Weems looked at the giant light-up “Xanadu” sign Tuesday, March 26, and said, “We actually taught a bunch of the students how to roller skate for that one. I remember after rehearsal, they would strap on their skates and go flying down the hallways. I did it myself a few times.”

Computer science teacher, set designer, sound manager and Weems’s husband Tom Dodd keeps all the posters for past shows in his sound booth next to photos of their daughter Caroline.

“She’s about to graduate from Cornell, but back when she was in second grade and we’d be working late on the shows, we’d set up a sleeping bag backstage in case she got tired,” he said.

Weems and Dodd have put on plays at the school for the more than 15 years, and this year’s production of “Tuck Everlasting” from March 28 to 30 will be their last with the institution when they retire from teaching in the summer.

“This will not be our last show (in general) by any means,” Weems said. “I already have a Pendragon (Theatre in Saranac Lake) job lined up this summer. I’ll continue to work for whoever and whenever in the theater, and I’m sure that Tom will, too.”

Despite this being their last show with the school, Weems said they’ve just been too busy to think about it in that light. The sentimentalism comes later. Plus, the day after the last show, Weems is taking the school’s chorus group to Disney World for a performance.

“This is just another show,” she said.

Weems said the two don’t have solid plans for retirement, maybe some traveling and visiting her hometown of New Orleans.

Weems and Dodd met when they started teaching in the Tupper Lake Central School District in the fall of 1986. Weems was hired as the music teacher for the junior-senior high school, and Dodd taught at the elementary school.

“I think on the first day of school, all the teachers were talking to their friends and people they hadn’t seen all summer,” Dodd said. “The superintendent introduced us and said, ‘You two don’t know anybody else. Talk to each other.'”

A few years later, the two started producing school shows together. The cartoony ode to ’50s pop culture “Grease” was their first venture as a team. Productions were a little bit slower back then. A show that may have taken them three months to put on 20 years ago now only takes about six weeks, Weems said.

She attributes that evolution and efficiency to knowing and working with local theater experts such as former Rockette Terpsie Toon, lighting specialist Bonnie Brewer and wardrobe professional Kent Streed, who can “squeeze a dime until it melts but also take a scrap of fabric and turn it into the most beautiful costume you’ve ever seen.”

“I think a division of labor has made it easier to produce the shows,” Dodd added. “Early on, we were doing everything ourselves.”

When it comes to showtime, Weems is down in the pit playing piano, and Dodd is up in the sound booth reading along and queuing up all the audio effects. But what if something goes wrong on stage?

“You do the best you can,” Weems said. “We’ve had something things over the years. The forgotten prop, you just do without it. The forgotten line, you move on to the next one. I can’t think of any real disaster that we’ve had on stage in performance. That’s the beauty of live theater. It’s never the same, and those little accidents become teaching moments.”

Weems and Dodd may be teachers during the day, but when the students come on stage, the two treat them like professional actors, Dodd said.

“Our expectations for them are not of a ninth-grade student or a 10th-grade student,” he said, “and we also communicate those expectations. One of the nicest things to see is when a student really rises to the occasion and gives a performance that they never really thought they were capable of.”

For “Tuck Everlasting,” Dodd, an avid canoe and small boat maker, has gotten to flex his design and building muscles. Other than a tree that stays on stage for most of the show, there are a lot of moving set pieces – a doorway with attached garden, the interior of the Tuck home and giant smiling clown face.

“The hutch on the stage in the Tuck house is a piece of furniture that I built for our dining room and it just seemed it would fit in,” he said.

Weems said it’s a piece that the two often use at home.

“We’re taking one for the team here,” she said.

Dodd said the favorite thing he’s ever built for the stage was a two-story house for a production of “Anne of Green Gables” at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts.

“It was very open and stylized. The first floor was the kitchen and the second floor was a bedroom, but when you open those curtains and the gables of the house flew down to frame, it was just impressive.”

Over the years, Weems and Dodd have seen many students come and go, some who continued their pursuit for music and theater.

“I always miss them the most in September when we come back and I look at my chorus and it’s not the same group I had the year before,” Weems said. “You have a new group of fresh faces, and it’s exciting but there’s also a moment of just sadness, you know, because they’re not there.

“And those kids become very, very dear and we can’t replace them as people, but what I’ve learned is there’s always another young singer or actor in the wings who’s waiting for their moment to shine. They’re always there. And you just have to find them.”

And now it’s time to move on.

The two said transitioning to new teachers and production managers can be challenging for a school, but they also feel it’s important for anyone who’s running the plays to also teach at the school.

“If we’re moving on as teachers, I think it would be a different experience to try and come back and do the musical,” Weems said. “I think the healthiest thing for the music department because transitions are always hard is for me to take a step back and create space for a new person to come in and do something amazing with the students.”