“It Changes Their Life”: Physical Education and Health Teacher Mrs. Jones

Mrs. Jones’ life was changed by one of her high school teachers. “I had a really awesome teacher who helped me get by. At one point in my life we were homeless. My teacher actually made sure I went to school, made sure there was food on the table for me and my family. She helped me go to field hockey camps, and just made sure I was on track.” That teacher was Kelly Busby, Mrs. Jones’ field hockey coach and Physical Education teacher. Her impact on Mrs. Jones was profound: “I ended up wanting to be her, and have that same effect. Somebody had saved me, I wanted to be able to save somebody else.”

Inspired to follow in the footsteps of her former coach, Mrs. Jones enrolled at West Chester University, where she studied Kinesiology, the study of the mechanics of body movement. But Mrs. Jones was dealing with more than the average college student; she was only 17 when she enrolled, and shortly into her freshman year, her entire family moved to California. On top of her life changes, she decided to pursue collegiate field hockey, which, as she describes, is akin to “working two full time jobs.” But her teammates ensured that Mrs. Jones would be anything but alone in her college years: “they became my family. I was pretty much adopted into all my friends' families. All the holidays were spent at their houses. So they took me in, and they’re still my closest friends now.”

After graduation, she was hired to coach women’s field hockey at Saint Joseph’s University. “I was just following my passion. It was my dream to coach at the collegiate level… being with the team, and seeing people progress. I’ve coached girls from their middle school years all the way to college. It was pretty nice to see their growth.” After coaching for several years, Mrs. Jones was forced to put her career on hold when she tore her ACL: “It took a toll on me, both physically and mentally… and I always wanted to get back into teaching”. But finding a job wasn’t easy; the Great Recession in 2008 hit educators hard, and more schools were laying off employees than were hiring them. It was especially difficult for Phys Ed teachers: “They don’t leave,” she says, “they retire. They love their jobs.” Eventually, she began teaching at Olney Charter High School in North Philly, making the long commute every morning and every afternoon—Mrs. Jones, too, was searching for her life-long school.

The biggest obstacle to teaching at certain neighborhood schools, she reflects, was not her students’ academic preparation or their interest in sports; distrust of adults was pervasive and made it difficult for a teacher to make a difference in their lives. “I had to build a lot of relationships to get them to trust me [in order] to actually pass. People were [very resistant] at first… It helped when I coached… you’ve got to just chip away at their walls until you actually see who they really are.” After Olney, she taught at a public school in Reading, PA, a city in Berks County that suffers from high poverty. “I was building more relationships [in Reading], because that’s all we were working on. Building a culture that was conducive for [students] to learn ... we taught them more life lessons to get through a normal day. You know, there’s gangs, there’s high crime rates, there’s drugs all riddled throughout their system. So, just chipping down those walls everyday, it was a tough task.” Watching her students improve, she says, reminded her of what first inspired her to teach: “Actually seeing the change in people, the positive effect that I had with these kids, was… so rewarding, it outweighed everything else.”

Beyond the long commute, Masterman has presented Mrs. Jones with different challenges. Masterman is a downtown city school without nearby playfields, without field hockey or Girls' Wrestling teams. But as the new girls' volleyball coach, she’s enthusiastic about Masterman’s athletic future: “We do really well for a small school,” she says, “Everyone’s involved. It’s amazing.” When asked about the best parts of her new job, Mrs. Jones does not skip a beat: “The kids are able to grasp the concepts so much quicker than in any of my neighborhood schools. It’s kind of nice to get to teach, and reinvent my own teaching style.” She tells me she reached out to her former teacher Ms. Busby after losing touch for a few years, and thanked her for the extraordinary impact she had on her life. Together, they reflected on the gratifying impact of being an educator: “We felt like, ‘I saved one person, that’s all it takes. It changes their life.’”