Peggy Halter Morris,

Educator, Counselor, Author.

Early Desires

As a young girl, Peggy Halter Morris, preferred climbing trees to cleaning house. She grew up with her family in a small Colorado home built by her parents four hands. Gravel streets meandered along both sides of their corner property. A tall tree grew in the back “forty.” Peggy would climb to the top of that tree with paper and pencil in hand. She had a desire to write. Specifically, she wanted to write the Bobbsey Twins books.

She remembers writing one page.

God’s Touch

Early in life, God called Peggy to Himself, filling her with His love. She gave her heart to Jesus. Out of the overflow of that love, she decided to become a missionary to Africa. Later she realized she knew nothing about Africa or being a missionary. The real heartbeat of her life was a passion to help people, not necessarily in Africa but wherever she happened to be.

Opportunities Galore

In college, Peggy studied to be a teacher. While teaching second grade, a friend of one of her students brought some snakes to show her class. He had asked if he could bring a rattlesnake. She said no. Nevertheless, he brought one. The elementary school was on the edge of the prairie where vipers could easily slither onto the playground. He wanted to educate students to stay clear of rattlesnakes. It was a good thought, but Peggy’s principal wasn’t too pleased to learn of the snake’s presence on campus.

She wrote about that experience and sent it to the Rocky Mountain News. It wasn’t published.

A few years later, she sent Readers Digest a snippet of something one of her first-grade students said. Peggy gave the little girls information about becoming a Brownie with the Girl Scouts. One young girl stated she wanted to be a “cupcake!” Peggy submitted that as a cute saying.

No publishing results.

Preparing to Shine

She moved to Arizona with her husband and three children and was hired to teach second graders at a public school in Mesa, Arizona. When her own children were finishing high school and going on to other endeavors, the desire to help others bubbled up in her heart once again. She was accepted into the counseling program at Arizona State University.

She continued teaching school as she worked on her masters’ programs, eventually earning two masters’ degrees in counseling,  Crazy busy times! Three consuming responsibilities: her family, her public-school children, and the university classes. That’s the time she stopped preparing dinner each night. She joked with her husband that she cooked the first twenty-five years of their marriage, now the next twenty-five years were his. Perhaps he thought—erroneously—that after fifty years of marriage, they would renegotiate terms! They didn’t! Cooking wasn’t found anywhere on Peggy’s list of favorites.

During those busy years as a classroom teacher, she led a committee of teachers in developing a program at the school, Conflict Managers. It taught students to help other children solve interpersonal squabbles on the playground. A local reporter took pictures of the Conflict Managers and wrote up the program for the newspaper.

Responding to Needs

Peggy became an elementary school counselor in Arizona’s largest school district. There she formed character education committees at the two schools where she was the only counselor. Through those committees, she created the Character. It Shows. program, originally titled, Character Education Three Minutes a Day. Finally, she was able to act on the writing desire that lay dormant in her heart since she was very young. The program required a new character message for every school day for students to read over the school’s public address system at both schools. This need forced her to prepare scripts. For Peggy, this was a drop-dead deadline. Exactly what she needed! A nudge—similar to a kick in the pants—motivating her to write. She began writing one-minute messages daily

As the program continued day after day, Peggy sometimes penned the dialogue scripts in the wee hours of the morning for that day’s morning announcement. She jokes that she blew the ink dry on the day’s message as she drove to school, hurrying it to the character-announcer students for that day. Those messages became the anchor of the schools’ character education program.

In 2009, the Arizona Department of Education designated it as a Promising Program. It was one of only three selected.

Continuing On

Since that time of writing the dialogue scripts daily, Peggy was contracted to write retellings of two classic plays (Romeo and Juliet and Beowulf) to help Korean students learn English. An educational publisher in Korea published these plays. She also had short pieces of writing published in anthologies, various compilations, and newspapers. A manuscript for a young adult novel patiently lingers in her computer files waiting for another drop-dead deadline to motivate her to revise, tweak, and polish it. Character. It Shows. reached the queue ahead of the waiting novel. The novel’s day will come!

Full Circle

Peggy still is not a fan of housework. She has a wooden cutout of a girl with pigtails, glasses, and a plaid dress who holds a sign that says, “Housework makes me ugly.” That makes her smile!

Peggy and her husband have been married more than fifty years—the hoped-for transfer year for cooking responsibilities. They live in Arizona and have three adult children, nine grandchildren, and two often visiting grand-dogs. She continues her involvement with children by helping homeschool her grandchildren. Her granddaughter brings the two grand-dogs, Peaches and Sugar, over for homeschooling days!

Bio

Peggy taught school three years in Pueblo, Colorado, and twenty-seven years in Mesa, Arizona, the largest school district in Arizona. Eighteen of those twenty-seven years were as elementary school counselor, the other nine years as a classroom teacher. She served as school counselor for 1700 students at two elementary campuses each year until her retirement.

She holds a B.A. from University of Southern Colorado, and two master’s degrees from Arizona State University: M.Ed., Masters of Education in Counseling, and M.C., Masters of Counseling.

Let Your Light Shine. Matthew 5:16

For me to live is Christ. Philippians 1:21