Patrice Stanzione on July 27 made a Facebook post that sums up what being a teacher the past 42 years has meant to her.

“School begins next Wednesday. I’m so excited,” the post read.

On Tuesday, as she prepared her classroom for the first day of school on today, she doubled down.

“I just know I’m not going to get any sleep tonight because I get excited,” Stanzione said. “I have some students returning, I have some new students coming in and it’s just exciting because you never know what the future’s going to hold for these kids.”

Stanzione teaches special education to students in grades three through five at Nelson Elementary in La Puente. It’s part of Hacienda La Puente Unified School District, which starts school before any other district in the San Gabriel Valley.

Indeed, ahead of her 43rd year, Stanzione remains thrilled about her job. Even teaching distance-learning via Zoom during the early stages of the coronavirus didn’t dampen her spirts.

“As far as the Zoom-learning through COVID and distance-learning, I am very lucky,” said Stanzione, who said many of her students have autism. “I had my students for three years, so I had a group of like families that I had known, so we worked collaboratively. They learned more about their children than they ever knew about their disability and their ways of learning.”

She said the experience was eye-opening, positive and “very empowering.”

“My students who were maybe intimidated by a classroom or by others were in the safety of their own home, but learning, and they began to grow and blossom,” Stanzione said.

Besides her teaching duties in Hacienda La Puente Unified, where she has taught the past 22 years, Stanzione is on the board of education for neighboring Bassett Unified School District and she adjudicates for National Youth Arts, which entails taking in about 70 performances a year and handing out awards nationally.

“It enriches their learning, it enhances their learning, it’s therapeutic,” Stanzione said, of the arts studies.

One might say Stanzione is a can-do person. She comes by it honestly.

“It’s all about service,” she said. “My parents were very much into community service.”

It all began at her alma mater, Bishop Amat High School in La Puente, where she taught government and debate beginning in 1980. She also taught in Duarte Unified and Bassett Unified before landing at Hacienda La Puente Unified in 2000.

Through her journey, she noticed some kids were falling through the cracks, as she puts it, and she wanted to find out why. She came up with a cool idea.

“I started just jotting down essays,” Stanzione said. “I’ve been writing down little essays since I first came to Hacienda La Puente, or since a year before I came to the district.

“I started writing, ‘Why, what is going on?’ Anytime I’d see something, I’d make a little notation, ‘Write an essay.’”

She saw patterns.

“And I started seeing easy ways to connect to kids,” Stanzione said. “And I think throughout all of it, my main point, from teaching seniors (in high school) to teaching my present population of children with autism, is to give them voice, to have them come into their own and give them voice of self.

“I think that’s really powerful because that’s what’s going to make a good, honest community as we go on.”

Nelson Elementary principal Marci Chavez can’t praise Stanzione enough.

“You know what I love about Patti?” Chavez said. “It’s just her energy and her positivity throughout the years. She’s been teaching for over 40 years and that has never dwindled because she loves her students, she loves teaching, she loves what she does and that’s really an inspiration to the whole staff.”

Stanzione had COVID-19 in July, so she could not come to the school. She made colorful flowers at home that now adorn the walls of her classroom, whose desks have protective plastic shields on three sides.

It’s been quite the fulfilling expedition for Stanzione. She was asked, in her heart of hearts, what it has meant to her.

“That I’m having some kind of effect on, I guess, the future,” she said. “That maybe I can help one kid see themselves as being important. It’s just having an effect on the positives.”

How much longer will she teach?

“For as long as I am allowed,” Stanzione said. “And I don’t mean allowed by the school district. I mean allowed by a higher power. You know, as long as I’m given another day, I think I can have a positive effect on children.”