SUNDERLAND — For the first time in nearly three decades, a familiar face will not be at Sunderland Elementary School on the first day of class this fall.
Matt Howell retired after 28 years at the school in March, capping off a teaching career that stretched about four decades in total, three countries and several roles.
“I didn’t have many bad days,” Howell, 64, said in the backyard of his Greenfield home. Although Howell grew up on a farm in Kansas and his wife works in West Hartford, Connecticut, he described Franklin County as his “adopted hometown.”
Before teaching, Howell hoped for a career in journalism until he went to Nagaoka, Japan. After graduating from McPherson College, he spent two years in Nagaoka working with teachers on lessons to “make English come alive for their classrooms.”
“I was in the classroom, and I started to think, ‘Hey, I could be one these people,'” he said.
When he returned to the states, he earned his teaching certification and taught English for three years in Maryland before he felt the itch to move overseas again. After talking to schools in South Korea, Germany and Morocco, he and his wife packed their bags for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, excited for a “new place, new experiences, new language.”
For two years, he taught at King Faisal School, a private elite elementary school for boys, before the couple returned to Japan. There, he reunited with friends and settled in Niigata, a city in Japan an hour away from Nagaoka that is known for its food, high quality of rice and scenic coast, Howell said. In a similar role co-teaching English classes, Howell immersed himself in Japanese culture.
In the United States, he said, teaching can become a solitary and lonely profession.
“You close your classroom door and it’s just you,” he said.
By comparison, in Niigata, the teachers sat together and planned lessons as a team between class periods, and embarked on overnight trips as part of the job.
Howell said Americans live in “a very individualistic society,” and described the culture in Niigata as traditional, mentioning the Japanese proverb, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.”
In his experience, schools in Japan reinforced these values through daily tasks like wearing uniforms and sitting in specific ways.
“The rebellious kids, maybe they wear their socks down a little bit,” he said.
When Howell returned to his home country, he knew he wanted to teach kids who spoke English as a second language. After attending the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, briefly living in Springfield for his wife’s former job and leading a trip to Japan for high school students — “which was a really good month, but not good for finding a teaching job in the fall,” he joked — he spotted an advertisement in the Greenfield Recorder for a coordinator for English learners at Sunderland Elementary School.
Although he did not envision himself working with elementary-age children, he decided to give it a go. As the first teacher in that role, Howell said he had to carve out his own corner in the school.
“I just jumped in and felt my way around,” Howell remembered.
Of his many positions at the school since starting in 1998, Howell also taught Spanish. Before taking on the role, he spent about a month staying with a host family in Guatemala to “ramp up [his] Spanish.”
“[The students] called me Don Matteo — Señor Howell just didn’t work, so I kind of had this other identity in the school,” Howell said with a laugh. “I put a lot of energy into that. It was my passion.”
After budget cuts in 2009 eliminated the Spanish program, Howell worked part-time at the elementary school and Frontier Regional School teaching English as a second language before returning to the elementary school full-time.
Howell worked with small groups of students to help them become more comfortable speaking English. According to Sunderland Elementary School Principal Benjamin Barshefsky, Howell taught students from around 40 different countries.
Outside the classroom, Howell also built relationships with the students’ families.
Keylin Perez, the mother of one of Howell’s students who moved to Sunderland from Nicaragua, described him as the “bridge” between their family and the school.
“When I came to this country, we didn’t know anything about the culture, the people, the typical behavior people have, and he introduced our family to Sunderland Elementary School,” Perez said. “We always felt very welcomed in the Sunderland Elementary School because he was there.”
Howell helped Perez with school paperwork, to start her daycare business and with other questions about life in Sunderland as a whole.
“You call Mr. Howell, and he responds really quick. You send a message and he responds really quick. He tries to help with everything,” Perez said. “He always did more than his job.”
When new families moved to Sunderland from other countries and enrolled in summer programming at the school, Barshefsky said Howell was always ready and willing to pause his summer vacation to welcome them.
“Our immigrant and English-learner family population at Sunderland has always added to the richness and beauty of our school,” Barshefsky said. “We’ve always taken pride in really being intentionally inclusive, all in an effort to help these students and families feel welcomed and valued, and over the years, at the forefront of this effort was the work being done by Mr. Howell.”
Howell also created the Sunderland English Learner Parent Advisory Council in 2019 to help the families of his students connect with the school. As a group, the council gathered for meetings, community meals and other programs.
Looking back on his 28 years at the school, Howell said he is proud of “carrying that torch.”
Another layer of Howell’s legacy at the school is “Walk and Roll to School Day.” Since 2012, teachers, students and their families have biked, ridden scooters, skated, jogged or power-walked to school for the event to introduce Earth-friendly habits to the kids. Over the years, Howell’s idea grew, and the school now celebrates the tradition twice a year in the fall and spring, with the Frontier Marching Band as its soundtrack.
Howell credited the event’s success to the school’s community.
“Even if the weather wasn’t perfect, people showed up and people loved it,” Howell said. “It really became a signature Sunderland event, not just a Matt Howell event. This is a Sunderland tradition — we have to keep it going.”
Barshefsky said he plans to do just that.
In his retirement, Howell hopes to travel during the school year instead of just the summer, play tennis, sing in the Pioneer Valley Symphony Chorus and garden. Along with these hobbies, he would also like to find other callings that will keep him busy and fill the gap of “making a difference” that he feels retiring from his job left.
“I felt really lucky that every day, just as part of my regular job, I could make a difference in a lot of different ways,” Howell said. “You don’t get lost at that school, and if there’s a kid we’re worried about, people will go that extra mile to give the kid what they need — nobody falls through the cracks. Those kinds of values you just feel in the building every day.”
While reflecting on his time at the school, Howell wore a T-shirt that read, “Sunderland in Action Day” from a past school day dedicated to community service. He had planned on wearing his “Walk and Roll to School” shirt, but he wore that one the day before.
“This was on the top of the pile,” he said with a smile.
