By Kathleen Acuff

Marge Gratiot, superintendent of Los Altos School District, shown here at her retirement party in May, received the PTA Council’s Golden Oak Service Award last week.

It’s the time of year for celebrating what is slipping quickly away. It isn’t just graduation season, it’s Michaels season, as Rich Fischer, superintendent of Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District, said recently. There was plenty to praise and even more to wave goodbye to with tears and laughter during the Los Altos-Mountain View PTA Council luncheon at Michaels at Shoreline last week.

Barbara Emerich, a council veteran, paid tribute to PTA Life Service Award-winner Lucille Liewer, who died in April at the age of 98. The program also remembered young Matt Heroux, the Egan Junior High School science teacher who was killed in an accident in the fall.

Also bid farewell were 25 teachers retiring at the end of the school year from the three districts in the council, Mountain View-Los Altos Union High, Mountain View-Whisman and Los Altos. Two of the three district superintendents are retiring, too. Eleanor Yick, the former Whisman School District superintendent serving a one-year interim term in MVW, and Marge Gratiot, superintendent for 18 of her 35 years in LASD, will pack up their personal mementos and hand their office keys to others at the end of June.

Gratiot praised the PTA for “its small, ethical voice, insistent, persistent - it’s at the school level, the local level, the state level (asking), ‘Is this what’s really good for our children and our families?’”

Yick told the 200 volunteers and staff at the affair that she thinks of change and resilience when she thinks of the PTA. She acknowledged the MVW PTA for its work in establishing and supporting the Shoreline Choral Fest and for supporting the school communities of the sites under consideration for closure earlier this year.

In MVW, assistant superintendent Modrite Archibeque also is retiring in June.

Judy Hannemann, most recently honored as a Champion of Youth by the Mountain View-Los Altos-Los Altos Hills Challenge Team, presented the Honorary Service Award to the Los Altos Community Foundation for its grants to teachers and students for projects and programs that benefit children and the community. The small foundation awarded a total of $100,000 to those efforts. Dennis Young accepted the award on behalf of executive director Roy Lave.

Outgoing council president Suzanne Montgomery noted that the 6,715 members of the 19 PTAs comprising the council contributed $5 million in professional volunteer labor to their schools this year.

The highest honor the PTA Council can bestow went to the departing superintendents. Receiving the Golden Oak Service Award, Yick said, “How lucky I am to work in a profession that makes you grow as a person. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this award.”

Before revealing that Gratiot also would receive a Golden Oak award, veteran PTA volunteer and LASD trustee Margot Harrigan warned the audience that it was going to “a paragon who has not paid her PTA dues.”

Despite that deficiency, however, “Her legacy of candor, inclusiveness, support and care for teachers and students will outlive us all,” Harrigan said. “Of course, it’s Marge.”

Handing Harrigan a banknote, Gratiot said, “She shamed me into it. Here are my PTA dues.”

The superintendent said she had cried at a recent school concert when she realized she was hearing children sing “Fifty Nifty United States” for the last time.

“You can imagine what this is doing to me,” she said with a laugh.