WEST LEBANON — While teaching at Richmond Middle School in Hanover for more than 20 years, Judy Collishaw was often the first on the staff to arrive each morning.

“I would have had to sleep over in the building to get here before she did,” said Stephanie Davis, who taught social studies with Collishaw.

An early riser, Collishaw’s reason for wanting to get a jump on the school day was twofold, said her husband, Bill, a longtime middle school math teacher and guidance counselor in Lebanon. She used the time to refine lesson plans at her desk before heading to the hallway to greet students as they trickled in.

“She wanted kids to feel welcome and also wanted to get a sense of their mood,” Bill Collishaw said. “If she saw someone who looked a little down, she’d make sure to check on them.”

At lunchtime, students gravitated to her classroom, knowing it was a space where the teacher always made time for them. “Mrs. C. believed in me when I felt no one else did,” a former student wrote in the online guest book that appeared with her obituary. 

In another online tribute, a colleague wrote about Collishaw guiding her early in her teaching career. “She showed me how to support and care about kids while still being firm and fair. She taught me that relationships are what matter in the classroom. She also taught me how to avoid taking kids’ behavior personally, and how to laugh at myself.”

Collishaw died last August due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease. She was 81.

In referring to both students and teachers, Davis, who was mentored by Collishaw, said “there’s an an entire generation or two who were impacted by her. She was incredibly dedicated to the craft of teaching.”

Collishaw taught in Lebanon and Indian River School in Canaan before joining the faculty at Richmond where she stayed until her retirement in 2010.

Collishaw was known for tackling difficult subject matter, including the Holocaust, apartheid and the civil rights movement.

“We dealt with some major political topics and the content was so engaging,” said Annie Ferrell, one of Collishaw’s students in the early 1990s. 

“She had us thinking about things that mattered,” added Ferrell, an educator herself who recently moved back to the Upper Valley from New York. 

Collishaw wasn’t a teacher that students could easily forget, and Hanover High School’s 1994 graduating class didn’t. Although four years had passed since they had left Richmond, the 140 students asked Collishaw to be their commencement speaker. 

Standing before a large gathering at the outdoor Bema on the Dartmouth campus, Collishaw congratulated students for not only earning high school diplomas but for what they had accomplished as eighth graders. They had persuaded Dresden School District leaders to make Martin Luther King Jr. Day an official holiday in the district.

“Because of you, the Class of 1994, this district celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day,” Collishaw said.

Taking a well deserved jab at state leaders, Collishaw then then pointed out that the “state of New Hampshire is still unwilling to do that.” (It wasn’t until 1999 that the New Hampshire Legislature made MLK Day a state holiday — the last state to do so.)

In her commencement address reported in the Valley News, Collishaw reminded graduates that most of them were fortunate to have grown up in communities as wealthy as Hanover and Norwich.

“You have been given so much,” she told graduates. “Is it not your turn to give back, to help others? Wherever you go, encourage your business or college to become involved in the community.”

Collishaw came from a much different place. Her New Yorker accent, which she never abandoned, told only part of her story. She was still in high school when her father died. To make ends meet, her mother took a job as a custodian and office assistant at the Lutheran Church in their Bronx neighborhood, often leaving Collishaw in charge of two siblings.  

After graduating from Concordia College in Minnesota, Collishaw embarked on a teaching career. At a teachers’ conference in northeastern Pennsylvania’s Poconos, an “extremely attractive, bubbly blonde” caught his eye, Bill Collishaw said. “I got up the courage to introduce myself.” 

It turned out that they were both teaching at schools in the Bronx. (Bill was originally from Brooklyn.) A courtship began that led to their marriage of 56 years.

After their daughter, Denise, was born, Judy and Bill were still teaching in Bronx when they decided to look for teaching jobs in parts of the country that had more trees than concrete. In 1973, they landed teaching positions in Lebanon. Later, Judy earned a master’s degree at Dartmouth.

Like most successful teachers, Collishaw had strong organizational skills. At home in West Lebanon, “we would have just finished lunch, and she’d already be planning dinner,” her son, Keith, said jokingly. 

While teaching in Hanover, Collishaw made good use of the school system’s teacher enrichment program that covered travel expenses for teachers wanting to learn more about the subjects they covered in their classrooms.

Over the years, Collishaw traveled during school breaks to South Africa, China and Egypt. A trip to Eastern Europe, where she visited to expand her knowledge of the Holocaust, included stops at Auschwitz and other German Nazi concentration camps.

In her eighth-grade social studies class, Collishaw had students read historical and eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust. They wrote essays and created a video consisting of photos from German ghettos and concentration camps.

“The students find it fascinating to study this period,” Collishaw told the Valley News in a 1993 interview. “But a lot of them come in thinking they know a lot about it, then find they really don’t. They find that six million Jews died doesn’t mean anything until you put it on a personal level. That’s why they read the first-hand accounts and write their reactions in their journals.”

His wife “felt strongly that students needed to know and learn from the past,” Bill Collishaw said.

When Judy Collishaw was at Richmond, the responsibility of teaching a section of “sex education” to eighth graders fell upon the social studies department. 

Collishaw’s approach to the class put her “ahead of her time,” said Patti Dodds, a learning specialist at Richmond. She weaved women’s reproductive rights into the curriculum.

“She was passionate about standing up for women’s rights,” said her daughter, Denise McKinney. “It fueled her.”

Along with teaching at Richmond, Collishaw worked part-time training educators at other schools for the nonprofit Planned Parenthood in the Upper Valley. 

In recent years a lot has happened in education at the state and national levels that she would have fought against, her family and former colleagues said. 

A 2021 New Hampshire law was designed to discourage public school teachers from teaching and talking about so-called “devisive concepts,” such as race, gender identity and sexual orientation. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire and others successfully argued in federal court that the “classroom censorship law” was unconstitutional. The state filed an appeal.

How would Collishaw have handled the controversy?

“She wouldn’t have backed down,” said Davis, the Richmond teacher who was mentored by Collishaw. “It wouldn’t have changed who she was in the classroom.” 

In a lengthy obituary that she wrote last August, McKinney captured her mother in a single sentence:

“With beauty, intelligence, determination, and plenty of sass, Judy was a force.”

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.