Published: February 1, 1996

Leading Lady

As if answering a cattle call for a movie about the French Resistance, Mary Lee Drouin's English literature students, like Drouin herself, are dressed in black pants and turtleneck sweaters. They maintain a conspiratorial silence about their monochromatic look until late in the afternoon when a senior, index finger pursed to her lips, lets the cat out of the bag. "We are followers of Drouin,'' she murmurs.

It's all a jest, of course, a scheme designed to perplex me, the visitor, but like all good jests it contains a kernel of truth. For Mary Lee Drouin, a 17-year veteran teacher at Burrillville High School in the weathered Rhode Island mill town of the same name, has amassed a band of devotees over the years.

"School should be closer to the family experience than the industrial experience,'' she says. "If we take our strengths in the ways in which we relate to our own children and apply them to our students, those students will...