'Ultimate Child Advocate' Retires from Farmingdale School District

Ellen Krammer once tripped on her way home from the Boundary Avenue Laundromat. A man caught her and recognized her immediately.

“For 10 years your voice has been in my head,” she recalls him saying, “giving me a headache every time I went to do something I shouldn’t.”

She remembered this man, a former student of hers.

“He was on the ‘I tried but I just couldn’t help’ list in my head,” the educator said. “You just never know.”

Krammer, 76, is used to doing the saving, not being saved. She has spent the last 43 years working with some of Farmingdale School District’s most troubled students, first as a teacher and later as an administrator.

She has taken in kids who couldn’t go home, held towels over bleeding wrists and has sat for hours talking students through their problems in the hallways.

An estimated 2,000 students later, she is retiring from a career she admits to not initially wanting.

“I went into teaching for all the wrong reasons, like the good hours,” she said. “It wasn’t my passion. But it became it.”

Krammer worked at a series of engineering firms while earning her education degree from C.W. Post at night. Her first teaching experiences were as a replacement teacher at

A few years later, she became a seventh grade math teacher and found herself  “magnetized” to students struggling behaviorally and academically when it came time for registration.

“Those kids would request me and I would request them,” Krammer said. “Other teachers couldn’t understand why I would take all the kids who had ‘problems.’ But I knew once they wanted to be there they wouldn’t be problems. So I made them want to be there.”

She realized she could not help these students alone, that their success depended on resources and the help of the larger Farmingdale community. She began a mission to secure partnerships with local organizations and started grant writing.

Today, she is credited with creating partnerships with dozens of community groups and securing more than $20 million in grant money for the district.

“She’s absolutely relentless,” said Jamie Bogenshutz, director of the YES Community Counseling Center, who has worked with Krammer for more than 30 years.

Her grant projects and partnerships range from business and vocational opportunities to free universal pre-k, a project she will continue to work on in the district after she retires.

“I’ve taken down a lot of walls,” Krammer said. She was named Trailblazer of the Millennium by Nassau County in April -- for the third time.

"She devoted her life to high risk students to develop their untapped talents and motivated the students to increase their self worth," said Legislator Joe Belesi.

“She’s the ultimate child advocate,” said Board of Education member Tina Diamond.

Krammer is married to Jack and has two children, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. She raised her family in Farmingdale and after retirement she has plans to start a website that will help empower women and she will still consult for the district.

“I will fight to the death for kids,” she said. “And I don’t care whose feet I run over along the way.”