KNOX, Maine — If you were one of her people, Tanya Hubbard would remember you.
And the longtime educator who taught English to much of Waldo County over the last 40 years had thousands of people to remember. Many of them — former students, colleagues, friends and community members — mourned Hubbard’s death Friday after a years-long fight with cancer.
“It’s a loss to the entire county,” Chris Downing, the superintendent of Regional School Unit 20, said Friday afternoon. “She cared about people, and they knew it. It’s hard, when you lose somebody like Tanya. She always looked for the good in every person.”
Hubbard, 62, came to Mount View High School in Thorndike in 1975 as a newly minted English teacher. By 2012, when she retired, she had taught generations of students to love Shakespeare and learn about the Vietnam War, among other passions. Few other teachers inspired the kind of respect that Hubbard had from the kids she called “my people,” according to Kathy Cunningham of Freedom, who worked for many years in the high school’s front office.
“You always see a lot of kids sent to the office,” Cunningham said. “None of her kids ever came to the office. It was just unheard of. Kids that couldn’t connect with other people, she could find that connection with them.”
And in her classes, she held students to a high standard, according to Anne Schmidt, who graduated in 1999 and described Hubbard’s teaching style as unorthodox but effective. During a Vietnam War unit, Hubbard brought in local veterans to talk to the students about their experiences in a bid to have the teens learn about a war that often was still rarely talked about in America.
“Even today, it feels like a taboo subject,” Schmidt said. “The fact that we got to learn about it was really important for all of us.”
Hubbard also loved Shakespeare, and had her students memorize Hamlet’s soliloquy and recite it to the class.
“I remember all of us with note cards in the lunchroom, cramming for days,” Schmidt said. “I still remember most of it to this day.”
Hubbard believed in the idea that the Mount View community was a family, according to high school music teacher David Stevenson, who remembered her scouring the halls after school to collect bottles and cans to raise money to help a library aide who wanted to fly west to visit her new grandchild.
“Mount View and her family were everything to her,” he said of Hubbard, whose generosity did not stop at school walls.
A few winters ago, the teacher overheard an elderly woman asking a pharmacist to cut her pills in half, telling him that she had cut back on her meals and her pills and if she could turn down the heat, she might make it through the winter. That chance encounter galvanized Hubbard to start Warm Waldo, a grass-roots organization that raised money to help people keep warm. In its first winter, Hubbard and others raised more than $11,000 to buy heating oil for needy families.
“It’s just so life-affirming,” she told the BDN in 2012. “People are good. People are really good.”
After retiring from Mount View High School, Hubbard worked for several years running the literacy program at the Waldo County Technical School. Downing, who hired her to work there, said that she inspired her students even as she fought her third diagnosis of cancer.
“She was not going to let cancer beat her,” he said. “She fought quite a battle. Somebody upstairs is going to have to put up with her now. She’ll go after things. That’s my belief. She’ll make it better up there.”
Linda Lord, a longtime friend and the recently retired Maine state librarian, said that Hubbard didn’t want to be forgotten.
“I would just laugh at her,” she said. “As if anybody could forget the contributions that she made, and the relationships that she fostered.”
Hubbard is survived by her husband, Jim Bartels, her daughter, Meghan Hubbard, and son, Jason Hubbard, in addition to her father, Philip Witherell, and brother Brett Witherell, both of Monmouth.