MOUNTAIN View Children Centre’s longest-serving kindergarten teacher, Susy Rinaldo, is set to retire after 37 years.

“I first started as a preschool teacher in 1987,” Susy said.

"I originally started with Marconi kindergarten, up the other end of town.

"After 10 years, it changed to Myrtleford Preschool and then amalgamated into MVCC.

“I’ve taught so many children, I’ve ended up teaching sets of families.

“We’ve actually got one in our group at the moment which I’m teaching the third generation: I taught his grandma, his mum and himself.

“My one regret is I’m not going to get to teach my son’s children’s group that are just coming through now.

“But you have to stop somewhere, otherwise, I’ll be here until I’m 100!”

Throughout the years, Susy has been heavily involved in building the new kindergarten with fellow teacher, Robyn Richardson.

She has also been a champion for introducing children to community involvement; such as being in local festival parades on floats, as well as contributing to the Myrtleford Show and carols by candlelight.

“We’ve taken the children to visit some of our local shop people and they’ve always helped to show our children what community is all about,” she said.

“When we went down to the Mitre 10 and saw how a hardware store functioned, the kids loved it so much; I set up a ‘hardware store’ in our backyard at kinder.”

The most notable occurrence which happened while Susy was at the preschool was when the tornado went through Myrtleford in 2002.

“We had just let children go home for the day and we had three more children still in the building when the tornado hit,” Susy said.

“It was quite scary, as we had electric wires all down around the building, so we couldn’t go out.

“We were very lucky; we had to close the kinder for three weeks, but fortunately we were building new kindergarten rooms at the time.”

When asked what advice she would give to people first starting out in the kindergarten field, she said to really enjoy their time there.

“Children give you a lot in life and they can make your day really joyous; there’s always something good to share,” Susy said.

“Always find something in the day to reflect on and say ‘Wasn’t that great?’ and I think you’ll be in the profession for a very long time.

“And they always make you laugh.

“Even though I really love it and I’m very passionate about my job, it is quite mentally and physically hard work.

“I’ll enjoy being in my huge flower and vegetable garden and help my husband look after the cattle on our farm.

“A lot of my girlfriends, who are also teachers, have retired so I'll spend a lot of time with my friends and family and probably go to Melbourne a bit more often to see my boys.

“I would like to find something that I can do voluntarily like Meals on Wheels to help with the community.”

A number of Susy’s current colleagues are some of her former students.

“She is such a joy to watch with the kids,” said MVCC educator, Chantelle Watson.

“Her passion is so obvious and it’s such an asset to the community to have someone who has been there for such a long time; you feel safe dropping your kids off.

“Because she was my kinder teacher; why wouldn’t my kids come here and be taught by her?”

Fellow MVCC staff member, Jack Chisholm, who has just finished high school and gone straight into this pre-school training role, was also taught by Susy.

“I just remember having lots of fun," Jack said.

"I remember Susy and Robyn being very energetic and there was always something different set out for us to do.

“It was good when I first started working to have both Susy and Fiona Forbes to guide me.

“They were able to give me little techniques and strategies to utilise to get me in the right direction, but they’ve let me figure a lot of it out on my own, which I’m very grateful for.”

“It has been an honour and a privilege to have been given the opportunity to teach people's children," Susy said.

"I have loved my career and I'm very passionate about children's best learning outcomes.

“It has taken some time for me to come to this decision to retire, but when I look back I truly have been blessed with a remarkable and wonderful career with many memories.

“I would like to thank my committee of management of the past and my present day management at Alpine Children's Services.

“I would like to thank all the professionals I've have worked in conjunction with: speech therapists, occupational therapists and psychologists.

“I would like to hugely thank all of the teachers, educators and families for the support throughout the years of teaching at all the Kindergartens that I have worked and been involved with at Myrtleford.

“My biggest thanks goes to all the children I have taught for making my career the most rewarding, fun, happy, fantastic experience of my working life, it's been a BLAST!”