She didn't argue with them, but instead validated their ideas, said Adrria Volk, an Alternative Learning Center graduate. She would take the ducks home every night and put them in the bathtub and then take them back to school every morning.įor a final project one time, students expressed a desire to produce a rap video. For one project-based lesson, she hatched ducklings with students. She ditched traditional methods for more unconventional approaches. "She helped them find pathways of empowerment." "She told them that because of the lens that you have, because of your life experiences, you have a unique way to give back to our world," Holtorf-Jewell said. After Quackenbush moved to New Orleans in 2019, Higgs joined her a year later and moved in the house.Īlthough Higgs, 36, was on parole for a robbery and sexual assault he committed in Minnesota when he was 19, Quackenbush told her family to look past his record, according to Law enforcement authorities have tracked him to Iowa and believe he may be en route to Minnesota.įriends say Quackenbush's ability to see the best in others and not judge a person based on their past misdeeds may have accounted for the relationship with Higgs. New Orleans police identified Quackenbush's former boyfriend, Preston Higgs, who lived with her at the time, as the suspect. "We had so many pivotal moments and - I'm sure I'm not alone in saying this - we fully expected to have more and more adventures." "It changed the trajectory of my life," said Jess Sarver-Mullan, a former Rochester resident who first met Quackenbush at Willow Creek Middle School when they were both students. Having known her, they can't imagine a world without her. Three weeks after she was fatally stabbed in her New Orleans house, colleagues, friends and students are emerging from a "numbing grief" to talk about the magnitude of the loss. She wouldn't stop until the learning was meaningful to them." "But as a teacher, she was so tenacious about when a kid was struggling. "They knew that she genuinely cared about how they were as human beings," said Marian Holtorf-Jewell, a learning center colleague. She "fiercely cared" about her students and their experiences. Quackenbush, 39, taught at the Rochester Alternative Learning Center for five years before moving to New Orleans in 2019 to teach at a similar school there.Ĭolleagues say her great gift was the ability to connect with students who felt like castoffs in a traditional school setting. But it is impossible to assess her dynamic life - a life taken too soon when she was stabbed to death - without taking into account her skill as a teacher. Liz Quackenbush was many things: an adventurer, an artist, a free soul, spontaneous and unafraid.
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