Two women saluted for service to schools, community Two women saluted for service to schools, community (May 11, 2005)

Two women who were honored during May Day festivities Saturday -- Grand Marshal Karen Arimoto-Peterson and Citizen of the Year Diane Talbert -- are longtime workers and volunteers in the Woodside community.
Karen Arimoto-Peterson

"I've never missed a parade," says Ms. Arimoto-Peterson, since she started as a substitute teacher at Woodside Elementary School in 1970. Two years later, she became a full-time fifth-grade teacher.

She's been teaching ever since, everything up to eighth grade, mainly in social studies. In the early 1990s, she was dean of students. Now she's coordinator of student services, which includes teaching character-education classes.

She's also very active at Woodside High School, where she graduated in 1964. She serves on the boards of the Woodside High School Foundation and Athletic Boosters, and on the Shared Decision Making Committee.

She was the first winner of Woodside High's Seiko award for community service, started in 2000 in her honor.

Her late husband graduated from Woodside Elementary School in 1961 and Woodside High School in 1965.

Ms. Arimoto-Peterson is in charge of community service activities for students at Woodside Elementary, including Special Olympics and a recent project to repair and refurbish a home in East Palo Alto, done in conjunction with the Menlo Park-based Rebuilding Together Peninsula organization.

Recently she joined the San Mateo County Historical Association, and is helping with the Japanese-American part of a plan to create a permanent exhibit on immigrant groups.
Diane Talbert

Citizen of the Year Diane Talbert became a room parent at Woodside Elementary in the early 1990s when her daughter, JoAnna Rickard, went to school there. JoAnna is now 17 and a student at Woodside High. Son Jake Rickard, 12, is in the sixth grade at Woodside Elementary.

Ms. Talbert, who has a degree in K-12 education, has been deeply involved in fundraising activities for both schools. For the past two years, she was chairman of the Woodside High School Foundation auction.

At Woodside Elementary, she is known as the "blood lady" for bringing the Stanford Bloodmobile to the school three or four times a year.

She also volunteers for the elementary school's big book fair, when Sellman gym is turned into a bookstore for three days, and has helped with fundraising for Barkley Field, an athletic field and park on donated land across from Canada College.

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