Teacher Connie Tebo helped guide children’s lives

Connie Tebo’s love for the people around her seemed to overflow through the smile she brought to work every day as a sixth-grade teacher.

“I just always knew that she was there, she was my second mom,” said Ashley Bledsoe, 22, who was one of her students at Mountain View Middle School.

“I was having a rough time at home that year, and I came to school every day crying,” she said. “At first I wasn’t very open about things, but she just kept trying.”

Though the rest of middle school, high school and to this day, Tebo’s guidance became a part her life.

“She never made you feel like she was judging you … even if you knew she didn’t agree, she always said something positive,” Bledsoe said.

After a lifelong career in education and 15 years at Mountain View, Tebo will be remembered as one of those teachers who had a way of guiding kids through the times they needed it the most.

Connie Tebo died Feb 28. She was 59.

“She loved the beach,” her daughter Lara Tebo said.

Her family plans to scatter Tebo’s ashes off the coast of Southern California where she grew up.

Tebo also enjoyed cooking, traveling with her family and collecting dolls resembling angels that still adorn her home.

She worshipped and volunteered at St. Mary’s Catholic Church and put in countless hours helping with extracurricular programs at Mountain View.

“She was very trusting. She would always believe people and believe in people,” said Scot Tebo, her son.

Her trust in others sometimes went so far that it allowed them to have fun at her expense, family members said. Connie Tebo took it in stride.

One time a sixth-grade student called a classmate a derogatory name. Later Tebo confided in a group of adults, “I didn’t know what it meant, but I know it couldn’t be good,” her daughter said.

Tebo’s good humor was complemented by a smile that those close to her said could light up an entire room.

“I always looked forward to her smiling at me,” said Bledsoe, the pitch of her voice becoming brighter as she described one of Tebo’s best-known features.

In fact, when a friend at El Camino College in California introduced them, Connie’s smile was the first thing that her husband Pat Tebo noticed about her.

“He took me in there one day and I can still see her … The smile I got when she looked at me,” he said.

They were married about three years later. Pat served in the Air Force, and after a series of moves they lived for three years in Victorville, Calif., where Scot and Lara were born and Connie Tebo taught at a one-room schoolhouse outside of town.

They moved back to Los Angeles, where she worked for about five years at the Catholic school she had attended as a child.

“When she was a little girl, she wanted to teach,” her husband said.

Tebo continued her career as the family moved to Boise and then to Coeur d’Alene in 1976.

She commuted to Eastern Washington University where she earned her teaching degree.

She worked at the Ponderosa School in Post Falls, at St. Thomas More in Spokane and at Mountain View in Newman Lake. The family moved to Spokane Valley in 1991.

“It was hard to go out anywhere in town without running into one of her former students,” Scot Tebo said.

The time she spent helping her students both in and out of the classroom spoke to who she was and how she lived her life.

“She was genuinely proud. It just made her feel so good, the accomplishments of others,” Lara Tebo said.

Connie Tebo valued the combination of learning and caring for others at home, too.

Her children recount how she would read book after book to them on long road trips.

“I can’t count the number of books we read in the car like that,” Scot Tebo said.

Before it took her life, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, took her ability to talk. One of the infrequent times she broke down in tears was at the realization that she could no longer read to her grandchildren, Pat Tebo said.

“She very seldom laid any of the suffering and the pain in this on anybody else,” he said.

Even while fighting the disease Tebo’s upbeat personality endured.

She taught until the end of the 2005 school year at Mountain View, where she was known among the teachers for jumping in whenever there was a project that needed a leader or a child who needed a hand.

When a task at school came to her attention, she would say, “Well, there’s no one else to do it, and the kids need somebody,” her daughter said. That somebody was Connie Tebo.