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Jacqueline Stack: An Apple for the Teacher

Jacqueline Stack loves to enter contests: cut out a coupon, send it in and see what happens. When she has time, she enters as many as three or four a day. She finds many contests online, particularly those that involve trips. She’s won a weekend in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania and a week in Florida, but the real winners over the years have been the students Jackie has taught. She has twice been honored as Connecticut’s Teacher of the Year, once when she taught at Windham High School in Willimantic and a second time when she was at Howell Cheney Vocational Technical High School in Manchester.

Retired for the last two years, Jackie, who lives in Chester, is still involved with students, at both ends of the age spectrum. On Halloween, she will be reading ghost stories at the Chester Historical Society to a visiting class of 4th graders from Chester Elementary School.

Every week, as a volunteer, she teaches adults at the Connecticut Women’s Prison in Niantic. She runs a study session connected to an economics course for inmates who have tested into a program that allows them to take college courses for credit—”Anything they need to make them successful in the course,” she says.

The courses, taught by faculty from Trinity College in Hartford and Quinnipiac University in Hamden present the same material that students on campus get. In addition to her tutoring, Jackie herself also goes to the lecture so she can understand how best to help her students.

Last year, Jackie also registered with a company that provides legally required instruction for child actors so they do not fall behind in their schoolwork. Jackie tutored Nicole Scimeca, who played two children’s roles in the Hartford Stage’s acclaimed production of Anastasia. (The play will open on Broadway in spring 2017, though no word yet on whether Nicole will reprise her roles.) The tutoring, which took place every day from Tuesday to Saturday, conflicted with Jackie’s prison volunteering, also on Tuesday. She asked her inmate class if they would mind switching to Monday.

“They told me it didn’t matter. They weren’t going anywhere,” she says.

Before her retirement, Jackie was a social studies teacher, an area that comprises a wide range of subjects from world and United States history to sociology and psychology. She strove to bring the world of real experience into the classroom, regularly inviting speakers from politicians and journalists to Holocaust survivors to talk to her students.

She even arranged with producer-director Steven Spielberg a showing of the Holocaust-based Schindler’s List for the entire junior class at Windham High School. She realized that in Willimantic, a community with many economically struggling residents, there were students who would not be able to go to the local theater to see the movie. She wrote to Spielberg and asked him if he could arrange a showing for her class. Indeed, he did, setting up a free screening at 8 o’clock in the morning.

“The entire junior class walked down to the theater,” she recalls.

The next year she wrote Spielberg again, and again he arranged a showing, as he did for a third time the following year. But by the fourth year, Spielberg had a better idea. When he got Jackie’s letter, he sent her a copy of the film.

Jackie employed the same strategy when she went to a performance of Buffalo Soldiers at the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford. (Buffalo soldiers were black soldiers who fought in mid-19th century conflicts with Native Americans in the American West.) She realized that a ticket to the Bushnell would be well out of the range of her students. She wrote asking if there was a way the theater could arrange for her pupils to come. The Bushnell found a way. A fund provided money for transportation and the theater itself waived the price of admission so the entire class was able to attend.

Jackie’s ambition to bring new experiences into the classroom included activities that broadened her own worldview. She won a U.S. State Department exchange fellowship that took her to Ukraine for two weeks—not of sightseeing, but of teaching in a local classrooms on what it means to be an American. She says that the Ukrainian students, who study English from their earliest school days, had no trouble understanding her.

Another fellowship brought her to Washington, D.C., one of two Connecticut teachers chosen, for a week’s seminar on the Supreme Court, that including attending oral arguments, meeting with the chief justice, and attending seminars at Georgetown Law School; a third program that she attended focused on presidential politics, civil rights and the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that called for desegregation of public schools.

In addition to teacher of the year, Jackie has won numerous other awards for leadership in civic education, excellence in social studies education, and classroom teaching.

Jackie and her husband Mark Riggio moved to Chester seven years ago, because so much of his family is in the area. Until her retirement, she commuted to Manchester. Now she is on the Planning & Zoning Commission in Chester as well as the Democratic Town Council. She is also a volunteer at Manes & Motions, a therapeutic riding center in Middletown for children and adults with special needs.

“I always loved horses,” she says.

And now, after a year of riding lessons, she can both lead Manes & Motion clients, and ride the horses herself.

“I can stay on top of the horse and make it do what I want,” she says.

Jackie was born in Utica, New York and says it is her New York roots that make her still a Yankee’s fan—at least for one week every spring. She and her siblings get together at Yankee spring training camp in Sarasota, Florida. She says it is her brother who is the committed Yankee fan, but she and her sister play an important part in what happens during the week. When the players walk by, they sign balls for women and children regularly, but less often for men.

“Without my sister and I, my brother might not get an autograph,” she says.

At the upcoming Halloween reading at the Chester Historical Society’s museum, Jackie says one of the selections she is likely to read is her own favorite scary story, Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the classic of schoolmaster Ichabod Crane and the headless horseman.

“It has everything,” she says. “It’s historical, it’s about a schoolteacher, and it has horses.”