In the summer of 1907, after five years of home-making, civic club work, and no children, Marie decided to look for a teaching position in Adair and resume her career. Her husband introduced her to John Kirk, the President of the Normal School in Kirksville. Their professional connection was almost immediate as they shared a deep desire to see education reformed in Adair.1
Kirk’s Model Rural School built earlier in 1907 on the Normal School campus to trained Normal students in the “ideal” rural school. There was an opening for a critic teacher position at the School and Kirk offered it to Marie. In this role, she supervised the teaching of students in training.1
As awareness of the Model Rural School increased, so did the stream of criticism. When Marie became the main teacher at the School in 1910, she expressed to Kirk that accusations about the school’s artificial nature needed to be addressed.1
The critics had a valid point: the Model Rural School was not located in a rural setting but on the Normal School campus in the city of Kirksville with the resources available at the college. Kirk’s School trained teachers in an “ideal” rural schoolhouse but the “ideal” did not exist in rural areas. While it was clear the model succeeded on the Normal campus, Marie believed it was time for the experiment to be done in rural areas.1
During the next couple of years, the two educators discussed plans to build a model schoolhouse in a rural setting with a similar design. However, before that could occur, Marie and her husband divorced in 1912 after a suit so heavily publicized the Board of Regents at the Normal School felt they had no choice but to dismiss both Marie and Henry from their posts.1
Marie’s dismissal from the Model Rural School did not erase her reputation in the wider community as a teacher with exceptionally strong convictions about rural education and instruction. She soon began teaching at the Porter school.1