At Rosa Parks Elementary, They've Got To Have Hart

Principal's Passion Earns Her Award

JARCELYNN HART

Apparently, it is not easy to interview for a teaching job with Jarcelynn Hart, principal of Rosa Parks Elementary School in Woodbridge.

The veteran educator said she recently interviewed 250 people for 70 teaching positions. She grills candidates on a range of topics, asking recruits how they teach classes filled with students who are at different levels of learning, how they sustain relationships with students and parents during the academic year, and what drives their teaching philosophies and practices.

"I do not select average educators. I interview forever," Hart, 47, said. "The red flags are people who cannot talk about their passion and craft. Then I call their old principals and I ask a series of questions like, 'Would you place your child in this teacher's classroom?' Having excellent teachers is key."

Hart is one of this year's recipients of The Washington Post's Distinguished Educational Leadership Awards, given to the top principal in each of 18 jurisdictions in the Washington area. Hart is known by her peers as an aggressive and affable educator with a record of boosting standardized test scores and earning the respect of her staff. Although she began her teaching career in Maryland, and did a stint teaching members of U.S. military families in Germany, she has spent most of her career in Prince William.

Hart came to Prince William in 1993 to teach first grade at River Oaks. Later, she moved to the central office as an instructional support adviser and began climbing the administrative ladder. She became Minnieville Elementary School's principal in 2001. She stayed until 2006, when she was named principal of the new Rosa Parks Elementary, where 36 percent of the 700 students are Hispanic, about 26 percent are black and 26 percent are white.

In its first year, Rosa Parks earned adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law, partly because of the performance of its minority students on the state Standards of Learning tests.

Hart attributes the success of the school's English for Speakers of Other Languages program to the school's "inclusion" strategies. ESOL teachers do not simply sit by in a math class and chime in when a student who is not a native English speaker needs help. ESOL instructors coordinate classes as a team with the regular teacher, and they assess results together.

"The ESOL teacher can't happen to walk in the class and think she's part of the community," Hart said. "We are a profession. We do a lot of collaborating."

Parents say Hart is receptive, especially when a delicate issue is brought to her attention. Brooke Nelson, the school's PTO president, recalled how Hart immediately took care of a problem last year involving too many students -- many of whom should have been walking -- cramming onto the school buses. "I approached her and said, 'I don't think you're aware of what's going on,' and she jumped right on it and it was taken care of in a matter of days," Nelson said.

Before Rosa Parks opened in fall 2006, Nelson said, she fought aggressively against the new boundary decisions that took her children away from a similarly diverse school that they loved. "I knew nothing about Ms. Hart. It was the fear of the unknown," Nelson recalled. "But what I liked immediately before school opened at Rosa Parks was that Ms. Hart called, and I was surprised at how open to suggestions she was."

When the teachers hear her inside the school, Hart says, they can sometimes finish her sentences. That's because Hart says she is constantly spouting maxims. " 'It matters not how much you know, it matters how much you care.' And, 'There is no significant learning without a significant relationship,' " Hart recited. "Those are like mantras for us."