By Dr. Deanna Gilmore
I would like the readers of “There’s a Pig on the Playground” know why I wrote this book. In 2023, after the Covid pandemic resided, I read in the newspaper that many teachers were quitting the profession and that fewer people were attending college classes to become teachers. This made me very sad as I had been an elementary teacher for over twenty- six years and absolutely loved my profession.
One night, I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about this and asked myself the question, “What can I do to help this situation? The idea came to me to write a book describing my life growing up in a small farming town in Eastern Washington, and how I loved going to school. This joy of learning propelled me to become a teacher, a school principal and eventually a college professor, where I taught preservice teachers how to teach reading and writing to elementary children.
Along the way, my husband and I also had the opportunity to live in small villages in Alaska where we taught Yupik and Inupiat Natives for eight years. We both agreed that this experience was the highlight of our lives where we learned to appreciate their culture and grew to love the children we taught and the people we lived with in these remote villages. I wanted to share some of the touching and funny stories that ensued as we lived there. When we returned to the “lower 48,” my husband and I both taught Native Americans on a reservation in Eastern Washington which was again, an insightful experience.
When I read that in 2025, there were over 400,000 teaching positions that were not filled across all the states, I knew I was on the right path to write this book. As people in education realize, it takes more than teachers to run a school, so the second half of my book includes true stories from people who fulfilled the roles as teacher aides, school cooks, bus drivers, maintenance men and many more. I wanted to honor them for their work, because despite the long hours and sometimes tedious work, they do it for the love of the children and students in their care.