LEBANON — A longtime community volunteer and board member at Upper Valley organizations and a first grade teacher at Plainfield Elementary for 26 years, Betty Ann Heistad succeeded in “making a difference in the world” child by child, her son Sven said.

Heistad served 40 years at Storrs Hill Ski Area in Lebanon, in the kitchen and on scheduling duty for the lodge.

“She was an institution,” said Paul Coats, director of Lebanon Parks and Recreation. “She was part of encouraging people to come down and treat Storrs Hill like the family place it is. She had very public roles, but she was also the one passing a cookie to the kid who didn’t have a quarter to make someone’s day.”

Heistad lived with gumption and humility right up until she died in her sleep at age 82 on Aug. 3 in Lebanon.

“She had more on her (August) schedule than I did,” said Sven, 55. “Almost every single day had something planned.”

The two days before her death “were the first two days in a row in 30 years that she did not leave her house,” added son Per, 54.

“We kind of lost track of all the places she was involved in,” Sven said. “She didn’t like sitting at home with nothing to do. She never tried to run things herself, but she was a great helper. She’d jump right on your ship and help you do whatever you wanted to do.”

The daughter of Albert and Mildred Carlson was born on June 23, 1942 in Hanover, where her father was a geography professor at Dartmouth College.

Her parents were of Swedish descent, a heritage in which Heistad took great pride. In her 60s, Heistad traveled to Sweden to retrace the steps of her family lines. It was one of many trips abroad that punctuated her life in the Upper Valley.

Heistad attended the University of New Hampshire for a time in the 1960s, where she met Erling Heistad. After marrying in 1964, the Heistads moved briefly to Michigan for Erling to attend graduate school — one of only about two years Heistad that spent away from the Upper Valley. (When she was younger, Heistad spent a year in France, working as an au pair in for a Hanover family.)

After the Heistads’ children — Kari, Sven, Per and Hansie, who died at age 4 — were born, Heistad went on to complete her bachelor’s degree in education at the Granite State Alternative Degree Program.

“She joked with me (that) she wanted to get her bachelor’s and her master’s before I did,” said Kari, the eldest Heistad child. “She beat me both times.”

Kari, 59, was born in Michigan. The family moved back to the Upper Valley when Erling became a jewelry-making and ceramics instructor at Dartmouth.

Once back in the Upper Valley, Heistad earned a master’s degree in education at Antioch College. She first began teaching art in Grantham when her youngest son, Per, was about 3 years old.

“She started when Grantham had a three-room schoolhouse,” Per said. The school included grades K to 8. Erling built a cart for her that she rolled around to each class to teach art, sometimes with Per in tow.

The Heistads made their home on Highland Avenue (now Forest Avenue) in Lebanon, near the city’s former junior high school on Bank Street.

“We weren’t hippies, we were organic, sustainable, homesteading before it was a movement,” Per said.. “We grew our own food, drank goat’s milk; ate duck eggs.”

After she began teaching in Plainfield, Heistad brought first graders to her home to milk the goats and collect eggs every spring. “We had 40-plus baby goats born (on Forest Avenue),” Sven said.

For about eight years, starting when Per was about 3, the Heistad kids slept outdoors. including winter months, on the porch of their Lebanon house. “Nobody wanted to be the first one to go inside,” Sven said.

Heistad herself attributed her lifelong robust health to sleeping with a window open year-round.

At Plainfield Elementary, where Heistad taught from 1985 to 2011, she was known as a commanding presence yet not shy with a smile.

“Outside of the classroom, she didn’t try to control people in any way,” Sven said. “She was always very much a cheerleader and an assistant.”

Her answer to most complaints was: “What are you going to do about it?” Not one to candy-coat hardship, Heistad always looked for ways to make situations better.

“She saw better of people than they saw themselves,” Sven said.

Heistad made a habit of filling the family’s home with love and activity. When she encountered kids who needed a safe home locally or as far away as Maine, where the family spent time in the summers, Heistad took them in. Some were Dartmouth students that Erling had gotten to know from his position as a ceramics instructor.

Over the years, Heistad took 17 kids under her wing in this way, her children recall.

Working behind the scenes as often as not, Heistad urged everyone she encountered to follow their dreams — and did what she could to support them in word and deed.

“The theme of her life was helping other people,” Sven said. “She’d meet new people and (after initial introductions), she’d ask them in so many words, ‘What are your dreams in life? What are your goals?’ If the person had a goal, the next thing out of her mouth was, ‘So what are you doing to go after it?’ She wasn’t shy about it or anything. ‘You need a dream, and you need to go get it.’ ”

Her third question was usually, “How can I help?” To his mother, “help meant accountability,” Per said. “She’d say, ‘Next week I’ll send you an email or remind you just to make sure you’re getting it done.’ ”

After retiring at age 69, Heistad didn’t leave teaching entirely behind. She was a founding member of the Mascoma Sailing Club, where she taught youth classes in the summer.

Kate McMullan, the club’s co-founder, learned that Heistad had started a de facto after-school program at the Lebanon Housing Authority’s Romano Circle housing complex in West Lebanon.

“She started tutoring someone who lived there and her tutoring evolved into an informal after-school club that met in the complex’s community room and did a lot more than just homework,” McMullen wrote in an email. “She introduced various crafts and activities and helped the youngsters who showed up each week make Christmas presents, for example.”

“She very much enjoyed her interaction with the youngsters living in the complex.”

After her divorce in 1990, Heistad continued living in Lebanon, where in her free time she maintained connections with photography. She had a darkroom in her basement.

“She had a lifelong love of photography,” said Sven. “She would take pictures, print pictures, mail pictures. She’d find out where her students lived and send them pictures.”

“She did it to build connections with people,” Kari added.

Extending her reach beyond the Upper Valley, Heistad began the tradition of sending shoe boxes filled with school supplies to teachers for New Missions, a Christian organization that establishes churches and parochial schools in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

In “hundreds” of instances, Per said, Heistad supported kids financially with anonymous scholarships. This often happened casually and very spur-of-the-moment. “She was talking to somebody at AVA (Gallery in Lebanon) and it came out that a teenage girl couldn’t (afford it),” Per said. “She said, ‘I’ll talk to my friends,’ then three days later sent in a check herself.”

“She didn’t want to be the one to get the credit,” Sven said.

Kate Oden is a freelance writer. She can be reached at odenk06@gmail.com.