Henrico's Top Teachers – Jocelyn Henry-Whitehead, Baker Elementary School

Jocelyn Henry-Whitehead knows fear firsthand. She understands trauma, because she’s lived it. Pain? She’s felt its crushing weight at the most inopportune times, too.

But she also understands how it feels to overcome all odds, to get up when it would have been easier to stay down, to thrive in ways that maybe never seemed imaginable, because she has done so repeatedly herself.

The young students in her federal preschool program class class at Baker Elementary School in Varina don’t realize it yet, but there’s probably no one more prepared or more willing to guide them through arguably the most important year of their burgeoning educational lives than Henry-Whitehead.

Henry-Whitehead’s story reads more like a movie script than a real-life path, but it’s all very real, and she’s got the receipts to prove it.

She grew up in Baltimore, attending schools that were still segregated. But Fort Worthington Elementary School No. 85 provided her a sense of calm, away from the pain of domestic violence involving her parents she’d ultimately witness at home for two decades.

“School was a refuge for me,” she recalled. “Going to school was literally a place of peace for me.”

Inner-city Baltimore, where the family lived, was rough, so Henry-Whitehead often tagged along after school to volunteer at the local hospital where her mother worked. That led her to VCU, where she intended to study physical therapy.

“But what I didn’t know was that I had to have good grades in math and science,” she recalled, “which I didn’t.”

She found herself on academic warning after her first semester of college, then changed her major to music, which had inspired her in life. (Her father was a pastor, and Henry-Whitehead sometimes joined him on visitation trips to the Crownsville Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland, playing music at the bedsides of patients to help calm them.)

But, she said, “it wasn’t until I changed to an education major that I really felt my place.”

“My father used to always say, ‘Jocelyn – you’re a teacher,’” she recalled.

Her career path coming quickly into focus, she was planning to attend graduate school, when during her senior year at VCU, her mother was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. She put her plans on hold to be with her mother, returning home to Baltimore to try to find work there. Someone told her the Baltimore Police Department was hiring and that they were looking for women and minorities.

“I had never seen a gun, much less held a gun,” she recalled.

No matter. She applied, earned a $500 stipend for completing the police academy and was two days away from graduating and beginning her $11,000-per-year job (“more money than I had ever seen,” she said) on the force when her mother died at 51.

Devastated but determined, she graduated and became the only woman on her squad, handling mostly domestic violence calls.

“It was like going full-circle,” she recalled.

But after a year, the challenges of feeling isolated on her squad as a woman had her considering her next move. That’s when her boyfriend popped the question, she said yes, and they moved back to Virginia, where they’ll soon celebrate 41 years of marriage. She then earned her doctorate in education at William & Mary, taught kindergarten and music in Charles City County, became an assistant principal, then directed a Head Start program in Williamsburg.

She’s also taught as an adjunct at the collegiate level and taken mission trips to South Korea, Rwanda, Kenya and Standing Rock (a U.S. Indian reservation that straddles the Dakotas). She wears a watch with a picture of Earth to remind her of the children of the world, poverty and of the domestic violence that affects one in three women worldwide.

Music remains a significant part of Henry-Whitehead’s life – and of her class. She’s intentional with the music she selects and plays for her students.

“Everything is purposeful, because I do not know what they might be going through,” she said. “My teachers in Baltimore at #85 provided a refuge for me – that’s one of the things i’m trying to do.”

She often plays and sings a song for the class that she wrote on Sept. 12, 2001 called “P-E-A-C-E spells peace, and peace begins with me.”

“That song is about right now for me,” she said.

Henry-Whitehead was recruited to Baker in 2014 as an interventionist and quickly felt a connection with the place.

“There was something about Baker that really touched me, and I think it was because I could almost identify with some of the students,” she said. The school serves a population that includes some vulnerable communities and children.

“When I’ve had children who came in sleepy or tired, I’ve never really said ‘Wake up!’ because I remember how tired or how hungry I would be going to school,” she said.

To her, there’s no more important time educationally for a child than in pre-kindergarten because it’s when they learn the foundation of what education can and should be. And though her students may not understand that most four-year-olds aren’t fortunate enough to be taught by someone with a doctorate, they’ll come to know that they’re being educated by someone whose perspective on life comes from one full of real experiences.

“For every experience I’ve had, whether it seemed challenging or not at the time, it has really shaped my entire approach,” Henry-Whitehead said.