Florence Bliss Ends Teaching Career, 1942

Florence P. Bliss Ends Teaching Career

Had Guided Students for Over Decade and a Half

Bainbridge News & Republican, June 25, 1942

 

When the Fall term of Bainbridge Central High School [Chenango Co., NY] begins there will be a vacancy in the faculty that no replacement can cover.  For it is virtually impossible to replace over a decade and a half of devotion to duty and charges such as continuously given by Florence Price Bliss, who, this June, has retired permanently from the teaching profession  Mrs. Bliss, under whose guidance hundreds of pupils prepared to take the eventful step from Junior High to High School, has been forced to render her resignation due to illness, and will receive a disablement pension, her rightful reward for many long years of labor.

 

Florence Price Bliss graduated from Bainbridge High School in 1917 and then spent the next year teaching in the Bristol District, after which she entered Syracuse University for a year and a half of training, followed by the formal completion of her education in the Oneonta Normal School from which she graduated in 1923.  On leaving the Normal, Mrs. Bliss continued to teach in the Bristol District for four years until 1928 when she joined the faculty of the local Bainbridge School, instructing in the Junior High.

 

In 1935, Mrs. Bliss was stricken with "creeping paralysis" and was taken to New York City where her ailment was definitely diagnosed as multiple sclerosis.  Despite her disablement, she continued her teaching and in the years  1936-37 was given the less arduous position of teacher in the Newton Hollow District.  The next year, however, found her joyfully welcomed back to B.C.H.S. where she has constantly taught since then.  Her remarkable courage, her ability to remain the smiling, helping "Mrs. Bliss," loved by all her pupils, have won this true teacher the admiration and respect of all.  The students she taught will never forget her.  The individual attention she gave to her pupils, the special aid to problems, both personal and scholastic and her understanding ways are all traits of Mrs. Bliss.  It is something to win the respect of a disinterested pupil but to win his love is an accomplishment and in her years of teaching, Mrs. Bliss has done this often.  Constantly improving her own knowledge as well as that of her pupils, she took extension courses form Syracuse University and attended numerous summer sessions at Oneonta Normal. 

 

In addition to the students the faculty, too, has loved Mrs. Bliss.  Her fellow workers have also realized their colleague's worth and she always occupied the highest point of their esteem.  the faculty, in a body, have presented Mrs. Bliss with a beautiful coffee table, a material offering of their sentiments.

 

The following verses have been contributed by a local friend of Mrs. Bliss.

 

A Tribute

Florence Price Bliss

 

"All day beside her desk she sits to teach

The youth; to sow the seed of truth and tend

The growing plant; the tender twig to bend,

To train, to trim.  Her aim the mind to reach

And waken, stir to life the soul.  Her end

Not wealth, or fame, or power, but so to spend

Her life that it shall count for common weal

In helping humankind still to ascend.

 

Content is she her pupils forth to send

To find in all the fields their treasures rare,

Knowing that they who seek the best befriend

Themselves and learn to sympathize and share,

Thus character is formed and lives reveal

The goal and glory of her high ideal."