About the author: Chapter 4

By Mike Joseph

Ferguson Township resident Debbie Patrick, a kindergarten teacher and Centre Daily Times columnist and blogger, submitted the winning entry for Chapter 4 of the unfolding Centre County Story.

Ferguson Township resident Debbie Patrick, a kindergarten teacher and Centre Daily Times columnist and blogger, submitted the winning entry for Chapter 4 of the unfolding Centre County Story.

“I read all the time,” said Patrick, a Clearfield Area High School graduate who majored in journalism at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown and then got her teaching certificate from San Diego State University in southern California.

She and her husband, Bob, an engineer and her high school sweetheart, have three children — Sarah, 18, Tori, 16, and Matthew, 9. Family experience is sometimes material for her blog, “Notes from a Teacher,” at www.centredaily.com.

In a recent blog, she wrote: “I’ve decided that, after 5 years into the teenage girl thing, I have found words that can shake a teenager to the core. They are not ‘Get to your room!’ They are not, ‘You are in big trouble!’ and they are not, ‘You are grounded!’ They are ‘Hello, Verizon.’

“Yep, that’s right. With one quick call, the phone is dead. It’s the new miracle cure for disrespectfulness. Try it, I guarantee it works!” Patrick says she reads anything and everything, including Stephen King novels and other mysteries and happy-ending romances.

And she loves to write. She has two manuscripts of children’s books out to publishers and is awaiting word on them, “hoping to fulfill a dream,” she said.

“You really can’t have any regrets, I guess,” she said, “but you have to put yourself out there and see what happens.”