Olive B. Loss, CHEP ’71M, Delaware’s first female school superintendent, soon will have an elementary school named in her honor.

The Appoquinimink School District’s new K-4th grade school, which will be located north of the Summit Bridge in southern New Castle County, Del., is scheduled to open in 2001.

The decision to name the new 700-pupil school after Loss came after the district asked the public to submit names for the new building. Close to 4,000 suggestions poured into the school district office with adults and children proposing everything from the “ABC 1-2-3 Elementary” to “Cal Ripken Jr. Elementary.”

The board narrowed the choices to two and then voted unanimously in July to bestow the honor on Loss.

Loss says she thinks it was the support of the community more than her accomplishments that brought her the honor. “But, maybe I did do something in my 34 years with the district to make a difference,” she says.

A teacher and principal in Odessa and Townsend schools from 1950 to 1978, Loss served as a deputy superintendent from 1979 to 1983 and then accepted a one-year appointment as superintendent before she retired. As an administrator, she established health centers at district elementary schools, started a kindergarten center and wrote the first comprehensive curriculum guidelines for the district’s elementary schools.

“Mother attended UD to work on her master’s after the death of my father. She was in her 50s and serving as a building principal of two schools. At the time, I was young and not as impressed with this accomplishment as I should have been,” says her daughter, Sandra Loss McKay. “Now, I’m almost the age my mother was then, and I wonder how in the world she worked full time with such responsibility and got her master’s!”

Voss also has two sons, Robert, EG ’63, who is vice president and chief information officer of Unigraphics Solutions in Cypress, Calif., and Brian, a retired dentist, who resides in Ocean City, N.J., and Glen Mills, Pa.

Of her six grandchildren, one grandaughter also is a UD graduate. Sheryl McKay, AS ’95, works as a lawyer in Philadelphia.

Now 84, Loss spends her time doing her own housework, mowing her yard and tending a small garden.