Another first day

The first day of kindergarten is always a big adjustment for students and parents, but this year at Wild Horse Elementary, it was an adjustment for the teacher as well.

“The first day of school was crazy,” first year teacher Marie Errecart said. “Trying to get them all to sit down at the same time, or go in a line, it’s all new to them. I’m sure it looks very chaotic, but it’s an organized chaos.”

Errecart, who grew up in Plains has known she wanted to teach, well, forever. “Ever since I was little I have been teaching in some way or another,” she said.

After going away to school at the University of Idaho, Errecart decided to come home to do her student teaching, although she initially had no intention of beginning her career here.

“It was cheaper to live at home than to survive somewhere without a job,” Errecart said.

After the warm reception she received during her student teaching, however, Errecart decided that the relationships she’d built during her time in Plains were too valuable to give up, and when she realized there was an opening here in town, she wasn’t about to miss her chance.

“I was very happy with the way I was treated. Everybody was so helpful, they wanted to make sure that I succeeded,” she said. “I couldn’t think of a better place to have my first job.”

Although being a first year teacher is by no stretch of the imagination an easy job, Errecart enjoys and couldn’t see herself doing anything else.

It was a strange transition for Errecart who during the course of her student teaching, not only had to transition from student to teacher, but from seeing her child-hood role models as parental figures to peers.

“They kind of had an expectation of me already, and I didn’t want to disappoint,” she said. “It definitely made me dig down and it made my first teaching job easy because I already knew the kind of hard work that would go into having your own classroom.”