Browse > Home / School News / Following Death of Popular Pincipal, P.S. 209 Teachers and Parents Look to Rename School

Following Death of Popular Pincipal, P.S. 209 Teachers and Parents Look to Rename School

October 25, 2007

By AMY GOLDSTEIN
NYCity News Service

When P.S. 209 principal Jacquelyn Cannon died in May, parents, teachers, and community residents realized they wanted to make sure the school retained the spirit of its much-loved leader.

Now, they’re hoping to go one step further – in renaming the school and a portion of 183rd Street on which the school sits in her honor.

“She was the mother of the school,” said Niya Mitchell, whose third-grade daughter, Ny’Rayah Mitchell, attended the school and whose first-grade son, Charles Fields, is in his second year there. “You’d never hear anything negative about her.”

Mitchell, along with her mother and Louella Hatch, president of the 46th Precinct’s Community Council, started a petition to get the school renamed and got 400 people to sign it in just two days. In September, Hatch sent it to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, the local council member, and Community Board 5.

The Council usually votes on street renaming twice a year – in the spring and in the fall – said Jeremy Drucker, a Council spokesperson. No date’s been set for the fall vote, but Hatch says she’s confident it will pass. It won’t cost the city much to put up another street sign or change the lettering above the entrance to the building, she said.

The proposed name change is in memory of a woman who even second-grade students remember as someone who has helped them develop. They remember her favorite book that she read to them during class (“Piggy Pie”), how she persuaded Macy’s to donate stuffed Snoopy and Curious George toys to all the students last Christmas, and how the four-month-old school playground was her brainchild, even though she didn’t see it to completion.

Faculty and parents remember Cannon, who was 57 and lived in White Plains, as sweet but firm. “She was phenomenal,” said Anne Keegan, who served as assistant principal under Cannon and is now the principal. “She really brought academics to our early childhood school. I miss her every day; she never let anything overtake her.”

They recall that Cannon danced in her office to Michael Jackson, Keegan said, or even to a pen she owned that made music, teacher Jocelyn Kahl said. But she knew when to be serious: If a teacher didn’t have a lesson plan ready or do his or her best, she’d send it back until it was the teacher’s best effort.

She pushed parents, too. Mitchell recalled that she once fell but didn’t go to the doctor at first. Cannon saw she was hurting and told her she wouldn’t let her back into the school – not even to visit, which is tough when you have two children in the school and try to volunteer whenever called upon, said Mitchell – until she sought treatment. Mitchell heeded the call.

Though Cannon had sickle cell anemia, an inherited blood disorder, she didn’t let it stop her. She continued to dress up for Halloween every year, and many people didn’t know she was sick until she died, first-grade teacher Jennifer Mittleman said. She continued to enter classrooms to read books to the children until just a few weeks before her death.

No job was too menial for her, said Fay Adams, a supervising school aide whom Cannon hired when she came on board in 1998. Adams is one of six people from within the neighborhood whom Cannon hired full-time during her 12 years as principal. “She came in here picking up a mop one day, and though I told her no, she said, ‘I’ll do anything to keep the kids happy, to keep the building running smooth.’ ”

“She was the perfect principal for a K-2 school,” Kahl added. “She would do anything and did everything for these kids.”

Written by admin · Filed Under School News 

Comments

One Response to “Following Death of Popular Pincipal, P.S. 209 Teachers and Parents Look to Rename School”

  1. New York City News Service - CUNY Graduate School of Journalism » A Matter of Principal at P.S. 209 on August 14th, 2008 8:22 am

    [...] in: Mount Hope Monitor Expand Photo + FOND MEMORIES: P.S. 209 Principal Jacquelyn Cannon, who died in May, was [...]

Got something to say?