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09/12/2018 08:30 AMDr. Rita Landino, who has spent her career working for the causes of education and women’s rights both in North Haven and in the region, says she will never forget Sandy Hook and those who were shot and killed there in December 2012 during a mass shooting.
She wants other to remember as well, and so she recently became one of the major supporters and contributors to an effort to erect a monument to Southern State Connecticut State University (SCSU) alumnae who died that day.
“When I heard that they were doing this, my heart immediately went out to those sister educators,” Rita says. “There were six adult educators [killed at the Sandy Hook shooting] and four of them had Southern degrees.”
Her work advocating for the causes of education and women’s rights began two years after she graduated with a master’s degree in American literature from Wesleyan. She then returned as a professor of English to SCSU, her alma mater. She remained on the faculty at SCSU in one position or another for 35 years.
“I enjoyed the interaction with young people,” she says. “I was always interested in teaching English. Over the years, I’ve always been a great reader.”
After some time, she obtained a degree from Fairfield University in counseling and took on a new role at the university.
“I wanted to get more involved with the students and I felt that switching to counseling services would give me that opportunity,” she says.
Her time at SCSU as a professor of English and as a counselor eventually led Rita to become a champion of women’s issues at the university.
“I found out that some of the students were troubled in many ways and I thought that I could help them not only as a role model but as a counselor,” she says. “And then I realized the systemic difficulties of being a woman in a university setting.”
Rita decided that the best way to support women at SCSU was to work toward changing the culture of the university. To this end, she helped create the Women’s Center in the 1970s.
“The women’s center provided a safe place for women students to be supported for their achievements and not denigrated,” Rita says.
At the same time, faculty members at SCSU began to unionize. As part of this movement, Rita and her colleagues founded Committee W.
It was “the committee on women faculty to ensure that women faculty felt welcome in a university setting and were not discriminated against,” Rita says.
Forming these advocacy groups, intended to provide both emotional support and a welcoming environment for women in academia, contributed to Rita’s goal of changing the culture of the university for students and faculty.
“It’s subtle, but in some cases absolutely necessary, to try and change the culture of an organization,” she says.
Even while working these issues at SCSU, Rita was engaged as a volunteer at home in North Haven. She served on the library board in the 1970s, when she says many people questioned the need for a free public library.
“When we got together, we were very focused on trying to create the best library that we could,” she says. “There are always people in every town who do not have the resources...to get all of the books and computer resources that they need.”
In 2001, Rita retired from SCSU to raise her adopted son, Michael, with her partner Norman Glover. Still involved with education, Rita soon joined the PTO at the middle school.
“We had a very vibrant middle school at that time,” she says. “We...did all we could to support the educational enterprise at the middle school.”
Michael died in 2011 at the age of 21. After his death, Rita began to focus on philanthropy. She endowed a family scholarship at SCSU and also at Gateway Community College, where Michael was enrolled at the time of his death.
The Sandy Hook memorial, which is centrally located in a remembrance garden, was based on the design of Carly Barnes, an SCSU art student. Her design was part of a contest in 2012. The project went forward again in 2016, with some revision, with the support of SCSU’s new president.
“I felt that putting up a monument to them was an important way of remembering them and their sacrifice,” Rita says.
Rita spoke at the dedication ceremony in May, soon after the installment was finished. Though the memorial is open to the public, Rita says that the project was funded entirely by private money.
“That memorial takes the pain of my personal grief and my more general grief over the deaths of my sister educators and transforms that grief into a monument of beauty and memory,” she says.