HUDSON – Steve Beals can still remember the smile on Barbara Boyd’s face the December day she showed him all of the gifts donated for Alvirne High School’s annual toy drive.

“I don’t know who it brought more joy, the families or her, just by the fact that she was able to help and make a difference for people,” Beals, the school principal, said Thursday. “Through her own compassion and kindness she was able to rally people to live that message and pay it forward.”

That kindness, Beals said, will be remembered as the school community mourns Boyd’s death this week.

Boyd, a family and consumer science teacher at Alvirne for more than 20 years, died unexpectedly Wednesday night.

She and her longtime partner Jim MacEachern, an English teacher at Alvirne for more than 30 years, were scheduled to retire together at the end of the school year.

“It was a tough day at Alvirne today, a tough morning,” Beals said. “But I am so proud that, even in their own significant grief, staff members immediately rallied to support one another and started asking how we could help the kids.”

Beals said that like him, many of the staff and students in the high school have had close relationships with Boyd and MacEachern.

MacEachern taught Beals when he was a student at Alvirne, and he and Boyd were teachers when Beals returned to the high school to teach.

After returning this year as principal, Beals said the two veteran teachers were just as he remembered – warm, positive, happy people who were always grateful to be working with students.

“You couldn’t separate them,” he said. “They traveled to school almost every day together and seeing them walking in many days a week, they would walk in with warmth.”

In addition to her work in the classroom, Boyd was very involved with the school community, Beals said.

Each year she organized the toy drive and the school’s Cinderella project, which provided prom and semiformal dresses to students in need.

“She was just a classy lady,” Beals said. “If we had the ability to design who should and shouldn’t be a teacher, she had that design, that package of caring, passionate, empathetic, combined with just a love for kids and a love for education in general. Her teaching went well beyond her subject matter.”

Students took to social media Thursday to share their own memories of the veteran teacher.

“Alvirne has another guardian angel watching over us,” one student wrote on Twitter.

“Ms. Boyd was one of the most upbeat and happy people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing,” another wrote. “Alvirne is an emptier place without you.”

Beals said Boyd and MacEachern were planning on attending many end-of-the-year activities together, from senior night to graduation. Instead, the school community will remember her during those events.

“Our sorrows are just all over,” the principal said. “We’re going to go through these activities saying her presence will still be there.”

Danielle Curtis can be reached at 594-6557 or dcurtis@nashua
telegraph.com. Also, follow Curtis on Twitter (@Telegraph_DC).