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| Tom Porton |
A Beloved Bronx Teacher Retires After a Conflict With His Principal
Tom Porton is used to
drama: Since arriving at James Monroe High School as an English teacher 45
years ago, he has taught and staged plays. Outside, in the Bronx River
neighborhood where the school is, there was plenty of drama in the 1980s, when AIDS and crack ravaged the area. His response then was to establish a
group of peer educators who worked with Montefiore Medical Center to teach
teenagers about H.I.V. prevention. His efforts earned him awards, including
recognition from the City Council and the John F. Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts, and led to his induction into the National Teachers Hall of Fame.
Now he is at the center of
drama: Last month he clashed with Brendan Lyons, the school’s principal, who
disapproved of his distributing H.I.V./AIDS education fliers that listed
nonsexual ways of “Making Love Without Doin’ It” (including advice to “read a
book together”). This month, he said the principal eliminated his early-morning
civic leadership class, which engaged students in activities such as feeding
the homeless, saying it was not part of the Common Core curriculum. Mr. Porton
was already skeptical of that curriculum, saying it shortchanged students by
focusing on chapters of novels and nonfiction essays rather than entire works
of literature.
So, next month Mr. Porton
— a 67-year-old educator whom students praised as a lifesaver and life-changer
— is walking away from teaching. He handed in his retirement papers on Friday.
“My career has always
been based on the emotional and social well-being of the child,” he said,
inside an office whose walls were decorated with awards, proclamations and
photos of him alongside several school chancellors, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
and the rapper DMC. “Now, I don’t know where teaching is headed. I just know I
can’t anymore. I find it torture. I’d rather separate myself from the classroom
doing something that is distasteful and try to spend my days doing things that
are important.”
Mr. Porton has been
teaching and coordinating student activities long enough to see Monroe go from
a large urban high school to one housing several smaller schools, including
his, the Monroe Academy for Visual Arts and Design. Mr. Lyons — who repeatedly
replied “no comment” to questions during a telephone conversation — arrived at
the school at the start of the academic year. A previous tenure at a Manhattan
high school was marked by his replacing paper hall passes
with toilet plungers, which students used to wreak havoc on property
and one another.
In December, on World
AIDS Day, Mr. Porton handed out his flier, as he had for almost 25 years. Mr.
Lyons sent him an email saying the flier was “inappropriate,” and asked that he
collect those already distributed. Though Mr. Lyons said he would discuss the
matter later with him, Mr. Porton said that conversation never took place.
H.I.V. and AIDS may have
faded from the public mind, but they remain a danger in places like the South
Bronx, especially among young blacks and Latinos. Mr. Porton said the school
has failed to meet Department of Education mandates to educate students about
the diseases, making his work all the more necessary.
Mr. Lyons, who would not
say if the school met the mandates, never explained his objections to Mr.
Porton. At the start of this semester, Mr. Porton said, the principal
eliminated the 40-student leadership class because he said it was not part of
the standard curriculum, even though the class met before the formal start of
the school day. Because of that, combined with Mr. Porton’s disappointment over
the standardized test frenzy that rules in many schools, he chose to leave.
“School is not pleasant,
the way it was when I started,” he said. “They pay lip service to the social
and emotional well-being of the child. My generation of teachers had a mind-set
about how to teach a child. Today, young teachers see teaching as a way to kill
time on the way to something else.”
Reaction among students
and former students, many of whom learned of Mr. Porton’s retirement on Facebook, was
immediate and full of outrage.
“How can anyone think
what he does is inappropriate?” said Janelle Roundtree, a former peer educator
who graduated from Monroe in 1995 and went on to Howard University. “He changed
Monroe. He was in the forefront of so many things. The school is losing out on
this one.”
David Gonzalez (no
relation to this writer), amusician, poet and performer who graduated in 1973, was so grateful to Mr. Porton that he
nominated him for the Kennedy Center’s Stephen Sondheim Inspirational
Teacher Award, which he received in 2011.
“Tom has been the
consistent heart of that building since I was at Monroe in the ’70s,” said Mr.
Gonzalez, who still wonders how the teacher managed to get tickets to Broadway
shows. “He was always looking for the heart and soul of the individual. I would
never have had the confidence to do what I do without him. He changed my life
forever.”
And now, Mr. Porton will
change his own life.
“It was bittersweet,” he
said after filing for retirement. “I’m sort of resigned to making the change.
But there’s still a part of me that feels I’ll have to figure out where I’m
going to go each day. Hopefully, somebody’s going to ask for my expertise
somewhere. Let’s put it this way: I’m looking for job.”
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