Meet Mrs. Leah Shulman, bulletin board designer extraordinaire

Mrs. Shulman is a teacher in Baltimore, but in the summer and early mornings before school starts, you can often find her with her trusty stapler and scissors in hand, working to get a bulletin board just right. These days, Mrs. Shulman is actually paid to put up bulletin boards, which is a pretty interesting job. But she had many years of experience — and scores of bulletin boards — under her belt before getting there.

Mrs. Shulman actually started designing bulletin boards back in seventh grade. In Bais Yaakov Elementary in Detroit, every girl had the opportunity to design and put up a bulletin board, rotating each month. Leah got the month of Av. She created a bulletin board based on a Yerushalayim theme and was so excited about it. But when she got to school, she saw just how large a bulletin board is (a standard board is 8 feet by 4 feet!) and the material she had prepared just didn’t fill it up. Oops! That’s what she remembers most about that first one —her material just being too small for that ginormous board.

Color War in high school brought more bulletin board design opportunities. But it wasn’t until she came back from seminary that Leah actually got paid to do them. She started her first teaching job and mentioned to the principal that she had experience with bulletin boards. Voila! A bulletin board creator was born.