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 Kathleen Heidi Watts, 1931-2026 --- 

A lifelong learner, educator, writer, and defender of social justice and peace, Kathleen Heidi Watts died on Sunday March 15, 2026. She was 94. Heidi called her journey from this world her “last great adventure,” and that spirit most captured her enthusiasm for the unknown, and her acceptance and curiosity about the world.  

Born in Chelsea, Mass. in 1931, one of two daughters to Constance and Richard Walter, Heidi lived a rich and full life, across many continents and people. She brought an optimistic spirit, a willingness to laugh at her mistakes and a strong love for the people and places she visited. 

Heidi had a lifelong passion for education, starting with her first teaching job in Washington state in her early 20s, later at the Putney Central School of Vermont, the Westminister West school she helped found, and with graduate students and teachers at Antioch University. Along the way she earned degrees from Pembroke, Harvard and Cornell.

She was an outstanding advocate for teachers, working with educators up and down the East Coast of the U.S., and for two decades helping to transform the education system in Auroville, India, her adopted community. Above all, she fostered and shared education that was interactive and engaging – with John Dewey’s “learn by doing” a guiding principle.

Heidi worked constantly for a more peaceful and just world. Opposition to the Vietnam war tore Putney apart in the 1960s and 70s and when the school board changed hands she stayed true to her values even when she was fired for her politics. She believed in the power of the pen and she could often be seen with a pile of envelopes and stamps, writing to congressional representatives or the local paper, focusing on causes close to her heart. Even in this past year Heidi showed up at protests, often in a wheel chair, dressed in a puffy coat and hat, holding hand-made signs, including “War is Not the Answer." 

Her house in a cove on an island in Nova Scotia was the anchor in her peripatetic life and career. It was here that her children and their cousins learned the value of work and boredom, where friends and family gathered yearly to sail, dig for clams, and fend off mosquitoes, and where she had many deep connections and hair-raising adventures. With no electricity and access only by boat, summers embodied the values of both independence and interdependence that defined her.

She traveled often within the country and across the globe, always frugally, from the Everglades and the Caribbean, to London, Thailand, India, Australia and many spots between. Although she lived in some of the most beautiful places in the world, it was the people in those places that drew her to them. Heidi’s sense of community fueled her deep commitment to the Quakers and Putney Meeting, to Antioch University, to her “teacher center friends,” and to the many causes for social justice to which she was fiercely dedicated. At 94 she was still making friends.

Heidi found magic and connection in nature. Her daily walk was a fixture of her children’s childhoods and lives on in the ubiquitous ‘family walk’ that she inspired. She had a particular affinity to birds and loved to sit on her back porch watching them fly from the oak branches to her feeders, which she defended from the squirrels. With her beloved friend Anne, binoculars in hand, she explored the hills of Putney by foot and the hidden ponds of New England by boat. The two could be spotted kayaking in their 90s, meeting on the banks of the Connecticut River and wading through the mud.  

 Her friends and family were numerous and committed and she loved them unconditionally. So many meals over the years with friends and family!

 

Heidi leaves behind her three children, Richard Watts of Hinesburg, Vt, Alison Watts and Rebecca Watts, both of Newfields, N.H., their spouses and former spouses Allison Cleary, Eric Nichols, Adrian Fieldhouse, and her seven grandchildren, Kristina Rivers, Anna and Rose Watts, Patrick and Alexis Nichols, Elanor and Madeline Fieldhouse and two great-grandchildren Indira and Eleanor Rivers. She treasured her sister Fran’s children, Dan, Steve, Ben, and Tim, and their children, and her nephews Oliver and Stephen Lowenstein. 

Heidi was a prolific writer, and she posted many of her writings to her blog. In her book about her time and place in Nova Scotia (Some Wonderful) she described leaving the island at summer’s close with her granddaughter: 

“The narcissus and lilacs had gone by but small green forests of cranberry bushes clung to the rocks, suggesting fall was on the way.  I looked back from the water and my eyes swept the shoreline: saying goodbye to the old, weathered house, the shingles covered with fading red paint as it had been when we arrived.  As my eyes slid further down the shore I saw the old store, several times re-shingled and blocked up, and a large new boathouse where this year’s fleet of Simon-made wooden boats were shoehorned in, snug for the winter. 

"I thought as I always did of a line from Robert McCloskey’s Time of Wonder. The family in the book, like ours, were packing up their summer home in Maine to go back to their winter home, work and school, feeling: “A little bit sad about the place we are leaving; a little bit glad about the place we are going.”  I scanned the shore line we were leaving, reviewing the joys, set-backs and surprises of the summer and I said, under my breath, “Keep safe.” Then we turned our backs on paradise and paddled toward the mainland.”

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 A celebration of her life is planned for May 10. Contact rwatts@uvm.edu for details. In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization and one of Heidi's trusted charities.