Meet Dr. Elizabeth Wolterink, PhD, Leelanau School

By Norm Wheeler

Sun editor

The pandemic pivots and pirouettes required of teachers everywhere only inspired the creativity of Leelanau School’s Dr. Elizabeth Wolterink. Her PhD (and MA) in Mythological Studies (with an emphasis in Depth Psychology), and a BA in Anthropology (with a minor in Cinema) show her versatility, her attention to detail, and her passion for expansive imagining and deep thinking.

After five moves before she was in third grade, Elizabeth’s family settled in Clarks Summit near Scranton, Pa., for most of her childhood. The Wolterink family moved to Traverse City when she was a college freshman, and she followed in 2003. After graduating from SUNY Binghamton, she started fixing houses in the rented student-housing neighborhoods of Ithaca, NY, home of Cornell U. and Ithaca College. 

“We patched drywall, set new toilets, and repaired sinks,” she laughs. Such is the post-graduate plight of many who major in the Humanities! Elizabeth wanted to go to grad school, but didn’t know for what, so she entered the gig economy as a substitute teacher and then classroom consultant creating games and posters, plus tutoring and editing. She also volunteered and then worked at Grace Episcopal Church in Traverse City, finally becoming the Director of Children & Youth Ministries in 2008.

Wolterink kept searching for just the right grad school. She found Pacifica Graduate Institute, a small private school in Santa Barbara, Calif., that offered only six graduate degrees in a variety of psychology related disciplines includingmythology or comparative religion. 

“I didn’t want a program that forced a concentration in one religion, I wanted a comparative degree, so one August when I learned that they were doing rolling admissions I sent an application, interviewed by phone, got accepted, and flew off to California!” The hybrid program required her to spend one week per month in-person with intense all-day classes. “It was cheaper to fly back and forth than to rent something out there. So I’d fly home and read books and write papers for three weeks before returning to California.” Home to the Joseph Campbell Archives, and steeped in the mytho-poetic psychological teachings of Carl Jung, Pacifica awarded Elizabeth her PhD in 2017.

Back home in TC, Elizabeth continued her work at Grace Episcopal. There she worked a lot with Elizabeth Blondia, the history teacher and chair of humanities at the Leelanau School. Despite her PhD, she was finding it hard to break into academia, and one day Blondia declared, “We need an English teacher!” When Winter Term 2020 started in January, Wolterink was the full-time English teacher at the Leelanau School.

Eight weeks later, when the COVID shut down and stopped everything, everyone was sent home from the intimate little boarding school on Lake Michigan. 

“We got the shutdown news on Thursday, and the dorms were empty by Saturday,” she remembers. “We didn’t know for how long, so we scrambled like everyone else to move to Zoom school, and we finished off the school year that way.” The June graduation of 2020, with awards and speeches, was all on Zoom. “We knew our students really needed support and both fun and academic things to do over the summer or they would just get lonely and sink into video games all day. We did group Zoom, but also tutored individuals after dinner or in the morning on weekends.” Wolterink helped devise trivia games, social chatting, and summer projects to keep students busy. These included, “Every Day Carry (EDC) survival kits to help those who were interested to stay engaged with the Leelanau community and not get bored.”

In the fall of 2020, the Leelanau School resumed in-person learning with the approval of the State Health Department of Michigan. Everyone returned to campus with a negative COVID test to quarantine, to a mask requirement, and to socially distanced classes outside the dorms. When a positive test two weeks into the semester appeared, the school acted fast to again quarantine those who were exposed. Students remained in their dorms, had food delivered from the Dining Hall, and attended classes only on Zoom. When everyone tested negative on a subsequent test, masked and socially distanced classes resumed. 

“We were really strict about masks,” Elizabeth recalls, “and we kept all of the students on campus, which you can do at a boarding school. The teachers who lived off campus were extremely careful and maintained masking and distancing guidelines when not isolated in their homes.” The arrival of rapid testing allowed for a few off-campus trips for students. All of the adults were vaccinated in March, and the students completed their vaccinations by the end of the school year as well. (Four members of the community who were not vaccinated continued to wear masks and to distance.) 

The senior class of 2021 went through the traditional ceremony on Graduation Green under sunny skies with great relief and tremendous emotion. “We have been really lucky because as a boarding school we could monitor everything, including who enters campus and when,” Elizabeth concludes. “We could quickly lock down if necessary, but we continued to offer students the opportunity to be part of a community, to have some emotional and mental security and support, and to have some freedom in the middle of a pandemic.” The Leelanau School in Glen Arbor deserves huge kudos for their resilience and creativity in reacting to COVID thanks to the versatile and committed staff that includes Dr. Elizabeth Wolterink.