Amy Rich’s Retirement Tribute

Amy Rich, Grade 2 Teacher

At the end of the year faculty meeting, Ensworth honors faculty and staff who celebrate milestones with the school or retire after a long career. This year, we honored Grade 2 Teacher Amy Rich for her 26 years of service. Delivering remarks about Amy’s unique personality and dedication to her students were Kindergarten teacher Megan Florentine and Hope Moeller, Amy’s fellow second-grade teacher for the last 11 years.

From Megan Florentine, Kindergarten Teacher:

“As I quickly learned, to know Amy is to love her. Amy has the distinction of being the most interesting, unique, quirky, hilarious person I know. Amy is, in a word, legendary.”

“To be a friend of Amy Rich means you know she originated the term ‘lockdown,’ pre-Covid. This was Amy’s term for quiet classroom time when her students had a big project to finish. You would enter her darkened second-grade room, a Kenny G CD blasting from a 90s-era boombox, kids silently working at their desks. ‘We are on lockdown,’ Amy would say as she looked at her students above the glasses perched on her nose. They would all smile because to be a student of Amy’s was to love her, too.”

“But mostly, to be a friend of Amy Rich is to feel loved and cared for by her. She will listen to you, comfort you, help you think through dilemmas, offer you helpful advice and tough love, call you to check on you, and tell you that she loves you. She will make eye contact with you across an unruly lunchroom exactly when you need it. When you are 23 and far from home, she will treat you like a second mother. She will make you laugh, hug you, invite you to her beautiful home to talk, let you sleep over when Nashville is snowed in and you can’t get home, and she will make you feel like a family member.”

From Hope Moeller, Grade 2 Teacher:

“To be a teammate of Amy Rich means that every printer and copier accessible to you will have a post-it stuck to it with Amy’s perfect handwriting detailing how to use the machine and what to do if it fails to work - which it consistently will if Amy is using it.”

“To be a teammate of Amy Rich means you will revel in her talent of finessing hard conversations— with you, with other colleagues, and especially with parents of her students. You may at first think that it’s the way her drawl gets just a bit deeper that softens what she is saying just enough to make it palatable, but you will come to realize that her gift is the love and commitment she feels for her students and their families. She can say the hard things because we know she is invested in these relationships and that she will see the work through with you and with them.”

“To be a teammate of Amy Rich is to watch her lean into every new curriculum change that comes our way and become its staunch supporter. Structured literacy, Responsive Classroom, Singapore Math - she loves to talk shop about the impact of each program on her teaching and her students— from her first year at Ensworth to her 26th.”