Carey Swanberg retires after 37 years

A line of second graders wrapped around a hallway in front of the small cafeteria at K. William Harvey Elementary in Ronan. Many of them were wearing red shirts with the words “Wild About Reading” splashed across the front. Carey Swanberg, Dean of Students at the school, walked from kid to kid, handing out Skittles to the ones wearing the red shirts and giving high-fives or gently patting others on the back as they waited their turn to get into the lunchroom. 

“I give out Skittles on Fridays to the kids who wear their shirts,” Swanberg said. The shirt is a prize for kids who fulfill certain reading requirements in the Wild About Reading project that Swanberg started years ago. The candy on Fridays is an extra way to reward them. 

Swanberg is passionate about what she does and it shines through in all her accomplishments since she started teaching in 1976 at Pablo Elementary. Today she is the Dean of Students and Reading Specialist at K. William Harvery Elementary in Ronan and a Food Corps Sit Supervisor.

Her calm demeanor betrays her unstoppable energy. She’s the type of person that just can’t sit still and needs to have a project to work on and this is made obvious through the programs that she’s started or helped start in Ronan and across the Mission Valley. “I’m just very passionate about this community,” Swanberg said. 

Swanberg started her teaching career her senior year of high school when she taught a second grade class and a special-ed class five days a week. “I had a study hall that I didn’t know what to do with,” she said. She took the opportunity to be a part of younger lives and she ran with it. “It was just so much fun and I just ate it up.”

Her next step made so much sense to her after her experiences with those kids at Ronan Elementary. “Once I found what I wanted to do, it was easy from there,” she said. Swanberg signed up for classes at Western Montana University in Dillon, now University of Montana West, and began her path toward obtaining two degrees, one in Elementary Education and another in Physical Education. After four years of school, she moved on to the next stage of life as an elementary school teacher in Pablo. 

Swanberg’s passions for education reach beyond the classroom. She has a passion for sports and has been a coach since the beginning of her career, making waves across the state of Montana through her advocacy for girls sports. 

In 1979, Swanberg was on the ground floor of a controversy surrounding girls volleyball. She was part of a team that wanted to start a volleyball program in Ronan, but ran into issues with the state and the school. 

The problems seemed to be related, in part, to girls having access to play sports and having programs for them, as well as sharing gym time with the existing sports. But through paying attention to legislation and bringing communities in the area together, Swanberg was able to help make a change and start a girls volleyball team. “It came down to telling them that they could either use money for litigation or build infrastructure to make the girls sports possible,” she said. 

Times have changed and the community is supportive of girls athletics thanks in part to Swanberg’s efforts. “It is satisfying to me to see that Montana girls have so many options to participate in sports,” she said.

At that time she was still teaching in Pablo, splitting her time between coaching in Ronan and teaching in Pablo. It was difficult to be in both places because Pablo’s school would dismiss at 3:45 while her coaching responsibilities began at 3:30. So she made a change and decided that Ronan would be her home once again. 

Then in 1984, after years of advocating for girls sports, coaching, and teaching she decided to take a leave of absence from the school. The years had taken a toll on her and she needed an escape for a short time. “It was probably the most stressful time of my teaching career,” Swanberg said. 

Her next stop was Butte, Montana. 

She started as an assistant volleyball coach at Montana Tech.  It made sense to take her abilities as a coach to the next level and she decided to see how she would manage with that age group. It turns out, though, that the collegiate level wasn’t where she wanted to be. “I had a year in college [sports] and that was enough to know I didn’t want that.” 

1986 saw Swanberg heading back to Lake County and back to teaching elementary school and volleyball to high school girls. 

Then in 1987, she married Dawson Swanberg. “That’s a game changer,” Swanberg said. 

Her last year as a coach was 1988. 

But her energy for making a difference didn’t leave and she turned her attention towards reading incentive programs to boost kids’ reading abilities. “It is so foundational to the success of the kids in school,” she said. 

At that time she had seen some research about the importance of reading in early childhood development and wanted to implement some programs to incentivize kids in Ronan to read more. 

In 1992 she did just that. 

That’s when Wild About Reading started. She gave kids prizes for reading at home, giving them positive reinforcement for educating themselves through literature. Her belief in the importance of reading led her to reach out to kids and families across the area. Her goal was to improve their overall success and understand that reading is everywhere. “If we can improve that,” she said, “we can improve their success.”

She lead that program for nine years then let a board take over the majority of the responsibility though she still helped build incentive programs and kept the program fresh. 

But once again, she couldn’t sit still for too long. In 2007 her focus switched from reading to the sciences when she took a class through the Big Sky Science Partnership at SKC and UM. It gave her ideas on how to build education through science and keep kids engaged. Her idea made sense because of how the program lined her up with options for education. “Opportunities just came to do things in sciences,” she said. 

She has been working with spectrUM, a public science museum in Missoula that is made possible by the University of Montana, since 2009. She has brought people together for classes, programs, and assemblies around the reservation. 

Then in 2014, she started Scination, a committee that focuses on bringing sciences outside of spectrUM alone, to the communities around the Reservation. Her goal was to give as many opportunities as she could to all kids. “So many opportunities are science-related,” she said. 

Swanberg is also responsible for starting the Girls Career Fair in Ronan in 2013. It stemmed from her desire to give every student the same opportunities to achieve their goals, and women are often under represented. 

Her most recent project has been the Ronan Community Garden, located at the elementary school. She felt that encouraging growing food could bring a community of people together to learn about gardening and food. She opened it up to public participation because “to have a garden be successful, you need to have the community involved,” she said. 

Swanberg is retiring this year on June 9. She felt that the timing was right because her husband is retired as well and she wants to spend time with him. “If we’re going to do activities together now is the time,” she said. 

She has left a mark on the school and the community because of her initiatives, programs and leadership. But the distinguishing part of Swanberg’s efforts are her selfless intentions. Many of the things she does keep her happy, but they’ve been more about the people that her programs affect than herself. And that make the biggest difference to her. 

“I want really good things for kids,” Swanberg said. “What’s important is that they make good choices.”

“I have been privileged to be a part of many special projects in my season as an educator in this district,” she said. “The relationships formed with the students in my class and staff I have worked with is most precious to me. I will miss this aspect of teaching.”