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Bronx Principal Praises School's Culture of 'Educating the Whole Child'

By Eddie Small | October 5, 2014 8:40pm
 Hazel Joseph-Roseboro has been principal at University Heights High School, where she used to be a student, since 2009.
Hazel Joseph-Roseboro has been principal at University Heights High School, where she used to be a student, since 2009.
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DNAinfo/Eddie Small

SOUTH BRONX — Hazel Joseph-Roseboro was convinced that she was going to be a psychiatrist when she went to college.

However, she soon found that education more effectively combined her curiosity about English and history with her passion for working with people, so she decided to switch majors.

"It seems like if I think back, there's always been the natural inclination to work with others, support others, help others learn, tutor others, and I think the ability to work with people is really important," she said. "Education gives you a chance to do that."

Joseph-Roseboro graduated from the award-winning University Heights High School. She has worked there since 1995 and served as principal since 2009.

DNAinfo recently sat down with Joseph-Roseboro to talk about her deep connection to the school and some of its more progressive practices.

You were a student here, and then a teacher here, and now the principal. What is it about the school that has such a strong pull on you?

This is a school that gets into your — forget about under your skin — it pours itself into your soul. I think that’s because of the culture that we have here of educating the whole child. Academics are extremely important here, and we do focus on those, but I think we also focus on helping students develop their moral compass and helping them give back to community, find their voice, find ownership and to create leaders.

I think that when you are engaged in that kind of work, and when you see the development of the students as they move along in the years, it really makes an indelible impact on you. You can go other places and probably make more money and go into other fields, but I don’t think it’s as rewarding.

Would you ever want to work in a new school?

Right now, I’m very content. I’m happy doing what I do. It gives me a joy and an internal reward to see the students develop, and I’m very passionate about what I do. I wake up every morning, and I go to bed every night just being grateful that I can make a small impact. These students also make an impact on me, and so that has really helped motivate and kept me here.

The school offers a so-called "Tinkering Class." What's that?

Oh, it’s so awesome. So, we are a New York Performance Consortium School, and so what we want is to have a child have an experience where they become curious for life. If I talk to you over and over and over and just talk to you, you’re not going to be curious, but if we [help] them to have the ability to think 'How are things made? How are they done?' it’s just a whole different world. Then you foster a lifelong learner, which is the culture here. It's what we want to foster: leaders and lifelong learners.

And so in tinkering, it's amazing. They get to do all of these different scientific melds of STEM and engineering, and they get to tinker and figure things out. Can I make this different? What prototype can I create? What if I change the dynamics? What impact would it have? I love to see the kids. They are just so curious and so excited, and they really take off in terms of how we want them to think.

What do the kids do in a tinkering class?

They could be doing anything from building bridges to doing circuits to, oh my gosh, there are so many different things that they do in there. Building a roller coaster or testing out force or velocity, how things move, doing an egg drop, building a kite, creating an original experiment. I mean, they do so much, and so the kids just always want that class. The kids are always, always excited about it, and there's so much that's done in that class.

Students at the school refer to teachers by their first names. How did that policy come about?

I think [when the school first started it] was based on a lot of sound research, which [stated that] kids are not really awake early in the morning, so we have a little bit of a later start than perhaps most schools. Secondly, there's the dynamic around the adult and the adolescent and having students have relationships with people that they feel that they can trust. So we’ve had things like advisory; we’ve sort of been on the cutting edge of a lot of progressive educational models since the inception of the school, actually. And so while I can say yes, students will say Hazel, most students will say Miss Hazel. They just can’t bring themselves to say Hazel.

But the level of respect that we have here between the students and each other and the faculty and the students is incredible … I think that kids are able to understand that, OK, we don’t have the same titles. The teacher is clearly the teacher, right, and in charge. However, this is an adult that I can trust and that I can learn with, and so the boundaries are going to be reciprocal. I think if you're not learning as much as you’re giving out, then something is wrong.