For Retiring Educator, It’s Magna Cum Love

For Retiring Educator, It’s Magna Cum Love

By M.J. McAteer

Alice Duggan skipped first grade. She started hating school in the second. By fourth grade, she was already set on what she was going to do to change that: When she grew up, she vowed, she’d start a school that children actually would want to go to.

That precocious sense of mission never wavered. Straight out of James Madison University, Duggan started a kindergarten in Clarke County with “a $4,000 budget, an empty room and 19 puzzles.”

She later tutored Native Americans, worked with special needs students and earned a master’s degree in family and human development. Then, in 1984, destiny came knocking in the form of a three-weekold help-wanted ad placed by Upperville’s Trinity Episcopal Church, searching for someone to start a daycare center. The rest is local history.

“I’m normally a five-year person,” said Duggan, who just retired as director of the Piedmont Child Care Center. “But I’ve been here 36 years because of the problem-solving.”

Alice Duggan

Problems tend to be as common as swing sets at daycare facilities, so Duggan definitely had found her element. The latest problem has been Covid-19, but after a closure of a few months, a “battened down” Piedmont reopened. There are fewer children (ages six months to 12-years-old), no mixing between the age-designated classrooms, no entry for parents, sections of the building “bubbled off” with plastic curtains and playgrounds cloroxed daily.

“Alice always has a very positive spirit,” said Cyndi Ellis, president of the center’s board. “What I love about her most is that she says, ‘There is always a solution, and we’ll work together to find it.’ ”

Long before the virus hit, Duggan had solved a problem for many hundreds of families: Finding a place for their children to learn and grow and feel safe and happy.

“I loved it there,” says Sean D. White, an equine dentist in Middleburg. As a four-year-old, he attended Piedmont when it was housed in Trinity’s basement. These days, the center sits across Route 50 from the church on a nine-acre site with its own playgrounds, gardens, and nature trails.

“It hasn’t changed a lot,”White said. “It’s just on the other side of the road.”

White’s 4-year-old daughter, Lillian, has been going to Piedmont since she was six months old.

“She loves it there, too,” her father said, adding that lately, Lillian has been especially excited about

helping to build a Mr. McGregor scarecrow that looms over the strawberry patch, the alphabet and herb gardens and the sunflower house. In the winter, when darkness comes early, Duggan said the children “have a lovely time out there with flashlights.”

White said he appreciates that Duggan is not overly protective, instead encouraging the children to be as autonomous as possible from an early age.

“I don’t believe in a baby-sitting atmosphere,” Duggan explained, and once children feel comfortable in their new environment, she works on their self-confidence.

She pointed to stripes on the hallway floor that are color-coded, leading to various classrooms and said even the two-year-olds can find their way around the building with minimal help, thrilled with that display of independence.

“They just have to know their colors,” she said.

“Alice has put her heart and soul into the place,” said Diana Lichliter, her assistant for ten years and now the new director. “She’s funny and easy going, but serious when it comes to what’s best for the children. I have big shoes to fill.”

Betsy Crenshaw, the center’s long-time bookkeeper, has known Duggan since the ’80s and seconds that sentiment.

“Alice can be tough, but the end result is that the child changes for the better,” she said. “Her M.O. is to make children love school.”

Make that her “M.A.” As in Mission Accomplished.