Remembering Westchase Elementary’s Treasure, Mrs. Mik

The children gathered at Baybridge Park on a chilly Saturday. On heart-shaped, helium-filled balloons, they wrote notes to Mrs. Mik, their kindergarten teacher. Then the balloons, nearly three dozen of them, were released to heaven.

They slowly disappeared from sight.

The children feasted on doughnuts. They played games together. Somewhere, Mrs. Mik had to be smiling.

She was Susan Mikolajczyk, but hardly anyone called her that. The pronunciation was too difficult. So she came up with a better name. Then, now and forever, she will be “Mrs. Mik,’’ the Queen of Kindergarten, everyone’s favorite teacher, the heart and soul of Westchase Elementary School.

On Dec. 21, 2011, while visiting her family in New York during the holiday break, Mrs. Mik died in her sleep. She was 59.

Children are always the resilient ones. The adults, coming to grips with the finality of it all, are struggling.

“It’s still a shock,’’ said Sue Farnell, Mrs. Mik’s best friend and chief classroom assistant, better known as “Nana’’ to students and parents. “She had such magnetism, such presence. She brought people together. She was so good at what she did.’’

In 2006 Mrs. Mik was recognized as Hillsborough County’s Teacher of the Year. She accepted the award with humility, saying there were many great teachers present in the ballroom and any of them would have been worthy winners.

But most people realized there was only one Mrs. Mik.

“Susan’s mind was always going,’’ said her husband, Ron Mikolajczyk, a former professional football player. “She was always thinking of a better way to do something. When she put her mind to something, it was like a scene from a cartoon. You could almost see the light bulb appearing over her head.’’

With Mrs. Mik, it was hard to tell where the school day ended or began. They all ran together. Long ago, she found her passion and lost herself in tasks that others might find mundane. The clock was irrelevant. So was the total on her paycheck. Mrs. Mik thought she had the world’s most exciting job. She taught kindergarten.

And she never lost sight of her awesome responsibility. She set a positive tone for the children, who were entering a real school for the first time. What could be more important than that? So it had to be special.

When her class read Dr. Seuss, Mrs. Mik dressed as the “Cat in the Hat.’’ During the yearly reading of Mrs. Wishy Washy, Mrs. Mik pulled up her pants and walked barefoot in a wading pool of mud, just like the book’s character. At the year-end “Aloha to Kindergarten,’’ she donned Hawaiian clothes and danced with her students.

“I have no recollection of her talking about a kid in her class without her saying something nice about them,’’ said Amy Callow, an attorney in New York, the oldest of Mrs. Mik’s three daughters.

“Somebody else would say, ‘She talks a lot.’ My mother would say, ‘She has a lot to say.’ Nothing negative. She always saw the good. She pulled the best qualities out of every single kid.’’

“She believed everyone had the capacity for doing great things,’’ Mrs. Mik’s husband said. “Once a kid knew they had unlimited potential, they could do whatever they wanted. The sky was the limit.
She got them to believe in that.’’

He once wondered how she did it, day after day, year after year. “Don’t you ever get tired of it?’’ he said.

Mrs. Mik: “How do you get tired of 5-year-olds?’’

Every student became part of her family. In recent years, she was constantly visited by her former kindergartners, who were graduating from high school or college. Growing up in Clifton, N.J., she couldn’t have imagined a more rewarding life.

Then Susan Shook, she was being groomed to take over the family funeral-home business from her father. She didn’t want that. She decided to become a teacher and she intentionally selected a far-away college – the University of Tampa.

One afternoon outside the UT cafeteria, she was introduced to another student in New Jersey, who lived just five miles from her hometown. It was her future husband.

Mrs. Mik is best known for her elementary-school teaching career at Bellamy and Lowry, then her place on the original staff at Westchase. But before her teaching career got fully under way, she raised a family.

“I was always a mama’s boy, but Susan was the best mother I have ever seen,’’ Mrs. Mik’s husband said.

Amy Callow was valedictorian at Leto High School. She attended Dartmouth and law school at Fordham. Kim Francis, the middle daughter who is an attorney in Athens, Ohio, was number three in her class at Sickles High School. She attended Vanderbilt and law school at Dayton.

Jennifer Moas, the baby, is a teacher in Boca Raton. She graduated magna [vulgarity] laude from UT. In many ways, she became Mrs. Mik’s prized student.

Early on, some teachers thought Jennifer was slow. They recommended remedial classes. Mrs. Mik wouldn’t hear of it. Eventually, some learning disabilities were diagnosed, including dyslexia.

“My mother made me feel like I was the smartest one,’’ Jennifer Moas said. “Without her, I wouldn’t have graduated high school. I certainly wouldn’t have gone to college. She worked with me and made me realize I had to learn in a different way.

“She got me through my papers and presentations in college. She always said, ‘If you understand something on a paper, that’s one thing. But it’s how you apply it to life.’ She helped it make sense for me. She told me I could do it. Because of that, I believed I could do it.’’

The daughters still miss confiding in their mother.

“She was always the first person I asked things to,’’ Kim Francis said. “I crashed the car in the parking lot, should I tell dad? Should I go to law school or nursing school? Should I break up with this boy? What should I say at my trial? She always had the right advice.’’

The daughters still mourn the fact that Mrs. Mik didn’t get more time with her two grandchildren, Eleanor Callow and Led Moas. But the kids will grow up and learn about their amazing grandmother. They will realize that even though Mrs. Mik is gone, she’s never really far away.

For years, at Mrs. Mik’s famous Thanksgiving Pow Wow, her students memorized verses and sang
to her. The words are never more fitting than right now.

Come stop your crying
It will be all right
Just take my hand
Hold it tight
I will protect you
From all around you
I will be here
Don’t you cry
For one so small,
You seem so strong
My arms will hold you,
Keep you safe and warm
This bond between us
Can’t be broken
I will be here
Don’t you cry
‘Cause you’ll be in my heart
Yes, you’ll be in my heart
From this day on
Now and forever more
You’ll be in my heart
No matter what they say
You’ll be here in my heart
Always.

By Joey Johnston