Deborah Stanford describes her life as a series of abrupt pivots. She grew up in Greenwich Village in New York City with an actress mother, Anita Cipriani, who exposed her to the vast cultural opportunities that existed for artists and performers. “When I was growing up, we did not own a television. My mother insisted that I read the classics. She instilled in me a love of literature. And she demanded that I always strive for more than I achieved.” Deborah’s mother was a hard taskmaster – a mix of stern and loving. “She referred to me as ‘My daughter, the doctor” or ‘My daughter, the lawyer.’” Having faced discrimination as a black woman, Anita was determined that her child would never be considered second best.
But everything changed when Deborah, her mother, and step-father were in a car accident on July 4, 1959. The family car was a red, two-seater British Morgan. Nine-year-old Deborah was wedged behind the front bucket seats – long before safety standards or seat belts existed. The accident was classic. Drunk teenagers speeding in an over-sized American car rear-ended the Morgan, causing the gas tank to explode.
The Morgan was totaled. Deborah’s parents escaped with minor injuries and the drunk teenagers were uninjured. It was little girl Deborah who was trapped in the burning car. She suffered third-degree burns and a dislocated hip with severed blood supply. She spent five months in the hospital, undergoing several painful skin grafts – long before burn units existed, long before pain management existed. A time when visiting hours were strictly enforced, even for the parents of a nine-year-old. She spent a year in a body cast, long before damaged hips were treated surgically. Treatment included a year in a wheelchair and a year on crutches. She was home schooled for three years before she was physically able to return to school. And the aftermath of those injuries have remained a part of her to this day.
Decades later, it is still difficult for Deborah to tell this story. “I was old enough to remember. I remember too much.” She believes that it was those classics that enabled her to survive. “I read my way through the trauma and the pain.” But for years she was unable to sit in a car without crying. Later as an adult, even as her physical injuries continued to haunt her, she learned that she also suffered from PTSD.
Deborah recalls her mother’s ugly words: “If my daughter is going to be a cripple, she will not be a cripple mentally.” Those words spurred Deborah to bring home high grades. Nothing less was good enough for Anita. After college Deborah attended graduate school (both at NYU) to study Old English and Medieval English. Her goal was to read Beowulf in the original. And she did. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was a breeze by comparison. But she never did become the lawyer or doctor.
After a ten-year digression marketing computer software, she needed a change. Deborah was now a single parent, struggling to juggle home life with a job that lacked humanitarian values. Despite a significant salary cut, she started teaching literature at a public high school in the South Bronx. And a few years later she was hired by the Horace Mann School, an independent day school to teach critical reading, writing, and grammar in the Upper Division.
During Deborah’s 28 years at Horace Mann, she taught a mix of 7-12. Deborah was committed to understanding the needs of students at every stage of their academic and emotional development. Those were exciting years with surprises in every class, every day. That is the power of adolescents. “My students kept me alert for the twists and turns of the unexpected. At times I felt like Odysseus, who watched his carefully planned ventures implode. Only I was watching young people discover themselves through literature and even grammar. I had distinctly odd approaches in teaching grammar – and they worked.”
A professional turning point occurred when Horace Mann sent Deborah to Seattle, Washington for a 10-day training program with SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity). Even after Deborah had announced her retirement, Horace Mann presented this opportunity as appreciation for all that she had accomplished beyond the classroom on behalf of her colleagues and her students. She remains profoundly grateful. SEED, founded by Peggy McIntosh, is committed to training facilitators to develop and lead inclusive workshops focused on personal identifiers and sensitive topics. Deborah worked with peers from across the nation who were also committed to creating a better world.
In the fall of 2018, she returned to Horace Mann to develop a series of workshops following the SEED models. She and other SEED trained professionals at Horace Mann prepared a series of four-hour workshops over the course of nine months – readings and conversations – a rethinking of curriculum, ourselves, and our circumstances. The workshops focused on the discovery of personal biases – how they affect us as educators and thus our students. She feels that the facilitators learned more than the participants by virtue of the intense collaboration (and disagreements) necessary to create dynamic, interactive workshops.
As Deborah considered life beyond Horace Mann, she was faced with a dilemma. “Having lived in the same apartment for 42 years on 87th St. and West End Avenue, I was ready to leave the city even though I knew I would miss the Philharmonic, the opera, and the coffee shops. I would miss my friends.” Although it was with trepidation – she knew it was time to make a change. She already had a sense of Southern Vermont – her son, Alan Blackwell, had moved to Brattleboro many years before. Deborah moved to Dummerston in August 2019.
The possibility of interacting with neighbors shut down seven months later with the pandemic. But given her background, Deborah could not stay away from the world of education. “By August 2021, I started attending school board meetings. And by January 2022, I decided to run for election as a representative from Dummerston. At times my energy feels boundless. I immediately became Chair of the Policy Committee and a year later Vice-Chair of the school board and the following year Chair of the school board. This year I am running for re-election. I feel as if I have returned to graduate school. There is so much to learn about board oversight. I thoroughly enjoy collaborating with the superintendent and administrators on issues relating to policy and finance. I grew up with the ethos that education is at the core of who we can become. As a teacher and as a person I never stop learning.
Nevertheless, there was a significant part of her life that was unresolved. She had made progress in the early 1990’s and had earned a driver’s license which she never needed in Manhattan. But living in rural Southern Vermont necessitated driving and, for the first time as an adult, Deborah was no longer independent. “I reached a point of frustration, tired of battling emotional demons without success. I hired a professional driving teacher who with the first lesson had me driving on I-91. He told me that I knew how to drive; I just needed the confidence to drive. After a total of three lessons, I was on my own.”
Deborah has capitalized on her strengths, determined to overcome a childhood trauma. She was smiling when she told me about a two-day conference at Lake Morey, in Fairlee, Vermont. “I drove myself there, and I even used cruise control.”
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.