After a long career at Pine Cobble, Linda Bernard was thrilled to rejoin the school in September 2023 to help the school to move into the future. Linda began at Pine Cobble as a part-time art teacher and then served for twenty-seven years as the fifth grade teacher. Subsequently at the school she was an arts liaison. She also created curricula for students and trained in the Orton-Gillingham and Wilson systems for teaching struggling readers. She was a reading specialist when the COVID era hit.
Originally from New York City, Linda attended the High School of Music & Art, in Harlem, which later merged with another school to form the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. This experience changed her life: it was there, in a nationally turbulent era, that she came to understand that kids had the potential to change the world. She went on to earn a BFA at Lehman College, where she took classes with such teachers as painter and visual artist Chuck Close. She and her husband, Scott—a furniture designer and onetime home builder—eventually settled in Shaftsbury, Vermont, where they have lived for more than four decades. There they raised their two daughters, Lauren and Caitlin, both of whom graduated from Pine Cobble.