Beverly Louise Roper was born on July 11, 1950 in Milton, Massachusetts. I am the oldest of four girls. My sisters' names are Adelle, Donna, and Lizbeth. We grew up in a house that was built in 1900 in Quincy, Massachusetts, which is just across the bay from Boston. As a child I really enjoyed school and LOVED to read. In the winter my mother would make us go outside in the snow to get fresh air and many times I would sit in the snow and read a book. I loved the spring and the fall in New England, but I was never too crazy about winters. Even as a kid I never seemed to be able to get warm. Everyone knew that my chair was the one by the fireplace. I hated that you could go for days and weeks without seeing the sun. Nowadays I joke that the stork made a mistake and I was supposed to have been dropped off in Florida from the start.
We spent our summers in Canada, on Prince Edward Island, which is where my father was from and where everyone in my mother's family, except her, was born. It is the place where the book ANNE OF GREEN GABLES and the Disney show AVONLEA take place. It is one of the most beautiful spots in the world. It is very rural--quite a difference from Quincy--and I got to help milk cows, deliver pigs, help with the haying, and so on. Where we stayed was in a fishing village and it wasn't until I was grown that I realized lobster was expensive because we used to get it for free or close to nothing and we ate tons of it.
When I started high school my family moved to Hollywood, Florida. We lived there for three years. During that time my parents got a divorce and after I graduated from MacArthur High School, my mother, my sisters, and I moved back to Massacusetts. I worked at a bank days and went to Northeastern University nights for a year and then moved back to Florida to go to college. I earned two bachelor degrees, one in Psychology and one in Elementary Education, in three years at the University of Central Florida, although it was called Florida Technological University then. I met my husband, Will Jones,there and we got married after we graduated. When he started graduate school in 1973, we moved to Gainesville and we've been here ever since.
Our son, Derek graduated from UF this past year, majoring in computer engineering, with a specialty in a new program called Digital Arts. He now works as an interactive art director at Walt Disney World in Orlando. He graduated in 1998 from GHS and he was in the AP (Advanced Placement) program. He played basketball and was in the chorus. Our daughter, Adrienne, is in the eleventh grade at GHS. She is also a good student and has interests in many areas. She plays both basketball and volleyball. In her last year at Fort Clarke she was in the band, the Thespians, student council, and was an anchor on the morning news. She just got her driver's license this past summer so her favoirte thing to do now is drive, going all over with her friends.
I started teaching in 1972. My first job was a third grade class at Orange Center Elementary School in Orlando. It was before they integrated the schools there and I experienced firsthand how unequal black and white schools were. When we moved to Gainesville, I commuted to Ocala for five years and taught Title I Reading at Fessenden Elementary. Then I taught reading for seven years at Lincoln Middle School and various grades for four years at Williams Elementary before coming to Fort Clarke in 1989. The Fort is a wonderful place to teach and I love being in FROGTOWN!
Hopefully this little bio of me will help you to know me better. Maybe you will see that I have experienced much of what many of you are dealing with. If you would like to have your bio on this page, write it up (if possible, do it on computer and save it on a disk for me) and have your parents write a note that they approve of it being put on the website and you can be spotlighted on this page!