Patty Kittredge on Lake Champlain in Vermont in 1978. Kittredge was a lifelong educator. Contributed / Tim Kittredge

Lifelong educator Patty Kittredge of Yarmouth, who died last year, will continue educating Maine’s youth through a new program at Merrill Memorial Library.

With the help of the Patty Kittredge Memorial Fund, the library now offers two early learning kits for children ages 2-5 — essentially backpacks that are filled with books on a certain theme, explained Paiten Price, children’s services librarian at Merrill Memorial.

One kit has a theme of feelings and emotions, and the other counting and numbers. The feelings and emotions kit features the book “The Color Monster” by Anna Llenas and the counting and numbers kits includes the book “Ten Black Dots” by Donald Crews. The kits are intended for preschoolers to “learn alongside their caregiver and build some skills that they’re going to need for the future,” said Price.

There is probably no better way to honor Patty Kittredge’s memory, given that her life’s work was helping young children learn and grow.

Mary Patricia Kittredge – “Patty” to those who knew her – was born in Philadelphia in 1948, but moved to Yarmouth in 1979; she died in June of 2023. She spent much of her childhood in Middlebury, Vermont, and went on to attend the University of Vermont where she earned a degree in elementary education in 1970.

She met her future husband, Timothy James Kittredge III, at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1969. Tim Kittredge was working as a lifeguard that summer and spending two nights a week helping out at his friend’s ice cream shop. One evening, Patty and her friend came by and bought ice cream and continued strolling down the street.

“As they were walking back, I said, ‘Girls, would you like a free ice cream cone?’” Tim Kittredge remembered. “She took the free ice cream cone. Anyone who could eat two ice cream cones in one hour sounds good to me.

“She was serious, but also very light. (She) had a great sense of humor,” he said, recalling his first impression of her. She grew up wanting to be a teacher and began her career teaching first and second graders in Colchester, Vermont. Later she worked as a special education tutor in Colchester.

After their son, Andrew, was born in 1979, the couple moved to Yarmouth. She came to love it, but it wasn’t easy at first. “Patty loved Vermont, loved the mountains. In New England, either you grow up loving the mountains or you grow up loving the ocean. She grew up loving the mountains,” Kittredge explained.

To help decide where to live in Maine, Patty would visit the elementary schools and meet with the principals and Tim would visit the libraries. Kittredge, a self described “avid reader,” is today a member of the board of trustees for the Merrill Memorial Library.

In later years, Patty worked as a special education assistant at the Morse Street School in Freeport and was a reader for the program Project Story Boost in multilingual classrooms at multiple schools in Portland. She ended her career as the head preschool teacher at the YMCA of Southern Maine Casco Bay branch.

“She had that innate ability to relate to children. She didn’t judge and she accepted them for who and where they were,” Kittredge said in his wife’s eulogy.

The kits are available to check out for anyone with a library card.