Meet Assistant Principal, Mrs. Edwards-Thomas

Mrs. Edwards-Thomas has been teaching her entire life, practically. When she was a child, she  set up dolls and teddy bears to be her class. She said she “needed to be the teacher because [she] had something to share.” As she grew up, she was a Sunday School teacher, a tutor, and a peer mentor. During college, Mrs. Edwards-Thomas thought she wanted to be a professor and also considered attending law school. But once she started a family, she “couldn’t think of any role that would be as fulfilling as being a teacher.” Mrs. Edwards-Thomas noticed that her own children had very few (if any) teachers of color, and she wanted to make sure that kids saw themselves represented in their school’s staff. So she became a teacher herself. Mrs. Edwards-Thomas is very dedicated: “I’ve always loved school. I could come to school forever. I literally am trying that because right now I am in school for my doctorate degree.”

Mrs. Edwards-Thomas has been working in the New Rochelle City School District since 2008. She started working at City Hall as the School and Community Facilitator and the director of a program called GEAR UP that “helped [first-generation] students gain early awareness and readiness for upper graduate programming.” In 2013, Mrs. Edwards-Thomas became a house principal at New Rochelle High School and then an interim assistant principal at the school. She worked at Albert Leonard Middle School for a year and then came back to NRHS as an assistant principal, her current position. Mrs. Edwards-Thomas’ children went through the New Rochelle school system as well. 

As one of NRHS’s assistant principals, Mrs. Edwards-Thomas has a lot on her plate. In a normal year, she works with the house principals and security staff to make sure that all students are safe. But during the COVID pandemic, she works with the house principals, security staff, Mrs. Cornelius (the other assistant principal), and the nursing staff to ensure health and safety in the school building. This includes enforcing social distancing measures, contacting people if they need to quarantine, covering classes with absent teachers, and many other tasks. Mrs. Edwards-Thomas summarized her job as “[trying] to keep the building organized and moving at a comfortable pace.”

Mrs. Edwards-Thomas has trouble naming her favorite thing about NRHS because she has so many. She said, “There is something for everyone.” She loves how the school’s huge staff and student body consists of “all different kinds of people, all different kinds of interests, all different kinds of backgrounds” and that there are endless options of classes to take, clubs to join, and programs to participate in. In fact, Mrs. Edwards-Thomas moved her family to New Rochelle so that her children could attend NRHS and take advantage of all its opportunities. One of the things she really enjoys about working at NRHS is seeing students develop over the years as they prepare for college. Mrs. Edwards-Thomas expressed, “[My job is] hard, but it’s a rewarding position…[NRHS] is like one of my happiest places.”

Mrs. Edwards-Thomas is a caring, sympathetic, and kind person who loves to help people reach their goals. She said, “I spend time in my own head thinking about how I can help somebody else do something that they really want to do...I do that in my spare time.” Mrs. Edwards-Thomas especially enjoys working with young women. She communicated, “Raising a family is no small feat, and to see that women have done that and anything else...is something worth noting and something worth focusing on.” March is Women’s History Month, and Mrs. Edwards-Thomas thinks that it is a chance for us to celebrate all that women have accomplished and give them the credit they deserve.

While Mrs. Edwards-Thomas has been helping young women her whole life, she turned that interest into a formal activity in 2015, when she started a nonprofit organization called Zawadi Exchange, her “little passion project.” Zawadi means “gift” in Kiswahili. Mrs. Edwards-Thomas said, “In my understanding, women are a gift and you can be a gift to the world.” The Zawadi Exchange program supports women who have dreams but need help reaching them. Through lots of research, networking, Zoom events, mental health conversations, and more, the members of Zawadi Exchange do everything they can to make sure that women’s dreams become realities. Mrs. Edwards-Thomas explained, “I’ve always had that [support system] since I was a young woman. I believe that those relationships have helped me to become the woman that I am...and I realize that everyone doesn’t have that. So this [nonprofit] is a more formalized way to provide that for someone else.”

Mrs. Edwards-Thomas draws inspiration from her parents who immigrated to the US from Jamaica. She described them as “hard workers” who pushed her to succeed. Specifically, Mrs. Edwards-Thomas said, “[My mother] helped people all the time...helping people to get jobs, helping people with housing...that’s just how I was raised.” When asked what motivates her to do the work that she does, Mrs. Edwards-Thomas replied, “This is just who I am and have always been.” She also said that she is who she is because of her parents.

As a teenager, Mrs. Edwards-Thomas “became very interested and enamored with learning more about Black people” and even started an Africana Club at her high school. Her favorite playwright is August Wilson and she read all of his plays as a teenager. In college, Mrs. Edwards-Thomas majored in Political Science and African-American Studies because she was fascinated by the fact that Black people were so vital to history yet they were left out of most general curriculums. 

When asked if there is a book or movie that changed her outlook on life, Mrs. Edwards-Thomas replied with her “first favorite” movie, “The Wiz,” an adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz” with an all-Black cast and disco/soul/R&B music. The movie made Mrs. Edwards-Thomas realize that stories she had already heard could be told from different perspectives. She said, “That’s the first time I started thinking about the fact that people could be in different roles, and that the story could be told in different ways.”

Mrs. Edward-Thomas’s advice for NRHS seniors going to college is, “Find your tribe immediately.” She believes that once you find a group of people who will support you, you can thrive and succeed.