Helen E. Remick Schult

Helen E. Remick grew up in Billerica and trained as a teacher at the State Normal School at Fitchburg. In 1927 the Superintendent of Schools reported that "four Billerica graduates of State Normal Schools were given positions in the grades," Miss Remick among them, and she began that fall as the teacher of a third grade at the Talbot School in North Billerica under Principal Hilda Holman.

When the new brick Pinehurst School (later the Ditson School) opened in December 1931, she was moved there to teach its third grade, which had forty pupils in 1932, under Principal Thurza M. McElman and alongside Esther A. Moglia. In 1934, "at her request," she was transferred back to the Talbot School "where she had previously taught," and in 1935 she was one of the teachers who took summer courses at Hyannis under the School Committee's new offer to pay for approved study. She taught the third grade at the Talbot, at times a combined second and third or third and fourth grade, for the next sixteen years.

In 1951 she became principal of the elementary school in the Old Howe School building at Billerica Centre, the post listed as principal, while still teaching a class of her own, first a fourth grade of 46 pupils and later a fifth grade. With Mary E. Gill and their teaching staffs she helped prepare the equipment lists for the new Center Elementary School, later the Parker School, which opened in 1953.

When the Eugene C. Vining School opened in the Nuttings Lake area in 1957, with eighteen classrooms, an auditorium that doubled as a cafeteria, and a separate gymnasium, the town added a supervising principal and appointed Miss Remick, then principal at the Howe Elementary School, to the post of Vining School Principal. Her reports describe a school of more than 550 pupils with 18 teachers and constant turnover: in the last four months of 1960 alone she enrolled sixty-six new children and lost forty-two, children who "come from every state in the union plus several foreign countries." She built up a school library under the sponsorship of the Vining Parent Teacher Association, which grew to some 800 books and was finally given cabinets and shelves in a corner of the gymnasium, and she welcomed the trees and shrubs planted by the Billerica Garden Club.

By 1961 she had married and was signing her reports as Helen E. Schult. Enrollment at the Vining reached 635 in the fall of 1962, with three separate lunch periods and 268 pupils coming by bus, which she said "creates many discipline problems and often dangerous situations for the drivers on all four busses." She resigned in 1963, after thirty-six years in the Billerica schools.

References

1. Billerica Town Report: Report of the Superintendent of Schools, 1927 (four Billerica normal school graduates, including Miss Remick, appointed to the grades)
2. Billerica Town Report: Report of the Superintendent of Schools, 1934 (transferred at her request back to the Talbot School)
3. Billerica Town Report: Report of the Superintendent of Schools, 1935 (summer courses at Hyannis)
4. Billerica Town Report: Report of the Superintendent of Schools, 1952 (Miss Gill and Miss Remick prepare equipment lists for the new Center Elementary School)
5. Billerica Town Report: Report of the Superintendent of Schools, 1957 (appointed principal of the new Vining School, formerly principal at the Howe Elementary School)
6. Billerica Town Report: Report of the Vining School, 1960 (signed Helen E. Remick, Principal)
7. Billerica Town Report: Report of the Vining School, 1961 (signed Helen E. Schult, Principal)
8. Billerica Town Report: Report of the Vining School, 1962 (enrollment, busing)
9. Billerica Town Report: School Department, 1963 (Helen E. Schult among resignations)