At this Philly school, the teacher two doors down is mom
“I usually call her ‘Mama Kline,’ but once in a while I’ll forget and say, ‘Hey Mom,’” Allison Kline said. She and her mom, Beth Kline, teach at Andrew Hamilton Elementary.
Beth Kline, a third-grade teacher at Andrew Hamilton Elementary in West Philadelphia, arranged books on her colleague’s classroom bookshelf.
“Oh, your kids are going to love these,” Kline, a third-grade teacher, told the second-grade teacher in Room 225 on Friday morning.
Allison Kline is very accustomed to help from her colleague — who’s also her mom.
The two have been teaching together in the Philadelphia School District for 11 years — first, at Bryant Elementary in West Philadelphia, then at Jay Cooke in Logan (where they co-taught a single, giant class), and, for the past six years, at Hamilton.
The difference one teacher can make
As a child, Beth loved learning and couldn’t get enough of school.
“I wanted to help kids find that joy, so I became a teacher,” Beth said. “When you see a child just dive in headfirst and want to learn, there’s nothing more rewarding than that. I still get tingles when I talk about it.”
Allison has known she wanted to be a teacher since she visited her mom’s preschool classroom in 1995.
“It was amazing to see the difference one teacher can make,” she said.
Still, when Allison announced her intention to not only become a teacher, but to become a teacher in Philadelphia, her mom questioned her. Beth loves teaching, but it’s a tough profession, especially in an under-resourced district with high concentrations of student need.
But Allison was full steam ahead, completing her student teaching at Bryant, where her mom worked, then getting her own classroom there.
The Klines have similar teaching styles, they said — they both love inquiry-based teaching, with students learning by asking key questions.
But they’re not carbon copies of each other.
“She’s the tough one, and I’m the soft one,” said Beth.
But the Klines lean on each other.
“If a kid needs a break, I’ll send them down the hall to her room. It’s an incentive, ‘If you get this done, I’ll let you go to Ms. Kline’s room,’” Beth said.
Two family teams
At Hamilton, where Principal Torrance Rothmiller said he loves having the Klines on his staff — “great teachers,” he said — kids are well aware that there’s a mom in one classroom and her daughter nearby.
Students usually call them “Mama Kline” and “Baby Kline.”
Allison goes with that — usually.
“I usually call her ‘Mama Kline,’ but once in a while I’ll forget and say, ‘Hey Mom,’ and the kids get a kick out of it,” said Allison.
They’ll often commute to work together from Delaware County, and they drive family members crazy with school talk. (Another Kline child is also a teacher — Jacob, Beth’s son and Allison’s brother, recently moved from Upper Darby schools to Harlem.)
And yes, they even spend free time together.
“I sneak down for lunch all the time,” Allison said. “That’s the first thing we checked when we got this year’s schedules — do we have lunch together?”
The Klines aren’t the only mother-daughter team at Hamilton.
Ikhlas Hussain and Ryan Mustafa are both special education assistants at the school.
Hussain is happy — and a little proud — to work with her daughter.
“Every time we have a meeting, she brings her chair and sits next to me,” said Hussain. “She wants to be next to her mom.”