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Date: 10/12/2022
HUNTINGTON — Paraprofessional Cheryl Miller-Harper, the Gateway Regional School District’s most senior employee, will be celebrating 41 years with the district on Oct. 15.
She first started in 1981, with the first class while she was there graduating in 1982. Recently, she realized she’s teaching the grandson of someone in that first graduating class.
Three weeks into a new year, Miller-Harper is as enthusiastic as ever.
“I think it’s a fantastic year, I’m having a great year. I see happy kids, a happy staff, and it’s only going to get better,” said the Middlefield resident.
She talked about Gateway’s Superintendent Kristen Smidy, now in her second year: “Such a young, energetic superintendent. We are so lucky to have her, someone who really wants to ‘do’ for the district. I’m really happy to be a part of it.”
Miller-Harper has spent most of her career in the district working with seventh graders, after first starting as a media specialist in the library.
This year, she is a long-term substitute for seventh grade special education students, and helps out three days a week in the after-school program, which has 60 kids enrolled in it this year. She said she especially loves working with seventh graders.
“I love seventh graders. I don’t know what it is. I just love them. My kids say ‘you’re just a 12-year-old trapped in a grown-up body,’” she said, adding that her choice would be to stay in the seventh grade until she retires, although as always, she will go where needed.
Before Gateway, Miller-Harper’s first job was at the telephone company.
“I needed a job a mom could do. I saw the ad for media specialist and applied,” she said, admitting she didn’t know what a media specialist was. She didn’t have a VCR herself, had never seen one, but had to learn how to record with one, as part of the school job required recording tapes for teachers.
She said there are probably still some tapes on the second floor of the school that she made.
When the audiovisual part of the job was slow, she helped out in the library, typing overdue book lists on a regular typewriter. She said at the time there were typewriters in the business department for student use.
“We barely had calculators, and now everybody has their own Chromebook,” she said.
She was also the first switchboard operator at Gateway, which she had to learn. She had previously worked the switchboard for the telephone company, but it was a totally different system, she said.
Miller-Harper, who is originally from Pittsfield, said her family has two farms in Middlefield, a large one and a small one. Grandview Farm is a big farm of 300 acres with 35 Hereford cows, where her husband Robert Miller cares for the herd and does hay mowing.
Serene Pastures is a little farm where they live, with 14 alpacas that they feed and shear once a year, selling the wool to a woman who turns it into yarn and sells it online. They used to show the alpacas, but no longer breed them. She said the youngest are 8-year-olds, and some are in their late teens. Now they keep the boys and girls separate, because they don’t want any more babies.
“I’m not sure how many years into my late 70s I want to farm,” she said.
She said the town of Middlefield was late in getting internet access, as were many of the Hilltowns, a fact that drove many young families out of town.
When schooling went remote during the coronavirus pandemic, her farm in Middlefield still didn’t have internet, but she was given a space to work remotely at Azure Green, a warehouse, online retailer and community center in the town.
“They gave me a room overlooking the pond. I stayed there a year and a half. I was very grateful,” Miller-Harper said.
This July, her farm was finally hooked up to the internet as Comcast wires the town.
“I’ve seen a lot of changes. We’ve gone from the old ways to the new ways — you’d never believe,” she said. “I never dreamed we’d walk around with computers.”
She does miss a few bits of old technology, such as dictionaries and thesauruses.
“I worry about libraries. The one in Middlefield is super tiny, but my sister-in-law goes every Thursday,” she said.
Every year, Miller-Harper puts in a letter of retirement and then rescinds it. She now has one ready for December 2024, but says it probably won’t happen.
To mark her anniversary, she said all she really wanted was her own painted parking space. She hasn’t gotten it yet.
Asked to recall a memorable moment at Gateway, she had to pause. She recalled senior prank days, where teachers had to go through a gauntlet of balloons, sometimes slimy ones. Miller-Harper quickly learned to come earlier than the students on those days.
“With the kids, every year is memorable,” she said. “I always have the kids I made a difference with, when I finally saw the light bulb go off when someone has that ‘a-ha’ moment, and you feel you’ve been a part of it.”
“I just truly like my job, what I do and the people that I work with. I’m just happy here — it’s the little things. Being able to take time that the teachers can’t take with the kids. I like building their self-esteem and confidence — that’s probably the best part of everything,” Miller-Harper said.