Pierson To Person

CARRIE MORITA spent 36 years teaching in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Although she had several opportunities to work closer to home, Mrs. Morita endured a daily 75-mile, bumper-to-bumper roundtrip commute to teach at Eagle Rock Elementary School because of the cultural and socioeconomic diversity of its large student body. (45:58)      EPISODE NOTES - Posted June 10, 2017: I cannot bring myself to call CARRIE MORITA by her first name. She was both my daughters Taite and Quinn’s kindergarten teacher at Eagle Rock Elementary School and has always been – and always will be – MRS. MORITA to me.   PHOTO: Carrie Morita at her retirement party in June 2011. Hundreds of friends, colleagues, former students and their families came to wish her well. It does, as they say, “seem like only yesterday” that Jillian and I took our little 5-year-old Taite Rose Pierson to Mrs. Morita’s kindergarten classroom for her first day of school. Taite’s now 18 and, indeed, it was only yesterday that she graduated as one of