CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Alta Vista teacher Tasha Marshall has worked diligently to make sure her students know they will always be in her heart by making blankets for them that they can have for the rest of their lives.
Marshall has always loved working with children, beginning as a tutor before returning to school to become a teacher.
“This is my 10th year of teaching in the classroom at Alta Vista,” she said. “I was in kindergarten for seven years and then I went up to first grade.”
Having crocheted since the age of 6, Marshall has always loved the craft but was struggling to find a way to take this gift and use it to help others.
“I was praying about if I’ve been given these talents, let me use them correctly,” she said. The opportunity to use her gifts to bring others joy came up five years into her teaching career.
“There was a year where there were some students that had outside struggles that I just couldn’t let go. And people kept saying, ‘You can only do what you can do,’ and being such a new teacher at the time, I just thought that was not a great answer,” she said. “And talking to people, someone had suggested, ‘Why don’t you give the students something like a stuffed animal or something that when they look at that they know somebody cared?'”
With that advice in mind, Marshall began looking for something to give to her students, and it was not until one of her fellow teachers posted about how she had received a gift of crocheted blankets for her students that Marshall knew what she could use her gift for.
For the past five years, Marshall has worked to make blankets for both first-grade classes at the school and is able to complete the task with the help of her mother. Each blanket takes between 12 and 14 hours to complete, and she has not missed a year since beginning this journey.
“I love Cheyenne. I love doing what I’m doing most of the time,” Marshall said. “I mean, there are challenges all the time, but my heart goes to these children and we ask so much of them. This is my way to give back.”
