Bank Street Graduation Bids Adieu to Largest Graduating Class

Bank Street College President Augusta Souza Kappner welcomed “our largest graduating class ever” at the Bank Street College Graduate School Of Education commencement ceremonies.

The 2003 Honorary Doctoral Candidates, led by four-term North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., were of Olympian quality as well. Hunt, who served from 1977-85 and also from 1993-2001, was called “the nation’s first and only Educational Governor” in an introduction by Dean of the Graduate School of Education Jon Snyder. “Under his leadership, North Carolina led the nation in board-certified teachers,” Dean Snyder said. “We need him in New York.”

“We are so impressed with the work you do here,” said Hunt. “The entire Bank Street approach is unique and wonderful: teachers learn in the same classrooms where the children learn. And, first and foremost, the students are treated as individuals here.”

“If you would ask the nation’s 50 Governors how they feel about the issue, 40-45 would tell you that Colleges of Education must change,” said Hunt. “I feel that this change should be in the direction of the Bank Street approach. In particular, we must stress two most important areas: the first is early childhood education. The initial 2-3 years of a child’s life is where he develops his capacity for intelligence, yet I feel that this country is still not serious enough about early childhood. And the second is the field of teaching: it should be a birthright of every child in the USA to have a caring, competent, qualified teacher.

“Even if you find yourself in tough environments, and some of you will, you Bank Street graduates must take on the challenge of transforming America’s education,” Hunt said.

The next Honorary Doctoral Candidate, Superintendent of the Newark Public Schools, Marion A. Bolden operates in one of those environments. “One of every three children in Newark lives in poverty,” Bolden, a former mathematics teacher who’s been Superintendent since 1999, said. “Even today, according to all research, the worst place for a child in New Jersey to grow up is in Newark. So, even though we’ve a come a long way in the last couple of years, we have a still longer way to go. As my mentor Marian Wright Edelman said, ‘this nation sows its own destruction in its abandonment of children.’ We must change our priorities as a country. The village of support our children need must become universal.”

“We have the power but we must become a different people with very different priorities and goals,” Bolden said. “And number one among those must be our children.”

The third Honorary Doctoral Candidate, Joan Cooper Bacchus Maynard, was the founding member of the Society for the Preservation of Weeksville Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant and has served as the Society’s first Executive Director until 1999. “We are starting to build a new museum on the site,” Maynard, a trustee emeritus of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said. “The preservation of communities, and every caring person in those communities, is invaluable. We must save the memories of self; that’s what people who like themselves do. The artifacts for our children are precious in this great tapestry of life we know as New York.”

“I am here to promote history,” Maynard said. “And I am here to do it in this magical space called Bank Street.”#

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