The Kingshill School

Teacher Overcomes Learning Disabilities in Order to Help Others

Susan Cissal truly understands the difficulties many of her students face every day. 

Born in Arlington, Virginia, Ms. Sue struggled through grade school because of her undiagnosed dyslexia. “I was the daydreamer, I was distracted and a terrible reader,” she said, referring to herself as “a square peg trying to be fit into a round hole.” 

After overcoming many obstacles on her educational path, Ms. Sue is now a teacher at the Kingshill School in St. Croix and has had a very successful 20-year career.  

Despite constantly being told by educators that she was lazy and overly social, Susan knew that she was intelligent. “I vowed to become a teacher in order to help kids like me… to give them better self esteem than I had.”

When she was in high school she recalled her counselor saying that they didn’t think she was “college material.” But Sue continued to reach for her goal and moved in with her sister in Winter Haven, Florida, so that she could attend Polk Community College. After attending that school she transferred to Northern Virginia Community College and then to Radford Virginia Community College, where she graduated with a bachelors of science in education.

 After working briefly in the states Ms. Sue found it was hard to secure a job because the work field was “saturated with teachers.” Schools were also hungry for educators with experience living in other cultures because many students were coming in from Asia after the Vietnam War.  Susan knew she had to find a way to expose herself to this kind of experience, so she joined a local missionary group and asked them to send her anywhere. Well, you guessed it: Sue Cissel was sent to St.Croix, U.S.V.I. in 1980 to teach kindergarten at the United Methodist School.  Her assignment here was supposed to be temporary but in her words, “I ended up falling in love in a couple of ways.” “First of all, I fell in love with the people and culture, then I met my husband.”

She married William Cissel, a historian native to St. Croix and began teaching off and on at

many other schools here, including 5^th grade at St. Patrick’s and kindergarten at Good Hope School. She and her husband are also raising two sons, the oldest having ADHD and dyslexia.

When asked if she ever thought she’d end up teaching high school students she immediately replied, “Thirty years ago you couldn’t pay me to THINK I’d be teaching middle and high schoolers. I was afraid they were smarter than me.”  

Eleven years ago, Susan joined Janie Koopmans at the Kingshill School, a school built for middle through high school children with learning disabilities. She is still teaching at Kingshill today, making differences in the lives of students just like her… exactly what she vowed to do all those years ago when she was a struggling “non-college material” elementary school student.