A newsmaker you should know: New superintendent followed lifelong path to education
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Nancy Aloi Rose
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Nancy Aloi Rose firmly believes teachers are born, not made.
That might explain why she never wanted to be an astronaut or a doctor when she was growing up -- always a teacher. Or how she was fiercely competitive in academics but not in sports.
It also might explain what she described as an alertness to nuance she possessed at a young age. Even as a kindergartner, Ms. Aloi Rose said, she would reflect on how her teachers touched students' lives.
"The focus of the kind of things that I was paying attention to, even as a young [girl], was not so much the things [teachers] were talking about, but how they made you feel," she said.
In her new role as Bethel Park School District superintendent, she isn't roaming the halls of a school.
And Ms. Aloi Rose, who served as interim leader when superintendent Thomas Knight died in July, said she misses that.
"It was a struggle for me to agree to administration because for all those years I had gone to school -- whether I was a student or teacher or principal, I went to school," Ms. Aloi Rose said. "And now I had to go to work."
She said she visits the eight schools in her district as often as possible -- and she still tears up when she hears elementary students read.
"That's always a privilege to me," said Ms. Aloi Rose, 56, of Ambridge.
A native of Beaver Falls, she remembers fondly her blue-collar steel town, where vibrant clusters of ethnic communities, a loving family and small-town pragmatism enriched her formative years. She recalls riding to New Brighton every Wednesday night with girls from her church to tutor children with learning disabilities.
It was a good fit. Her first job in education was teaching developmentally challenged preschoolers for the Southwestern Pennsylvania Easter Seal Society in 1977.
First Published February 2, 2012 5:21 am
