As she nears 100, retired Arlington Heights educator Mary Stitt is still learning
Beloved Arlington Heights educator, humanitarian and international traveler Mary Stitt is adding another title on April 14: centenarian.
The retired principal of the Arlington Heights Elementary District 25 school renamed in her honor — Olive-Mary Stitt Elementary — regularly stays in touch with former teachers and coworkers, who have planned a big bash for her 100th birthday and are recording an interview with her that will be shown to current schoolchildren.
Family members — including three great-grandchildren who graduated from the school bearing her name — are throwing her a separate birthday party next month, too.
Stitt, who spent 31 years in District 25 before a post-career life spent distributing polio vaccines around the world with the local Rotary club, is the epitome of a lifelong learner.
Today she keeps abreast of current events by reading the newspaper on her iPad, listens to audiobooks delivered weekly by the Arlington Heights Memorial Library, and participates in a monthly book club where she lives at The Moorings senior living community in Arlington Heights. She also stays in touch with many of the people she met on some 45 stops around the world — from Nigeria to India — on Facebook.
Her recall of her life’s journey and career in education is sharp.
“What you want kids to do is begin to think about how they learn and why they learn and be in charge of it,” Stitt said during an interview this week in her assisted living apartment. “We all have to be learners forever.”
She attributes the emphasis on education to her parents, who met in a classroom as students at Vanderbilt University. Dad was a Methodist pastor and Rotarian, and Mom was the home economist as the family traveled from town to town for his church work during the Depression. Born in the small town of Williamsville, Missouri, in the Ozarks, Stitt lived in seven different places before going to college.
The family got involved in the life of the community wherever they went.
“My mother said, ‘The people are always sad to see you go but they’re happy to have you come.’”
Stitt took night classes at Washington University in St. Louis while substitute teaching and raising her family with her husband John. They moved to Arlington Heights when John got a sales job in Chicago and she got a teaching job in Park Ridge.
She was hired as a science consultant by District 25 in 1961, traveling from school to school to teach classes, before her promotion as Olive school principal in 1967.
It was there she made innovations over the next 25 years that have been studied and replicated elsewhere, like combining grade levels into multiage classrooms (though parents had the option to keep their kids in traditional grades), and a popular Friday afternoon activity hour for art, cooking and drama.
“Things come and go. We lived through a period that was very exciting. I felt kids were learning,” said Stitt, adding that teachers were learning too. “We always said it was a learning community.”
Longevity runs in Stitt’s family: one grandmother lived to 102, and the other to 92. Stitt also pointed to having good nutrition and staying away from cigarettes.
“I never smoked. I was a science teacher, remember. I taught healthy eating,” she said. “I’m lucky I had good health, and that’s because I ate all my vegetables and drank my milk.”