Ramona Joyce Mercer

1931 - 2022

News story
By Mike Sigov
Blade staff writer

Ramona Joyce Mercer, an accomplished educator and an Ohio Teacher of the Year recipient, died Thursday at McLaren St. Luke's Hospital. She was 91.

The cause of death was not immediately available as of Monday for Mrs. Mercer, who during her career held remedial reading classes and then taught and coordinated programs for gifted students in the Maumee elementary schools.

"She was a very dedicated, caring, loving educator and colleague," said Jenny Leininger-Newton, a friend and colleague.

Ann Morrow, a colleague, agreed. "She was a super educator, very innovative," Mrs. Morrow said on Monday. "When children got back to my class after attending her program, they would say how much they enjoyed it."

Mrs. Mercer taught remedial reading for nine years in the Maumee schools in the 1970s and then worked for 24 years in the schools' gifted students program, teaching and coordinating the program until retirement.

In retirement, Mrs. Mercer painted watercolors, which have been exhibited at area venues such as the Maumee Branch Library and the Way Public Library Gallery in Perrysburg.

Highlights of her professional career included becoming the Ohio Teacher of the Year in 1980 and a Martha Holden Jennings Scholar in 1982. She also served on the State of Ohio Teacher in Space Selection Committee in 1985.

She was named Ohio's 1980 Teacher of the Year in October, 1979, chosen from 76 nominees by various school districts.

Franklin Walter, then the state superintendent of public instruction, in announcing the award said Mrs. Mercer was a "dedicated teacher who has tremendous rapport with all the children she teaches."

"She has the wonderful ability to infuse students with enthusiasm for learning," Mr. Walter said at the time, as reported in a news story.

Mrs. Mercer credited "awareness of what's going on in the classroom" and keeping close ties with the students' regular teachers for achieving success in her own specialties.

This kind of teaching involves team effort and approach with the students, regular teachers, parents, and school administrators, she said. "I've been fortunate to work with the most cooperative people I know."

She explained that the students she had had in remedial reading for nine years and the gifted and talented students she was teaching at the time were youngsters that didn't fit into the conventional education patterns.

Gifted children may well be deprived students if they are turned off in the classroom and not given the means to develop their talents, she added.

In October, 1979, Mrs. Mercer taught gifted students in the third, fourth, and fifth grades at Fairfield and Union elementary schools.

That was the first year for Maumee's GATE program, which stood for Gifted and Talented Educational Enrichment Experiences. Mrs. Mercer was one of two teachers in the program, in which students left their regular classrooms for two 90-minute sessions each week.

She had taught the reading improvement courses, part of the Title I program, in the same schools.

"I learned the consequence of patience, the reward in sharing a child's success, the value of a hug, and the pleasure of accomplishment when a parent said, 'He can read now,'" Mrs. Mercer said at the time.

The state department of education announcement quoted a Maumee parent as saying, "Mrs. Mercer has a special talent with her reading kids that no other teacher can compare with. My son thinks she is the greatest, and I think that it is very important to have the kind of relationship that she and her kids have."

In 1985, Mrs. Mercer, at the time coordinator of the gifted programs in the Maumee schools, was chosen to serve on the state panel that helped select Ohio's nominees for NASA's "Teacher in Space" program.

She interviewed some of the 600 Ohio teachers who applied. After the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion that killed its crew including Christa McAuliffe, a Concord, N.H., high school teacher who was chosen to make the flight, Ms. Mercer said that the dangers had not been on the minds of most.

Even after the tragedy, she said she thought that most of the teachers to whom she talked still would be willing to become "space pioneers."

Born Sept. 18, 1931 in Detroit, Mrs. Mercer studied to be a teacher at Ohio State University for two years before she married Carl LeRoy Mercer in 1951 and reared a son and two daughters. Mr. Mercer died in 2016.

She later returned to school while living in Indiana, and received her undergraduate and master's degrees from Butler University in Indianapolis in 1968 and 1971. She taught third grade at Orchard Park Elementary School in Carmel, Ind., for two years before moving back to Ohio.

Along with her husband of 64 years, she was preceded in death by her son Douglas.

Surviving are her daughters, Marla Michelsen and Christine Mercer Kraft; seven grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.

Services will be from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. Thursday at Perrysburg First Church, 200 West 2nd St., in Perrysburg.

Arrangements are by Maison-Dardenne-Walker Funeral Home.

The family suggests tributes to the Maumee Schools Gifted Program or their S.T.E.A.M. lab.