Denise Simone died last week at age 50. She was a teacher and a principal in the New York City public schools for 26 years.
Those are the bare facts, but they just don’t begin to communicate the kind of impact that she had on students on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn; on Staten Island and in the South Bronx.
Denise was the kind of educator you don’t read about. She wasn’t a Teaching Fellow or Teach for America recruit, dropping in for two years and then out. She wasn’t one of the 600 teachers in the rubber room.
She wasn’t one of the people often quoted in newspapers blaming poor student achievement on students’ families.
She was kind of person who wore the fact that she was a New York City public school teacher with pride, as she wore the kind of outrageous outfits that some would say a woman of her size shouldn’t wear.
At whichever school she taught, long before she became a principal almost 3 years ago, you could find her there at 7 or 8 at night, rehearsing students for the talent show, the debate club or unbelievably, a full length, serious production of Shakespeare.
No, she didn’t direct the students in West Side Story or a hip hop version of Macbeth. Her students at Seward Park (who were the first to graduate from high school or go on to college or spoke another language at home) did amazing productions of King Lear and Midsummer’s Nights Dream.
For the parents and sisters and brothers who attended the performances with pride, this was their first taste of Shakespeare.
Denise grew up in Bensonhurst, when it was a working class Italian-American neighborhood.
Her pride in being Italian-American was always there but it didn’t interfere with her abilities to connect to kids who were Dominican, Puerto Rican, Colombian, African-American, Chinese, West Indian, or Bengali.
And perhaps her sense of her own roots helped her to reach out across ethnicities and revel in both similarities and differences.
She could switch accents from Brooklynese to deep ghetto to academic English at will and often used that ability (and the humor it aroused) to great effect in the classroom.
She decided she wanted to be a teacher early, got into it young (she graduated from high school at 16 and from Brooklyn College in 1980) and made an impact wherever she was.
At Seward Park, a large neighborhood high school on the Lower East Side, where I first met her, she directed a program called College Discovery, for kids who while their marks often didn’t show it, had that indefinable thing called “potential.”
She mothered them, she harassed them, she got on their cases.
This is true for all the kids she taught as well. “She never let me get away with anything and made me work harder than any other teacher,” wrote one student on a Facebook page “In Loving Memory of Denise Simone” which went up almost immediately when word was out that she had died on Thurs.
Another student wrote: “I was on the verge of being a high school dropout until Ms. Simone called my grandmother and told her I was gong to fail out of high school. She always called me out for being a bright student who didn’t apply myself.
"She kept on me until I did the right thing and graduated…I am not surprised that she has touched so many lives because she has touched mine and I will always remember her until the end of my days.”
Still another wrote: “The greatest gift she gave to all of us is the power of knowledge. Best of all, she believed in me. Without her power, I wouldn’t have read all the books that influenced me. Thank you, Ms. Simone for being a part of my world. And I am proud to say it was a pleasure to be part of yours.”
Denise spent her summers in National Endowment for the Humanities seminars for high school teachers on Shakespeare, Dante, Beowulf, soaking up as much as she could to take back to her students and in many ways representing New York City and its teachers to the larger world.
She shared her experiences and gave them a sense of what New York City teachers are up against in terms of 34-student classes, kids drawn to gangs or raising themselves, but also about the joy of working with those same kids.
She worked in very borough except Queens. After Seward Park, she went to Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences, a selective school which she left fairly quickly and on to Susan. E. Wagner High School, teaching kids very similar to the kinds of kids she grew up with.
I never knew anyone quite a versatile in the types of kids she could teach or reach.
After teaching for almost 25 years, she decided she wanted to become a principal and went through the intense one-year program run by New Leaders for New Schools.
Most of her colleagues in the program were people with far less teaching experience than she. Sometimes people leave the classroom because they’re sick of the kids. That wasn’t Denise. She wanted to bring the excitement she felt teaching to a whole school.
She became principal of New Explorer’s High School in the South Bronx, one of the small new schools carved out of failing high schools.
In the jargon of education, the school is 94% free or reduced lunch and most of the students scored 1’s and 2’s on English and math tests (tests scored 1 to 4.)
She brought in extra literacy classes and worked closely with the English teachers. From school with an English Regents pass rate scraping the bottom of the barrel, over 60 percent of the students passed.
She was beginning to work with the math teachers as well. She brought in an outside group to help change the “school culture,” to one oriented to academics and she talked to every student, one-on-one endlessly about college and planning for the future.
In all the talk about data analysis, mayoral control, the new union contract or charter schools, we rarely get to read about teachers like Denise Simone.
Scores of her ex-students, now in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s traveled down for her wake last weekend in Brick, N.J., where her parents lived, to pay their respects.
“She had something about her that drew a lot of us to her,” wrote one on Facebook. “For me, it was 16 years ago. I’m sad that other students will not have a chance to know her but her memory will never be forgotten by those who did.”
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