In a way, Leslie Torres-Rodriguez graduated from Hartford Public Schools for a second time this month.
The now-former superintendent went to middle school at Global Communications Academy. When she first walked onto campus, it was as a student in the bilingual program. This month, she walked in for the last time as Hartford superintendent.
“Hello, familiar face!” she called out to Assistant Principal Danielle Mullings across the school library.
When the two women reached each other, they embraced for a long time.
“Thank you for everything,” Mullings told her, welling up. “You did justice, from a — I'm trying not to get emotional — little Black girl, born and raised in the hood, and you taught me that I can grow up. I can be the assistant principal that I wanted to be, no matter how rough around the edges that I was.”
Before Torres-Rodriguez became a mentor and education leader, she lived in Hartford's predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood of Frog Hollow. The school is different than when Torres-Rodriguez arrived in the ‘80s, but it brings her back to her family’s move from Santa Isabel’s Peñuelas neighborhood in Puerto Rico. Her mom brought her and her brother to Hartford in search of what she said was "a better and safer life."
“I consider myself lucky that we arrived on Park Street, where it was the heart back then … of the Puerto Rican community,” Torres-Rodriguez said. “And it was a place where my cultural heritage I could see, I could hear and I could feel.”
And it helped being able to see herself in her first Connecticut classroom as well.
“My first teacher in the mainland happened to be a Puerto Rican woman,” she remembered. “I went home the first day, and I said, ‘Yo quiero ser maestra como Ms. Rivera.’”
Torres-Rodriguez felt a connection — one she would have with other educators over the years, but she said this was something deeper.
“Perhaps, it was because she was also the teacher that took me on my first trip to a university in the fifth grade,” she said.
On the campus of Central Connecticut State University, the young girl decided she was serious about being a teacher. As an adult, her career took a turn into social work before returning to her original plan of teaching, and eventually, she found herself leading the district that once educated her.
As both students and educators looked up to her as she once did Ms. Rivera, an influx of Puerto Rican students during the evacuation of Hurricane Maria in 2017 brought her right back to the beginning of her time in Hartford schools.
“I so vividly remember Maria. I thought to myself, ‘They're coming,’ and my team's like, ‘Well, they're not even here yet,’” she recalled. “‘The students, they're coming. We have to get ready.’”
Every estimate the district had of how many hurricane evacuees would end up in Hartford was significantly lower than the reality. More than 500 students arrived, seemingly overnight, and the efforts to get them settled in had to consider all they’d come from, not just the language barrier.
“It wasn't just about enrolling students. It would be taking into account how we welcome, how we program, and how we continue to support them and their families in a way that honors the sociocultural journey and the trauma of our students and their families,” she said.
The whole-student approach worked, and with it, a lightbulb came on for Torres-Rodriguez.
“One day, we're going to develop a teacher recruitment program that is going to be modeled after the same way that we are welcoming and supporting our students and their families,” she thought.
That program became Paso a Paso and is perhaps the former superintendent’s most lasting legacy. It recruits teachers from the island to better support Puerto Rican and Latino students here. It helps the educators themselves, with language classes, enrollment in the Connecticut Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents, and more.
So, it must be hard to say goodbye when it feels like there is more work to be done.
“I will say that Hartford is a community that has caring and talented educators and administrators and families and caregivers and community partners that are at the ready, that I for sure, am more than confident that will remain to be true,” she said.
As a new school board is in place and the new school year begins for students, Torres-Rodriguez is starting her new chapter, too. This time — supporting superintendents and the next generations of leaders.
