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A few years after Anna Dixon graduated from Beverly Kinney’s fifth- and sixth-grade classes at Princeton City Schools, she considered reuniting with her former teacher.
By then, Dixon had moved to New York City, working in publishing and photographing for Rolling Stone magazine. She wanted to share her own adventures with Kinney, and Kinney encouraged Dixon in her childhood to follow her own passions.
But when Ms. Dixon finally reunited with Ms. Kinney at her home in Cincinnati, the retired educator had only one question. “What are you doing to change the world?”
For Kinney, changing the world wasn’t about grand deeds or feats, but simple everyday actions.
“I think she woke up in the morning and asked herself, ‘What can I do to make the world a better place?'” said her son John Kinney.
Kinney was struck and killed by a Cincinnati Metro bus driver on January 11 while walking in a marked crosswalk at Dana Avenue and Duck Creek Road on the border of Hyde Park and Evanston. did. She was 87 years old.
Cincinnati police are still investigating, but the driver, whose license was suspended at the time of the crash, has not yet been charged.
Kinney, a Toledo native, grew up in a blue-collar household with three older sisters and an older brother, her son said. Inquisitive from her early childhood, she turned her passion for learning into her decades-long teaching career.
Before retiring in 1998, she worked as a gifted education teacher at Robert E. Lucas Middle School in the Princeton City School District, teaching students to think critically and encouraging them to take responsibility for their education.
“What I really enjoyed about her, even in elementary school, was that she never felt like she was treating us like children,” said Dixon, 43, who was in Kinney’s class in the early 1990s. I think so,” he said. “She had a lot of expectations for us. She engaged with us in a different way.”
Sarah Burkhart, another former student, said her biracial background often made her feel less included at school, but that was not the case in Kinney’s classroom.
“We were all very different,” Burkhardt, 44, said of the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity in Kinney’s class. “But she created a space where we all felt like we belonged.”
Ms. Burkhardt then worked at Mason High School for 10 years, serving as part of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team. She said she only recently realized how much Kinney’s teachings influenced her passion for creating inclusive spaces for students.
“I think we set an example of knowing that it’s possible,” Burkhardt told the Enquirer.
Outside of the classroom, Kinney was an avid patron of the arts and devoted his free time to numerous philanthropic efforts.
She was a longtime subscriber to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, and also volunteered as an usher at the Ensemble Theater in Over-the-Rhine, John Kinney said.
She has been an avid patron and donor to the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company since 2011, the company said in a statement.
John Kinney added that Kinney shared her passion for learning and love of theater with her two sons, taking them to music hall concerts and other performances from an early age.
She also incorporated her passion for theater into her education by hosting Shakespeare performances and allowing her students to participate in all aspects of the productions.
Her son said the students auditioned for parts, worked as backstage staff and even helped create sets, lighting and sound effects.
Shante Bright, 43, who raised Kinney in fifth and sixth grade in the early ’90s, said she had a small role as one of the soldiers in Kinney’s production of “Macbeth.”
Bright said she may have had stage fright as a child, but her entire class fondly remembers how supportive and believing Kinney was in her students.
“She was a very supportive and just a fun teacher,” Bright said.
Although Kinney devoted his life to formal education, his son said he believes humor is “the highest form of intelligence.”
“Humor was very important to her. The house was always full of laughter,” said John Kinney, 60, now a music teacher at Montfort Heights Elementary School. When he was three years old, he realized that he loved to make his mother laugh.
“She probably wasn’t really happy with the light shining on her,” John Kinney said. Rather, he added, she would like to be remembered for “trying to make the world a better place in any way she can.”
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