Neighbors: Alice Blueglass

The 13-year-old student’s pages were covered in his highlighter-drawn doodles. He was too distracted and had a track record for not being able to focus on anything to completion. But after Alice Blueglass helped him, he knew how to highlight, and he proudly finished his paper.

“It’s like anything else, you have a goal and that goal is to help the student be successful,” she said. “And when you see a little light go on in their head like, ‘Oh!’ that’s a priceless moment.”

This is just one of Blueglass’ many success stories. She was a teacher in New York, before becoming a principal in Nyack, N.Y., and spent her career helping students reach success. Now she tutors Booker Middle School students, tends a garden with elementary-level girls on a bi-weekly basis and teaches a reading class for adults. Her children are also in education, and family get-togethers are full of these kinds of stories.

Blueglass has helped maintain a pizza garden for the past four years — part of the Longboat Key Garden Club’s project with Just for Girls. It’s a circular-shaped garden divided into quadrants filled with plants that will become the toppings of a pizza at the end of the year. Every other week, she and eight to 20 third-graders tend the pizza garden. The girls plant, water and track their plants’ growth in a journal. They like to measure their plants against each other, “‘Well yours only grew three-fourths of an inch, and mine grew 1 inch,’” Blueglass says.

They eat the vegetables when they’re at their peak and have cooking lessons on how to prepare such dishes as fried zucchini.

“They’re invested; they’ve planted these things and they have to check out their broccoli and lettuce,” she says.

It’s certainly a learning process. One girl dug a hole and placed her tomato plant — pot and all — in the ground. She was proud of the work she did, and then Blueglass explained, “It will grow much better without the pot!”

Though she has fun with the pizza garden, tutoring is her real passion.

“If a child at the age of 13 doesn’t know where South America is, then I feel we need to work very diligently,” she says.

One student she got to know when she was a principal sticks in her mind. It’s the story of Jordan, a boy who was constantly getting sent to her office but had a lot of potential. He had a “good thread” and was intelligent. She got to know him well and hoped for the best.

“He’d be OK one minute, then he’d fall off the road,” she says.

The last she heard he was in jail and fathered two kids.

“I feel an enormous responsibility to bring children experiences and knowledge so that they can be successful in life,” she says. “I say to myself: ‘I’m not going to let another Jordan happen, if I can,’” she says.

FIVE Things You Didn’t Know ...
• Alice Blueglass likes to bike, walk and garden, and she is a member of the Democrat Club of Longboat Key.
• “We determined when we retired that we were going to see the planet,” says Blueglass. She and her husband, Murray, have done just that and continue to do so.
• Murray and Alice Blueglass met at a college party. She thought he was cute. “He was wearing a corduroy jacket — it was adorable,” she says. It was love at first sight. They have been married since 1959.
• The Blueglasses have two children. Michael is a science research teacher, and Wendy is a principal.
• Blueglass teaches an adult-education reading class that is similar to a book club. They read everything from Faulkner to Hemingway.