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Reston teacher enters 52nd year in education
When Reston resident Margaret Boyd began her teaching career, Dwight Eisenhower had just begun his second term as president, Hawaii was still two years away from becoming a state, and the hottest new show on television was "Leave It To Beaver."The year was 1957, and Boyd had just graduated from Langston College, two hours away from her home in Ardmore, Okla., where her father worked as manager of a shoe repair shop.
"I knew that I wanted to be a teacher since I was 10 years old," she said. "In 1957 I started doing it."
Boyd began her career by starting her own "colored" kindergarten in Ardmore, which at the time was segregated. "We were called 'colored' back then, and I still use the term today," she said.
In 1959, Boyd married her childhood sweetheart and began an educational journey around the world before landing in Reston and becoming a teacher for Fairfax County Public Schools in 1971.
"I just entered my 52nd year in teaching," she said. "And I plan on continuing a bit."
Before landing in Reston, Boyd taught in Oklahoma, New Jersey, Washington, Alabama, Illinois, Germany and Pennsylvania.
"My husband was in the Army and we moved around some," she said of that stage of her career.
When Boyd got to Reston in 1971, she first taught at Forest Edge, an elementary school with a rather unique design.
"It was all open with no interior walls and three teachers for 90 students," she recalled. "It was a truly open school."
She earned a master's degree in 1976 from Virginia Tech, and then transferred from Forest Edge to Terraset, "the solar-heated school."
In 1980, she transferred again, this time to Westbriar Elementary in Vienna, and three years later to Oak Hill Elementary.
Five years after that, she transferred back to Reston and taught at Dogwood Elementary. "Dogwood was my favorite school of them all," she recalls. "I really had a lot of input there and really got to see the fruits of my labor."
But her journey continued. In 1996, while teaching at Lake Anne Elementary, she began her own business, teaching English classes for adult speakers of other languages. "I owned the business, but others did most of the teaching there," she said.
After a short stint at Herndon Middle School, Boyd retired from full-time teaching in 2001, after 30 years with Fairfax County. Today, seven years later, she still substitutes part time for other FCPS teachers.
Boyd will not reveal her age, but said she has been "65 for so long that not many people know the real truth."
"As long as I am alive and able physically and mentally, I plan to stay involved in education," she said last week.
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