Helping others grow and embrace life, science teacher Valerie Ford dedicated her life to motherhood and education in the Souderton community. Ford passed away from brain cancer on September 21.
Ford and her husband, Ian, raised four children: Jacob, Bekah, Emma and Nicole.
Ford was born on January 4, 1969 and grew up in Allentown, Pa, where she attended Salisbury High School.
According to Emma, Ford was an active student throughout her primary and secondary school years.
“She was in all the musicals when she was in high school,” Emma said. “She was a stellar student, always got really good grades and loved education.”
After graduating high school, Ford attended Juniata College and earned her bachelor’s degree in biology and secondary education.
Following her undergraduate completion, Ford became a stay-at-home mom.
According to Jacob, Ford always envisioned herself as a stay-at-home mom.
“Even as a little girl, and even while she was a college student, she always knew she first wanted to be a mom,” Jacob said.
Ford homeschooled her four children up until various elementary grades, creating a “self-guided independent” learning environment, according to Bekah.
“My mom taught us to read like she taught us like all those really fundamental basic skills that you learn from pre-K through second grade,” Bekah said. “Anytime that I’m reading anything that’s like a piece of my mom because she taught me how to read.”
Jacob said that his mom would allow him and his siblings to cater their curriculum to their interests, whether that be doing lessons on Lewis and Clark or horses.
“Every year around the fall, I remember my mom and I, when I was 8 or 12, would sit down and have an annual meeting where we would decide what the curriculum would be for the next year,” Jacob said, “and I think that worked really well for me where I got to lead my curiosity to what I wanted to learn rather than be a distraction from what I was supposed to learn.”
After all of her children graduated from high school, Ford returned to school at Wilkes University in 2017 to become recertified as a teacher and earn her master’s degree in education.
“Before it even occurred to me that my mom might want to be a teacher as a career, I knew her as a teacher,” Jacob said.
According to Emma, Ford had an innate love for teaching and helping children.
“I think that she’s always had an absolute adoration for children and helping children to grow,” Emma said. “She always found it really, really important to foster safe spaces for kids to learn and grow.”
As a science teacher at Souderton, Ford carried similar values as a homeschool teacher into the classroom to heighten student engagement and enjoyment within the classroom.
“She would make adjustments every year if that’s what it took to kind of figure out what was engaging for her learners,” Bekah said, “even though you know, now instead of two kids, it was 25 every hour, until she found ways to kind of shift her homeschool methods so that she could apply them to the larger classroom.”
According to Emma, Ford approached teaching as an opportunity to help students grow and become more independent.
“I think that she was super honest with her students, which helped them to realize that she’s going to help you and she’s going to be there for you, but at a certain point, you have to take your education in your own hands,” Emma said.
Ford’s memorial service will be held at Zion Mennonite Church in Souderton on November 18 at 3 p.m.
