When Margaret Carthum moved from the suburbs of Chicago to Westport in 1970, it was a difficult transition at first, particularly in terms of meeting people. Even with three kids, it took a while to get integrated, and it felt like the literal end of the world to her.
But after four-plus decades in the community, a long career as an educator and countless hours of work as a volunteer for various nonprofit groups, Carthum can hardly go grocery shopping without someone stopping her to chat.
“We can’t walk through Safeway to buy four things without spending an hour and a half because she runs into parents and former students,” Carthum’s husband Harry said.
Carthum, now 78, has been a paraeducator, special education teacher and principal in the Ocosta School District, along with some interim roles in Aberdeen. This current school year, after 15 years of retirement, she answered the call to serve as interim principal at Ocosta Junior-Senior High School.
Equally impressive is her continuing work as a board member and volunteer for nonprofits such as Connections, which services child victims of sexual assault, the Domestic Violence Center of Grays Harbor, the Council for Exceptional Children, the Arc, and United Way.
For her volunteer and professional contributions to the community she has been chosen, The Daily World’s 2018 Citizen of the Year.
Volunteering and serving as a board member for those nonprofits was a natural progression from her first paraeducator job that fostered her interested in helping children and families in need.
“There are so many needs on the Harbor, so if you can do something to make a change and make it better, that’s what you do,” she explained.
Getting started
Margaret cites Harry as the one who inspired her to get into teaching. They came to Westport from Chicago when he accepted a job as a special education teacher.
“I have a great mentor sitting to my right here,” Margaret said. “He said, ‘You need some kind of skill,’ in case something happened to him.”
In 1973, with three young children at home, Carthum enrolled in Grays Harbor College and later went to Central Washington University to receive her bachelor’s degree in Special Education after spending three summers there. Carthum’s three kids — Susan, John, and David, now 49, 55, 57, respectively — would all stay in Ellensburg with their mom while she attended school.
She got her first job as an Ocosta special education teacher in 1976, and spent nine years as the elementary school’s principal from 1994 to 2003.
In that time, Carthum picked up her multiple board member positions. She still serves today as board president for the Domestic Violence Center and Connections. It’s also noteworthy that Carthum has previously served as a state president and a national board member for the Council for Exceptional Children.
Working for kids and families
Carthum’s family and coworkers say that getting a sense of her contributions in these groups can be challenging as she often deflects accomplishments to others, but they did name a few notable projects.
Angie Coulter, a former executive director for the Children’s Advocacy Center (now Connections), said Carthum was instrumental in the group’s efforts to bring the Parent Child Assistance Program to Grays Harbor. It’s a program that supports mothers battling drug addiction, and despite some public voices opposing it, Carthum and the board worked to successfully add it.
“It’s not always a popular program, but Margaret saw the importance of focusing on moms who have done some really bad stuff, so that they can get better, get their kids back, and so on,” said Coulter.
As a principal and teacher, Carthum was one of the educators who worked to upgrade and redesign special education offerings in Grays Harbor. When she was starting out as a paraeducator, Carthum said some students with special needs were simply kept at home, or placed in a designated institution because there weren’t many options for them. Harry said his wife was “one of the leaders in the movement” to integrate students with special needs into general school activities.
During her time at Ocosta, Carthum also worked to build a better relationship with the Shoalwater Bay Tribe, which she said had many students enrolled in Ocosta schools at the time.
A gift for understanding
Perhaps more important than Carthum’s tangible accomplishments is her overall dedication to supporting the kids and families. In her time as a principal and teacher, Carthum said making many visits to family homes opened her eyes to how resilient some children are and what they have to overcome.
“Those visits give you an understanding of where these children are coming from,” she said. “Maybe math isn’t the most important thing in their life, but getting breakfast is a challenge, or the parents are fighting at night, drinking and doing drugs. You need to understand what the kids are dealing with, and that doesn’t mean the parents don’t love them.”
In order to support students who weren’t showing up for school, Carthum would sometimes attend truancy court appearances. Even if the students’ parents showed up to the trial, Carthum said it was important in “letting them see you want them there, that you support them.”
The friends and coworkers who nominated Carthum describe her as caring and insightful when it comes to students and families in need, and Harry said it’s an overall sense of understanding that sets her apart.
“In my life, I’ve run into a few people who seem to have a gift for understanding that the rest of the population doesn’t have, no matter how empathetic they are. I think Margaret has that gift better than anyone,” he said.
Whenever Carthum’s children visit from elsewhere in Washington, they sometimes ask why she doesn’t move out of Grays Harbor. But Carthum said she is now too ingrained to ever consider leaving.
“I can’t leave here and give all this up. If I can make a difference and help someone, I want to be here.”
