Denise Williams, a beloved 35-year educator of Akron Public Schools and the heart of Helen Arnold Community Learning Center who taught herself the science of reading to better help her students before it became a district mandate, died Thursday following a medical emergency at the school board office.
Williams was 67 years old, but at any mention of her age, she was known to say she was not too old to learn something new.
"She was always about making sure that she was learning," Helen Arnold Principal LaMonica Davis said, noting Williams went "above and beyond," and always for kids.
Williams could have retired but rejected the idea, insisting on another year with her students. She was already planning for next year, mapping out what her incoming first graders were going to need and how she was going to help them.
She took their results personally, and not just those of her own students, but across the first grade.
"If the first grade scores as a whole weren't great," Davis said, "it was, 'Not only did I not teach the kids, I didn't teach the other first grade teachers what to do to teach these kids.'"
Thursday, the district was honoring Davis as Principal of the Year, a surprise only a handful of people knew about, including Williams. She was able to see her dear friend receive her award.
"She made me grow. She made me the principal who I am today," Davis said. "My Principal of the Year award, I give it to her because I could not have done my job without her. She was my go-to person."
Williams was nominated for Teacher of the Year every year, Davis said, but removed her own name from consideration. They had the district make her the "feature teacher" of the month this May, Davis said, "that way she had no control of it."
"She didn't care about validation," Davis said. "She didn't care about what you thought about her or the governor or the Beacon Journal. All she cared about was if her kids were learning."
Williams was instrumental in the turnaround of Helen Arnold CLC from a school the state labeled "failing" and "priority status" to one that has received high marks for growth and has officially been removed from state oversight. Williams was featured prominently in a year-long Beacon Journal story about Helen Arnold and its efforts to help students improve, a story that won an All Ohio Excellence in Journalism Award from the Press Club of Cleveland the day after she died.
Williams was initially reluctant to be photographed or interviewed, but found her groove talking about her students.
"I want them to see when they come in here they're safe and they're loved, and I have high expectations academically and socially," Williams said then.
On her refusal to retire, she said, "I feel like I still have more to do."
She was again interviewed after one of her students was shot and seriously injured the summer after he was in her classroom, helping a community understand the far-reaching implications of gun violence. When the boy returned to school weeks later, she waited for him in the hallway.
"Oh, my baby boy!" she said as she wrapped her long arms around him.
Davis said Williams had already been back in her classroom planning for next year, looking at her students' data and making phone calls to parents about how to help their children over the summer based on what the end-of-year test scores showed. She loved school, Davis said. She didn't really love the summer months, always agreeing to teach summer school and Saturday school.
She barely seemed to sleep, and was known to text Davis or other teachers at 1 a.m. with something funny or related to education that she saw on TikTok, which she loved, along with YouTube. She used YouTube to make one of her biggest transitions as a teacher, the move to a different way of teaching reading.
"I knew the way we were teaching reading wasn't working," she said in the 2023 interview. "And I blame myself. I always blame myself. I never blame the kids."
She heard about the "science of reading," a way of teaching reading that aligns with brain science, and used YouTube to further her understanding of that science. By the time the school was looking at adopting a program that was based on the same principles, Williams was ahead of the rest of the staff and had already been using the strategies in her classroom, Davis said.
"She goes, 'That's what I've already been doing. I've been trying to tell you,'" Davis recalled.
Williams was subtly funny, often making jokes or comments that would go over the students' heads, but that would make Williams smile to herself. Once while working with a group of students after school on a reading enrichment program, she noticed their attention spans were waning, and simply said into the air, "I think I've lost them."
She rewarded students with individual Skittles for right answers and good behavior, although Snickers were her own personal favorite, a fact known to just about everyone in the school.
Williams had a no-nonsense attitude, but her voice was always calm and soothing, even when she was being direct. Davis said they used to send students to her classroom when they got in trouble. Not because she was mean, but because no student wanted to disappoint Mrs. Williams.
"Even though sometimes they were difficult and she was on them like a mama, they still knew at the end of the day she loved them," Davis said.
A native of Akron and graduate of East High School, Williams earned her bachelor's and master's degree from Southern University, an historically Black college/university, and spent her entire teaching career in Akron schools, at Erie Island Elementary for the first half of her career and then Helen Arnold since 2009.
She was married to Thomas Williams for 40 years, and had two daughters, Danielle Williams and Ashley Bott, and two stepchildren, Naketa Jones and Brian Williams, whom she "treated like her own," Danielle Williams said.
Williams also treated her students as her own, her daughter said, and became a teacher because she loved helping them and seeing the moment of understanding come across their faces.
"When they got it, that meant more to her than all the money in the world," Danielle Williams said. "When they're like 'oh, I got this!'"
She said she watched her mother teach several times, but remembers being quite impressed with her once while watching her teach at Erie Island.
"I remember writing down, 'my hero,'" Danielle Williams said. "That's who I wanted to be, who I still want to be."
Williams was also committed to the growth of young teachers, and had several student teachers assigned to her over the years. The most recent one, new Kent State University graduate Katelyn Pohlman, said she expected not to be trusted to take on a lesson with a full class of students until Week 8 of her 16 weeks in the classroom. Williams had her in front of the entire class her third week.
"I could tell that her trust in me was very great," Pohlman said.
She said Williams pushed her to "always continue to learn."
"She was the first person that I wanted to call when I would have gotten my first job," Pohlman said.
Davis said Helen Arnold will never be the same. The school is installing a bench in her name, to be called the Denise Williams Reading Buddy Bench. Davis said Williams didn't just want students to learn how to read, but to learn to enjoy it.
Davis said Williams always stayed after school each day working on lesson plans or helping Davis with whatever there was left to do. They never left without each other. Both had been talking about maybe, possibly retiring, but put it off one more year.
"Both of us said we were going to do one more together," Davis said. "We were going to leave together."
Calling hours will be from 10 a.m. to noon on Friday, with a service at noon to follow at Billows Funeral Home, 85 N. Miller Road, Akron. Burial will be immediately following at Glendale Cemetery.
Contact education reporter Jennifer Pignolet at jpignolet@thebeaconjournal.com, at 330-996-3216 or on Twitter @JenPignolet.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Beloved Helen Arnold, Erie Island teacher Denise Williams dies
