Seattle Public Schools’ longest-serving teacher retires from Orca K-8

After more than 50 years in the classroom, Seattle Public Schools’ longest-serving teacher is retiring from the post she’s held teaching kindergartners at Orca K-8 for almost a half-century.

Marletta Iwasyk, 84, started teaching in Seattle at 28. Over 56 years in the district, she’s taught 49 classrooms of kindergartners at Orca.

“I’ve never thought of this as work,” Iwasyk said. “I always just thought I was going to school with the kids.”

Casey Bayuk, co-president of the Orca Parent Teacher Student Association, described Iwasyk as “a matriarch” of the school. The PTSA organized a retirement party last week, open to anyone in the community, and raised money for a shelf in the library and bench in the Orca garden in her name.

The school district estimates Iwasyk has taught about 1,500 students in her career. She isn’t sure if that’s exactly right. But she runs into them everywhere – her mechanic is a former student. One, now in his 30s, owes her a sorbet from his shop in West Seattle, she said. She once ran into a pair of former students on a flight to Hawaii. And when she went to get her blood drawn some time ago, the phlebotomy technician had been her kindergartner. She even plays Words with Friends with some of them. The month of her retirement, she got a letter from Australia from a man she had taught during her first year at Orca. Iwasyk said one of her students, who died a year-and-a-half ago, was her “third daughter.”

“They’re so curious, their minds are open, they’re like little sponges,” Iwasyk said. “It’s just a joy to teach them and watch them grow.”

Iwasyk’s mother was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. Iwasyk, who has been a Seattleite since youth, first taught at John B. Allen School in Phinney Ridge, which is now closed, after she graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Norwegian and a minor in education.

Iwasyk remembers when she started teaching in 1968, she “wasn’t very popular” with other teachers. Often unintentionally, she broke the rules a lot. “They wouldn’t even begin teaching the kids to read until they know the alphabet. In our meetings, I would ask ‘Why?’ ”

Kids weren’t allowed to talk in the hallway, but she wanted them to greet and say good morning to each other. “I got my feelings hurt a few times by the other teachers … but I just carried on with how I thought kids should be taught, with empathy, caring for each other and helping each other.”

In the 1970s, the Allen School shifted to an alternative school, the Allen Free School, where the goal was to “give each child an opportunity to decide what course of study to follow.” Iwasyk referred to it as the “Chaos School.”

“My motto was freedom with responsibility,” she said. “You teach kids responsibility, and they show they’re being responsible, they’re given lots of choices and lots of freedom.”

By 1981, the program had relocated to another building and changed its name to Orca K-8. Iwasyk has been with the program since the beginning.

“I’ve been able to have my own curriculum, [and] I take as much of the school district curriculum that’s actually useful and makes sense,” Iwasyk said.

A cornerstone of Iwasyk’s kindergarten teaching is her reading program. In the ’60s and ’70s, reading curricula largely focused on sight books and vocabulary. But that wasn’t really reading, she said. She developed a program based more on phonetics that was influenced by how she learned Norwegian.

Iwasyk took a year off during the pandemic because she couldn’t wear a mask due to her asthma. When she returned, she had to take time off again because she got pneumonia. Substitutes couldn’t teach her reading program.

“Being gone, I could see it affected their learning a lot and their behavior a lot,” Iwasyk said. She said she knows she will likely get pneumonia again, and being out sporadically would hurt the kids’ growth. “That’s when I said ‘This is the time. I need to retire.’ ”

Iwasyk thinks it probably won’t fully hit her until September that she’s done teaching. She’ll miss the children: the hugs they give and the way they keep her energy up. But she said she’ll still find a way to be around kids. She’s looking forward to volunteering in classrooms or tutoring friends’ children – and there’s a stack of books she hasn’t gotten around to reading.

Colleagues and parents said they will remember Iwasyk’s firm and loving approach to the classroom.

Physical education teacher Laura Grow said when her own children were in kindergarten, Iwasyk emphasized having them connect to the natural world. She would have the students take notice of shadows outside, log the weather and discuss the autumn equinox.

Heather Sticklin, whose fourth grader and seventh grader were in Iwasyk’s class, said she learned about her from a neighbor and specifically sought out Orca for Iwasyk to teach her kids.

Bayuk, the PTSA co-president, said Iwasyk’s classroom is full of reusable containers, and she focused on recycling way before it was districtwide. She took home carrots the kids didn’t want from their lunches for her dog.

“I taught the way I raised my kids, teaching them integrity and responsibility,” Iwasyk said. “I tell the kids every year, ‘My first job is not to teach you reading, writing or math. My first job is to keep you safe.’ ”

But the kindergartners who have gone through her class have taught Iwasyk too, she said: “Their curiosity is so wonderful. The ideas they have now, there’s so much creativity.”

Phi-Ho Le, a third- and fourth-grade teacher, recalled Iwasyk showing up to a staff workshop via Teams while in the hospital. “She was in bed … I told her ‘Mama, are you crazy?’ She’s so dedicated.”

Le said Iwasyk has become a good friend to him over the past 20 years. At the school, he said, she’s “like a legend.”

“She taught us this: Give a basic foundation for everything, and they will take flight,” Le said. “Have good manners, be kind.”