Rebecca Gedraitis, who has taught drama and English at Gulf, will retire at the end of the school year.
She is known to many of her former students as Mrs. Young.
Mrs. Young began her teaching career at Gulf Junior High School at the start of the 1976-77 school year, teaching 7th grade English.
She came to New Port Richey because her husband, whom she married in 1974, was offered a coaching job at Gulf High School. Jerry Young coached at Gulf High for many years. She had two boys with Mr. Young, Clayton and Brandon.
She switched to Gulf High School in her tenth year of teaching. Robert Prior was principal then.
Here she first taught drama exclusively, but then began teaching both drama and English, and finally English exclusively. The arrival of the FCAT led to the demise of some elective classes such as drama. As an English teacher, she taught mostly seniors, and she liked the Senior Project, which was formerly a requirement of most seniors.
On Dec. 31, 1998, she married Alan Gedraitis. Her students switched from calling her Mrs. Young to Mrs. Gedraitis after the winter break.
Mrs. Gedraitis says that with drama she is “pretty proud of some of the things we did in Room 256 with the limited facilities we had.” Her classes did well in Thespian competitions and one act went to the state competition.
Rebecca Richardson was born in Lawton, Oklahoma. She attended Lawton High School and Cameron University in Lawton, where she earned a B. A. degree in Speech and Drama.
Update: below the current photo are two photos uploaded to Facebook by former students. The first photo, by Becky O’Sullivan, is probably 1993. The second photo, by Christine Francis, is from the Class Act Christmas party in 1992.
