Paula Earley has helped hundreds, if not thousands, in her lifetime. As a former special education teacher and supervisor within the Michigan City Area Schools Corporation, she has repeatedly extended her hand to people in need, touching their lives and helping them along their way.
As an individual who loved her job day in and day out, no matter what challenges were thrown her way, it was difficult for her to retire last year.
Since she was a seventh grader, she had known that being an educator was in her future.
“One of the most important things I wanted to do as an educator was to instill a love of learning in my students – not just learning facts, but instilling a true appreciation for what it means to be constantly learning,” Earley said.
Earley taught special education at the elementary, middle and high school levels to students within each school of the corporation, bringing supporting resources to her students.
She started off her career by teaching a self-contained special education class. Over the years, one of the new areas that came out of special education was learning disabilities. Earley went back to school to receive her certification for that area, which allowed her to change assignments.
After teaching those with Iearning disabilities, Earley switched over to school administration and became a supervisor in 1984. She fell in love with supervising teachers.
While interested in supervising, there was nothing to her that caught her fascination like autism.
“I created and led the first autism team in Michigan City, which was one of the first corporations in the state with one. This was at a time back in 1991 when Indiana was first getting started with autism teams, and not many people were educated about it. We made it a commitment to provide information about autism to parents, students and the general public. Our team reached out to teachers who were dealing with difficult students, supported them and helped connect the students to doctors. We also did police training, teaching the police how to cope with an autistic individual,” Earley said. “The things I have accomplished couldn't have been done without the help of those around me. It was never just me accomplishing our successes, but rather, a group effort.”
In the 2009-2010 school year, Earley became the Director of Special Education, a position she held until 2014 when she retired.
During her experiences as an administrator, she met a variety of different people, including parents, students and staff.
“I worked on the preschool strand of the Strategic Planning Team, but I worked with policies and procedures for preschool autism behavior interventions. I was also able to secure a grant for technology. Because of that grant, we were able to move forward with co-teaching. This allowed our special education students with mild disabilities into co-teaching environments in English, math, science and social studies classes. I think this was something all the teachers were grateful for, and through this grant, everyone learned a little,” Earley said.
In addition to her work in the Michigan City Area Schools, she worked with students at Valparaiso University who were about to graduate and become teachers, teaching them all they needed to know about the introductory courses for special education.
Although teaching has been her driving force for the past four decades, it consumed her everyday life until she retired in the end of 2014. Beyond her surface is a love for exploration. Behind the white walls in which she worked were dreams of travel, inquiry and furtherance of her knowledge.
“For the past forty years, I didn’t go on vacations because of my work. I was working fifty hours per week, so now that I’m retired, I plan on doing things I have never done in my life. I want to go to new places and experience new things,” Earley said.
Now, she and her husband of well over thirty years, Tim, have time to break the common ground they share through their mutual love of fishing, hiking, skiing and traveling.
One of her first adventures will be traveling to Cuba in May for an educational delegation through the University of Indianapolis.
“We’re an educational group going to Cuba and we are going to be visiting farms, schools, hospitals, and the old city of Havana for eleven days. We’ll be learning about social work and education in Cuba with the help of an interpreter,” Earley said.
After her return back home in May, Earley might explore working with Casa for Children and plans to continue doing things that are always constructive, leaving a positive footprint on the earth.
