Lake Bluff Elementary Family Remembers ‘Devoted’ Teaching Assistant

Colleague and crony Jennifer Cosgrove pronounced Kathryn “Kitty” Ptacek clinging her life to a facile propagandize students she taught during Lake Bluff Elementary, and associate educators she worked alongside.

“She cared deeply about a people around her, and this was evidenced daily by her courteous questions and genuine seductiveness in a lives of others (and a chocolate she gave out in emergencies),” Cosgrove pronounced during a wake use hold Jun 28 during a First Unitarian Church in Milwaukee. “She honestly carried a spirits those she was around.”

Ptacek, of Whitefish Bay, died Jun 25 after a conflict with ovarian cancer. She was 61.

As a training partner in a facile school’s modernized training module for a past 4 years, and a surrogate clergyman for many before that, Ptacek felt a special joining to her work.

Cosgrove pronounced she worked closely with Ptacek for 3 1/2 years on many programs including a Junior Art Docents, a math curriculum, Battle of a Books and a school’s spelling bees.

“She was employed to work 4 hours of a day, though she would frequency only stay a 4 hours. She would always work past that,” Cosgrove said. “It was arrange of an ongoing fun between us, how most she worked.”

Lake Bluff Principal Kirk Juffer remembered when Ptacek replaced for another clergyman who was carrying surgery. Ptacek dull adult a classroom and took them to see their clergyman and serenade her.

“Kitty, like so many of a training assistants, was good prepared and had a skills and abilities to run a corporation but chose rather to spend her time assisting children and teachers,” he said. “She was a chairman who brought good hearten and conviviality to each room she entered. Her intelligence, oddity and genuine caring for others done her a profitable item in a lives of children and a present to a school. we have never famous a tougher, some-more reliant and carefree person.”

Even as she battled cancer for years, many didn’t know Ptacek’s onslaught since she was always warm, certain and frequency dwelled on it, Juffer added.

“She had some disagreeable bouts of chemotherapy though would be in propagandize a day or dual after with a grin on her face and prepared to assistance children,” he said. “She never gave adult wish that she could kick her illness. Our propagandize village was sanctified by her presence.”

When she wasn’t in school, Ptacek desired to revisit her son Joe, whom was a thespian study during Macalester College in Minneapolis. She was a foodie, Cosgrove said, who desired to try opposite restaurants.

Ptacek is survived by one son Joe, her father John, brothers Michael (Debra), Chris (Amy), Joe and sisters Susie, Julie and Gerrianne (Jamie). She is serve survived by her extended family as a sister-n-law to Joseph (Lynne), Louise, James (Bonnie) and Kathy (Joel), and aunt to many nieces and nephews, according to a genocide notice published in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.