Printer Friendly Version - 100-Year-Old Goodwin Diplomas Donated to Namesake School

Kathleen E. Goodwin Elementary School Principal Heston Sutman was happy to hang two diplomas donated by Susan Barsallo around the school’s portrait of Kathleen Elsie Goodwin. Photo courtesy of the Kathleen E. Goodwin Elementary School

Around 20 years ago, Susan Barsallo was enjoying a rummage through a local antiques shop and found, in a pile of unsorted junk, two diplomas bearing a familiar name: Kathleen Elsie Goodwin (1901–1983), the namesake of Saybrook’s Kathleen E. Goodwin Elementary School, who was known affectionately in the Old Saybrook community as “Goodie.”

One of the diplomas was from Goodwin’s graduation from The Morgan School in Clinton in 1920. The second, also dated 1920, certified that Goodwin had completed the requirements for teaching at the Summer Normal School. Normal schools were postsecondary institutions that trained teachers and awarded teaching certifications.

Goodwin, of course, went on to teach at the Consolidated School in Old Saybrook and to become, in 1941, the beloved principal of the elementary school that would one day bear her name.

In 1960 Goodwin retired and the district held a dinner to honor her and her 40-year career as an educator.

“Then, on March 23, 1961...[Old Saybrook residents] voted unanimously [at a town meeting] to name the new elementary school for her, a rare example of a public building being named for a living person,” Tedd Levy wrote in his book Remarkable Women of Old Saybrook. “A local newspaper reported her response: ‘But I’m not dead yet!’”

Barsallo, an Old Saybrook High School graduate, recognized Goodwin’s name and significance of the diplomas right away, paid around $100 for them, she remembers, and called the school to offer them as a gift. Whomever she spoke to, however, said the school had no space to display them and no need for them. So Barsallo stored them in her attic at her Westbrook home.

She mentioned the diplomas in a recent conversation with Nathan Wise, treasurer of the Acton Public Library Board of Directors and grandfather of Goodwin students. Barsallo and Wise work together in residential support for Gilead Community Services at a therapeutic group home in Saybrook.

Wise told her he would bring the diplomas to Goodwin Principal Heston Sutman, who has now hung them on either side of Goodwin’s painted portrait in the school lobby.

“History is more in vogue, maybe, than it was 20 years ago,” Barsallo said. “It’s nice that they have found their home.”

Goodwin, who was born in London, England, emigrated to the U.S. with an aunt in 1910, according to Levy’s book. They settled in Orange.

“Her mother died a year later and little seems to be known about her father,” Levy wrote.

In Orange, she attended Center School, now called the Mary L. Tracy School. She and her aunt then moved to Clinton and Goodwin continued her education at the Mill District Rural School, where Goodwin taught for two years after obtaining teacher certification at the Summer Normal School.

After a one-year stint in North Madison, she came to Old Saybrook to teach. On evenings and weekends, she “took the bus to New Haven where, at age 45, she obtained a bachelor’s degree from the New Haven Teachers College,” now Southern Connecticut State University, according to Remarkable Women of Old Saybrook. “At 50 she completed requirements and received a master’s degree from the Cooperative Program of New Haven Teachers College at Yale.”

She “was a firm and caring person with a magnetism that permanently captured the hearts of those who came into contact with her,” Levy wrote. “She loved walking down Main Street and meeting people and could be seen daily riding her old black bike around town.”