BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

To the Boys and Girls in Room 318 at Hays Elementary:

The holiday lights may be twinkling outside, but this has been a very sad week for Room 318, and for everyone at Hays.

For a little more than three months, you had the happy good fortune of being in the fifth- and sixth-grade classroom of Regina Gay. It was a place where everybody was welcome, where nobody's past mistakes were invited, where every day was a chance to do better. When the other teachers asked about the kids in Room 318, your teacher would always smile and say, ''They're really coming.''

Then last week, a terrible thing happened.

Ms. Gay was gone. She was killed in an automobile accident while taking her 6-year-old son to school.

I will not tell you not to cry or be sad. We are all sad. Ms. Gay was so strong, so confident. It seemed as if she could do anything. And the most wonderful part was that she made all of us feel that we could do anything, too.

Do you remember, earlier this year, when she had the funeral for the saying, ''I can't''? She wrote the eulogy, and read it out loud. ''I Can't is now gone,'' she said, with fake sobs. ''We're going to miss old I Can't. He was around for years.''

You had to laugh, didn't you? But you also got the message. Ms. Gay had no time for ''I can't.'' What she wanted to hear was ''I can.''

She loved real kids

That was like Ms. Gay to think up a new way to teach a lesson. She did so many things in her own special way. She was the one who started double hugs, where she and the principal, Mrs. Martin, would gather one of you in their arms and squeeze you together.

And the hugs weren't always for being good. Ms. Gay had this special way of knowing that sometimes you needed a hug most when you were bad. And she knew that sometimes you needed to be bad. We all do.

If you ever had words with your teacher, if you ever disobeyed or made her mad, don't be hard on yourself. The last thing Ms. Gay would have wanted was a room full of perfect kids. She loved real kids, and she knew real kids sometimes make mistakes. Remember your happy moments with her. Remember your successes. That's what she remembered about you.

You didn't know this, but she used to see you walk by and she'd say proudly to another teacher, ''We're all going to sit back one day and say, 'I had something to do with that.' We're going to sit back and see their successes and grin.''

Somehow, in a way I cannot explain, Ms. Gay will still see your successes. When you get that A on an algebra test, when you hold your diploma in your hand, when you walk into your first college class, Ms. Gay will be there, somewhere, and she will be grinning. Do her right, Room 318. Do her proud.

And maybe, as you do, you will find some little piece of the answer for the questions that trouble us now.

'She stayed until the end'

We wonder how she could be gone, just as she was in the middle of making so many good things happen at Hays. And we know how unlike her it was to leave early. Her friend, Carol Scheerer, said, ''Ms. Gay didn't just stay late for things. She stayed until the end.''

This time Ms. Gay could not stay until the end. But she stayed long enough to show us how to care about ourselves and each other, and how to apply our minds and hearts to something good and productive in the world.

And then it was her time to go.

Now we who knew her are left to carry on her work. I knew Ms. Gay from a homeroom parents program that started this year at Hays. Her conviction, perseverance and integrity are things I will never forget.

Just days before her death, Ms. Gay was reminding her intern, John Crawford, to take good care of the plants in her room. ''Make sure they get light,'' she told him. ''Make sure they have water, and then they'll bloom.''

They are not the only beautiful things Regina Gay made bloom.

What you must know, and always remember, is that you were her bouquet.

Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.