Last September, Lauren Rousseau's phone rang with a hard-won opportunity: a teaching position at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
The job, as a full-time substitute, offered little in the way of security or stability. It meant accepting a different classroom assignment on a daily basis without benefits or the promise of a permanent position. The pay was a meager $75 a day.
Ms. Rousseau, 30 years old, was thrilled.
"Oh she called so excited, she was just on cloud nine," recalled her father, Gilles Rousseau, a photographer from Southbury, Conn. "She had such big plans. She would just go on and on about the kids."
Ms. Rousseau's mother said the oldest of her three children decided early to be a teacher. She still has an old photo of a very young Lauren standing at a chalkboard, her toys at her feet.
"She used to talk to her dolls like she was their teacher," said Terri Rousseau, a journalist who lives in Danbury, Conn.
After graduating with a degree in education from the University of Connecticut in 2004, Ms. Rousseau got her masters degree from the University of Bridgeport in 2006 with the goal of becoming an elementary-school teacher. But teacher layoffs in the area in recent years made even substitute jobs scarce.
She had a lucky link to Sandy Hook. Dawn Hochsprung, the school principal who died trying to stop the gunman, was a family friend. Ms. Hochsprung's hu*****and, George, had once been Ms. Rousseau's grade-school teacher.
Ms. Rousseau had already moved back into her childhood home where her divorced mother still lived. To make the teaching job work, she put in after-school hours behind the counter of a busy Starbucks just off the interstate at the Connecticut-New York border, a demanding second job that supplied health insurance. She often drove directly to the coffee shop from school, changing clothes in her Honda Civic to save time.
Several chances for non-substitute teaching job looked promising but eventually fell apart, and her father said that she had struggled to pay her bills.
In her free time, Ms. Rousseau kept up with friends online and played with her cat, Laila, a regular feature in family photos and on her Christmas cards. A favorite getaway was a train trip to a Broadway show in Manhattan, preferably midweek for discounted tickets.
Last year, things started looking up. An Internet date blossomed into a full-fledged romance. She went to parties and Yankees games with her boyfriend, Tony. There was talk of marriage, her mother said.
"I'll take some comfort that the last year of her life was her happiest," the elder Ms. Rousseau said on Saturday.
On Friday night, she said her daughter had planned to see the new film "The Hobbit" and had baked Hobbit-themed cupcakes for a friend's birthday.
The family's initial optimism early in the day that Ms. Rousseau had survived the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School turned to dread as night fell without word from her. Calls and text messages to her cellphone went unanswered, and at 1 a.m. Saturday a Connecticut state trooper knocked on her father’s door. The officer was flanked by a minister and counselors.
The officials offered no details as to how or where Ms. Rousseau died, saying only that she had been identified among the six adults and 20 children who had died at the school.
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