I walked into our kitchen one day last week and noticed that my wife’s eyes were moist.

“The most amazing thing happened to me today,” she explained while chopping sweet potatoes.

“What, baby?” I said.

Immediately, she began to tell me about a phone conversation from earlier in the day.

My wife is a former first-grade teacher. Now in her late 30s, some of the students from the early years of her teaching career are now graduating from high school.

The phone call was from a parent of one of my wife’s former first-graders at 21st Century Academy, a magnet school in Brainerd. The mother, Barbara Vesselles, was eagerly inviting my wife and me to her daughter’s graduation from another local high school.

She explained to my wife that her daughter, Monica, had written a letter about “Mrs. Kennedy” as part of her college application process. Because of my wife’s influence years ago at 21st Century, Ms. Vesselles said, Monica had decided to be a schoolteacher.

The letter recalled how my wife had arranged for several of the children in that long-ago first-grade class to visit a sick classmate. That, and other small kindnesses, had deeply influenced Monica as a child. Now, as a young women, she wants to join the teaching ranks and share that “Mrs. Kennedy” energy with a new generation of children.

I could feel goose bumps on my arm as my wife blushingly told me the story. This kind of affirmation is the best gift a teacher can get.

While I was feeling a rush of pride for my wife, my mind wandered back to a November day in 1995 when I proposed marriage to her in the hallway outside her classroom at 21st Century. I remember wide-eyed children peeking out the door, watching this strange, romantic moment pass between two adults.

Maybe they’ll remember this scene as part of their education. I hope so. Schools, after all, are more than flashcards and science projects. They are communities of families whose lives intersect and spark friendships and careers and unimagined destinies.

Earlier this month, the Hamilton County Board of Education voted 8-1 to close 21st Century Academy. A passage from the next day’s newspaper account of the school board meeting read: “The most emotional reaction by far came after board members voted 8-1 to close 21st Century Academy, and send students, some of whom have attended the school for 12 years, to various schools around the district.”

Some of the students wept openly, according to the report.

I offer no judgment on the wisdom of this and other school closures. Closing public schools often comes down to dollars and test scores, I understand.

(Higher property taxes to support underutilized schools can have dire consequences, too. I can visualize a senior citizen balancing the cost of life-giving medicine against a growing property-tax bill.)

But every school that closes leaves a legacy of altered lives and a wave of sadness.

If we are lucky in these times of distress, we can find comfort by remembering the happy, affirming voices of our first-grade teachers, whose influence echoes through the tiled halls of our character for a lifetime.