by Heidi Happonen

As she celebrates her 100^th birthday, Northeastern alumna Ruth Gove reflects upon her favorite memory as a special education teacher.

“Just seeing my students realize that someone cared about them.”

After receiving her master’s degree in special education from Northeastern University in 1969, Ruth began a career marked with caring. At a time when the field of special education was relatively new, Ruth came to Northeastern at a pivotal moment, both personally and professionally. As a mother of two sons who struggled with reading, she found herself puzzled and searching for answers. “I just couldn’t understand how I could get them to read,” she remembers. A savvy friend changed the trajectory of her life with a simple conversation about an emerging field in education; one focused on helping children with emotional and behavioral challenges become successful students and citizens.

Ruth embraced the opportunity.

“Northeastern was such a nice program for me,” Ruth reflects, her voice warm with gratitude even after all these years. What made her experience exceptional wasn’t just the coursework, she explains, it was the thoughtful guidance of her advisor, who arranged for her to complete teacher observations in two vastly different settings: a large urban school and an affluent community. “I had a chance to see the difference in facilities and materials and everything,” she explains.

Those contrasting experiences would prove invaluable throughout her career.

Working with emotionally and developmentally challenged children was a groundbreaking specialty when Ruth began her master’s degree. Armed with her Northeastern education, she embarked on a teaching career in Lynn schools that would span more than two decades and touch countless lives.

The work was never easy. Ruth recalls the frustration of colleagues who didn’t understand children with behavioral challenges or who lacked the ability to concentrate. “Some would say ‘all they need is a kick in the behind,'” she recounts, “which was the opposite of what they needed and probably what they had outside of school.”

But Ruth persevered, helping to establish separate classes for children with special needs and later participating in an innovative collaborative program between Lynn schools and Union Hospital Mental Health Unit. For four to five years, she worked alongside consulting psychiatrists, social workers, and specialists in what she describes as some of the most meaningful work of her career. When she considered moving into administration, the consulting psychiatrist urged her to stay, saying: “You’re doing good work there.”

The landscape of special education shifted dramatically during Ruth’s career. After twenty years of building effective programs, she watched as financial pressures led to changes she deeply disagreed with. “One of my regrets is that somehow I just didn’t have the influence to maintain the type of program that we had established,” she reflects. It’s a lesson she wishes she could share with new teachers: “It’s important to know about the administration of different programs because you need to have some influence there too if you see things that you feel should be changed.”

Ruth’s connection to Northeastern extends beyond her own education. Her daughter, Mary Ann Voutselas (Ruth’s name during her graduate school years), also graduated from Northeastern (in her case in social work) and has since retired. Though driving has become difficult, making visits to campus challenging, Ruth stays connected to the university community and follows the updates to the buildings and programs with interest.

“Lifelong learning is a secret to long life. The thing is to have good friends, sometimes with advice, sometimes just traveling together or whatever. It just makes the time go by.”

Even after retiring at 65 in 1990, Ruth never stopped learning. She took an independent study tour to China, observing how different countries approach education for children with special needs. “That just adds to your background information,” she notes. Through the isolation of COVID, she discovered webinars on everything from education to art. “Thank goodness for the internet,” she says. “There’s no reason to not know what’s going on these days.”

Her philosophy is simple but profound: “Lifelong learning is a secret to long life. The thing is to have good friends, sometimes with advice, sometimes just traveling together or whatever. It just makes the time go by.”

From her home on the North Shore in Peabody, Ruth looks back on a life marked by both triumph and tragedy. She lost her older son, a Navy veteran of Vietnam, to Multiple Sclerosis. But she celebrates her son in California, married with three sons (including twins), two of whom recently earned their master’s degrees, continuing the family’s tradition of valuing education.

Ruth’s advice to aspiring teachers remains as relevant today as when she first entered those Northeastern classrooms decades ago: “Look at the community. Find out what their philosophy is on working with children who might need something different than a regular classroom. Look at the attitude of the administrators, because they have a lot to say about how it all works. And don’t be afraid of a little confrontation. With the right training and a bit of courage, you can also be a powerful advocate.”

A century after her birth, Ruth Gove’s legacy lives on, in the students whose lives she changed, in her daughter who followed her into helping professions, in her grandchildren pursuing advanced degrees, and in her enduring connection to Northeastern University.

They say the main indicator of success for any child is to know that at least one adult cares for them. Ruth Gove has cared for a lot of children over the course of her career and her life. And that’s the kind of success that is immeasurable.