New Principal Named at Gregorian
Posted on: Thursday, 3 July 2008, 15:00 CDT
By Linda Borg; Colin Grimsey
Colin Grimsey has been a history teacher, an education consultant and most recently, a principal, in Fall River.
PROVIDENCE -- Colin Grimsey, an elementary school principal from Fall River, is the new principal of Vartan Gregorian Elementary School, one of the city's success stories.
Grimsey, who is 41, married and lives on the East Side, has had a rather unorthodox teaching career. After graduating from Connecticut College, he took a job with a tiny Catholic high school located in a youth rehabilitation center in Westchester County, N.Y. Grimsey, a history teacher, worked with 8 to 10 students and often observed the counseling sessions.
"You really got to know the kids really well," he said yesterday. "It fit right in with what I wanted to do, which was work with at- risk kids."
While his wife pursued her doctorate in chemistry, Grimsey followed her to Wisconsin, where he taught in a suburban high school of 3,000 students. Three years later, he moved to Maryland and began teaching in Calvert County, one of the last school districts in the United States to racially integrate its schools.
"It was 20 minutes south of Washington but 50 years away," Grimsey said. "I called it the land that time forgot."
Always the history teacher, Grimsey invited the first student to integrate Calvert County High School to speak to his high school class. It turns out that he was the father of one of his students. The parent described what it felt like to move from an all-black school with no resources to an all-white school where he was not welcomed.
Five years later, Grimsey moved again, this time to Trenton, N.J., while his wife pursued a postdoctoral program at Princeton University. This time, Grimsey switched gears and became a consultant for a Cambridge company that guides school districts through major reforms.
The job took him to the Bronx, where he had to walk through an open-air drug market before entering the school, and to an elementary school in Brooklyn, N.Y., whose 2,000 children occupied an entire city block. From the school's top floor, the fifth graders saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He also worked in a high school in Cincinnati where every graduate went on to college.
Although each school had its own challenges, Grimsey said that successful schools have at least one thing in common: everyone from the parents to the principal agrees on the school's vision and they come together around a common curriculum.
In 2005, the couple moved back to New England, where Grimsey grew up, and he found a job as a school support specialist with the Fall River schools. In Massachusetts, the state Department of Education hired specialists to help chronically low-performing school districts improve student achievement. He said that his primary role was to help schools write new school improvement plans that conformed to state goals and expectations.
Grimsey became an elementary school principal in Fall River two years ago. He said he took the job knowing it was a temporary appointment because the school, built in 1897, was slated to be closed as part of a sweeping campaign to rebuild some of the district's aging buildings.
"It was definitely a change," Grimsey said of becoming a school principal. "The intensity level went up. The accountability level went up. It's one thing to fly into a school system and then leave. With the principal's job, this is it."
Asked why he didn't stay in Fall River, Grimsey said, "I thought it might be time to see what else is out there."
Vartan Gregorian, he said, will undoubtedly pose a new set of challenges. Whereas Healey Elementary School in Fall River needed a complete overhaul, Vartan doesn't.
"I'll be taking a chunk of time and just listening," he said, "finding out what people like and don't like about the school. It's a matter of getting in there and working with all of the constituencies and then taking it to the next level."
Gregorian is one of the jewels in the district's crown, a high- performing school with a deeply engaged Parent Teacher Organization and a devoted group of teachers. In 2006, Gregorian was only one of two schools in Rhode Island to receive a national award for closing achievement gaps between white students and minorities, low-income students and middle-income ones.
Between 1988 and 2002, the proportion of students who met or exceeded the state standards in reading, writing and math doubled at this Fox Point school. As the school turned the academic corner, East Siders began paying attention. Parents enthusiastically promoted Gregorian, raising money for extracurricular activities and lobbying to make sure that parents became partners in the school.
Last summer, because of public demand, Gregorian added another kindergarten class.
Gregorian also offers something that most private schools don't: diversity. The school is evenly split among black, white and Latino parents.
Grimsey replaces Anthony DeAngelis, who will take over the helm of Pleasant View Elementary School.
"I'll be taking a chunk of time and just listening, finding out what people like and don't like about the school."
Originally published by Linda Borg, Journal Staff Writer.
(c) 2008 Providence Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Providence Journal
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