Upper St. Clair teacher, curriculum leader retires after 43 years
Deanna Baird makes one of her final stops in her classroom at Upper St. Clair High School.
Deanna Baird's students present her with a farewell gift.
Deanna Baird's students presented her with a quilt made from some of the T-shirts from her many trips to Germany.
Auf Wiedersehen, Frau Baird.
As you may have guessed from that statement, the subject here is German, specifically the language that Deanna Baird started teaching in Upper St. Clair School District 43 years ago.
Make that 44, if you count her semester in 1972 student teaching with Will Hartley, who put in his own 35 years of Upper St. Clair instruction in Deutsch. Just as Herr Hartley did in 2000, Frau Baird is retiring from teaching, at least the full-time aspect.
She was part-time when her professional career with the district began, splitting German classes between Boyce and Fort Couch middle schools. By 1992, Baird had become district-wide curriculum leader for world languages.
“You teach five periods a day, and you administer,” she said about her responsibilities. “So you’re sort of this wonderful combination of teaching, still in the classroom, and administering, helping people, helping teachers. It’s a great ‘two worlds’ kind of position.”
From childhood, she knew she wanted to be a teacher.
“I’m the proverbial kid who was teaching in the basement to my friends,” Baird recalled. “Then it became a question of, what should I teach?”
The answer would seem to be obvious, under the circumstances:
“Because I had a German mother and American father, and I spent every other summer in Germany, I knew I had a talent that was not traditional. So I thought, OK, I’ll take that one on the market.”
She ended up taking it to Upper St. Clair after she graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and earned her master’s at the University of Mainz – it was in West Germany then – as a Fulbright scholar.
“I applied everywhere but here, because there wasn’t supposed to be a job here,” she said. “And then in the middle of the year, boom, there was a job, and I immediately came. So I lucked out.”
As her career progressed, Baird’s educational focus shifted from purely teaching German to something more far-reaching.
“It became very clear to me that many people were starting to realize that the world is becoming a smaller place, and that I can promote languages much more through the global lens than I can through saying, ‘Take this particular language,'” the Mt. Lebanon resident explained. “Many people understand that we have to develop global skills with our kids for the future. That covers any language, any culture.”
During her tenure, Upper St. Clair’s language offerings have grown from German, French, Spanish and Latin on the secondary level to include high school Chinese and Japanese, plus español from first through 12th grades.
The district also has an international studies program that is “almost unheard of at the high school level. I got special permission to do it,” Baird said. “It focuses on culture and what makes people tick. And it gets kids to think outside the bubble about what the rest of the world is like, and if they’d like to be in that world.”
About her own post-retirement world, Baird has no plans to sit still. She is on the board of the Pennsylvania Council for International Education and is in line to serve on a task force by Gov. Tom Wolf to promote global education.
Meanwhile, she hopes to continue to teach German, to fellow members of Mt. Lebanon United Methodist Church who are part of a long-running exchange program with a church of the same denomination in Zwickau, Germany.
Plus she plans to continue the tradition she started in 1978 of having Christmastime reunions with her former Upper St. Clair students.
“I had 50-plus kids at the last one,” she said. “It’s just a really neat way to stay in touch, to keep that network and to find out what they’re doing with language.”