TWU alum’s education impact spans seven decades

April 17, 2025 — DENTON — As the North Texas population continues to grow at an explosive rate, it stretches the imagination to grasp what education in the then-sparse region was like seven decades ago. 

In those days, a music teacher might traverse a county to five different schools to give lessons. Colleges expected scholarship awardees to cook and clean dormitories. Dining hall staff added color to margarine. 

Times were decidedly different.

Texas Woman’s alumna Gerry Haggard, EdD, born in 1929, doesn’t have to imagine it. She lived it, even interviewing for a teaching position with a principal who was milking a cow at the time.

“It’s been a long time since I thought about that,” Haggard chuckled.

That conversation wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for Haggard, whose parents sold milk. A customer once traded a piano for the family’s milk, and Haggard recalled doing laundry an hour a week to pay for piano lessons. 

Her talent for piano paid off with a music scholarship to Texas Woman’s University, then called Texas State College for Women (TSCW). After a year in the music program though, Haggard discovered she wanted to teach and was able to apply her scholarship to study that instead. But her musical ability played a role in her teaching career. She taught music in addition to grades 3 through 5 in different area schools, before eventually focusing on literacy as the reading supervisor for the Plano Independent School District.

Haggard earned her bachelor’s (1949), master’s (1952) and a Doctorate of Education (1980) from TWU. She received her doctorate the same year her daughter Sarah earned a master’s degree and her daughter Mary earned a bachelor’s degree, making for one of her husband Roy’s favorite pictures.

“He was her biggest fan. Anytime she wanted to start a new degree, he supported it,” Mary said of Roy, who came from a family of educators. Both of Haggard’s daughters became longtime educators as well. Haggard and her daughters visited the Denton campus of Texas Woman’s recently as guests of Literacy and Language in the School of Education.

Eventually, Haggard traveled to New Zealand to gain greater insight about Reading Recovery, a short-term one-on-one early literacy intervention for first graders that have been identified with difficulty learning to read and write. She later completed post-doctoral work in Reading Recovery at Ohio State University under New Zealand educator and Reading Recovery developer Marie Clay.

“She was my teacher for a whole year. Marie Clay came to TSCW and I heard her speak several years. Then I got to teach with her for a year,” Haggard said. “She’s my hero.”

As Haggard learned more about Reading Recovery, she knew she wanted to instill the practices at Plano ISD, where she spent most of her career.

“I was in hog heaven. I saw the answers for where we were in Plano,” said Haggard, citing the challenges Reading Recovery helped address within the district.

As the Plano ISD reading supervisor for 20 of her 37 years in the district, Haggard directed summer school and Head Start programs, managed Title I kindergarten and a dyslexic program, and helped open two new schools. She wrote the grant that brought Head Start to Plano ISD.

To complete 50 years of teaching, Haggard served as a visiting professor at TWU for her final two years.

But as anyone who knows a teacher understands, a teacher never stops teaching. Today, in her mid-90s, Haggard tutors a student weekly. When the fifth-grade boy started working with Haggard, he could not read at all. With her help, he already reads at a second-grade level.

One of the ways she motivates him: her piano.

In addition to tutoring, Haggard, who is already a prolific writer on topics of literacy and grief, continues to publish articles and research. She’s recently adapted her work in grief support for children to a new field — grief support for seniors within her own community.

Fittingly, she encourages seniors she knows to build connections with grandchildren and great grandchildren by reading to them.

^{Haggard visits with Betsy Kaye, PhD, and Nancy Anderson, PhD, of Literacy and Language}