Celebrating Our People | 30 Years | Jocelyn Garrity

When Jocelyn Garrity first arrived on the Hill in 1996, she was touring Hopkins as an apprehensive math teacher candidate. After submitting a resume for teaching positions to a recruitment agency during her senior year of college at Tufts University, she had moved on with her career, working at a software company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“I kind of forgot about the application at that point,” said Garrity.

That was until Garrity was approached by Rosemary Benedict, the Hopkins Dean of Academics, and Ruthann Aylor, the Math Department Chair, who were impressed by her mathematics background. Despite the interest, Garrity was reluctant to leave her position and move to Connecticut.

“I said, ‘Oh no, I have a job. Thank you so much,’” Garrity recalled. “Rosemary Benedict said, ‘No, we really want you to come. Just come for a visit.’”

Driven by sheer curiosity, Garrity decided to visit the School. While walking across the Hopkins campus with a student tour guide, she found herself struck by the student’s composure and attitude.

“[The tour guide] was incredibly poised, thoughtful, and curious, and I just started to really be excited about what I was seeing on campus,” Garrity reflected. “Just thinking about those kinds of kids that were at Hopkins—how curious and motivated she was.”

After several phone calls, an initial decline of the offer, and another nudge from Hopkins, Garrity finally accepted.

“So I decided, ‘Let’s switch gears,’” she recalled. “I accepted the job here and told the software company, ‘Sorry, thank you, but I’m going to do something else.’ And so I moved to New Haven.”

Starting as a pre-algebra and algebra teacher and moving through roles as a Head Adviser and now, as the first-ever Director of the Junior School (J-School), Garrity has been a fixture of the Hopkins community for thirty years.

Although she began her career teaching a wide range of grades, she quickly realized her passion lay with the younger students.

“I really enjoyed the seventh and eighth grade. I was more of a junior school person,” Garrity said. “The kids are goofy, joyful, and excited about learning and that’s why J-School is the best place to be.”

After years spent advising the younger grades, Garrity became one of the Junior School Head Advisers. Her experience interacting with younger students evolved into a teaching approach that she says is distinct from advising or teaching the Upper School.

“For the two-year Junior School experience, we really see seventh and eighth grades as a separate experience,” Garrity pointed out. “It’s a great time to try new things, try a new sport, try a new language, something different that you’ve been curious about.”

Garrity’s position as Head Adviser led to her becoming a go-to person to guide new faculty who were starting to teach or advise the J-School.

“I was mentoring and getting faculty on board, so I became a consistent person in the Junior School,” she said.

Once Hopkins’ 10th Head of School, Kai Bynum, arrived in 2015, the Junior School was developing rapidly in size and required more programmatic structure. Bynum recognized Garrity as the driving force behind the program, so he called her in for a new role: Director of Junior School.

“The new position has been a really positive thing for me to feel empowered to be able to do a lot more for the Junior School program as a whole,” Garrity shared.

Garrity, along with her fellow Junior School Head Adviser, Ian Guthrie, has instituted and resurrected many Junior School traditions and activities, such as assemblies, movie nights, and field trips to explore New Haven.

“We are our own community and we very much have our own traditions and events,” Garrity explained. “We try to make it a fun and happy place and recognize that this age group is still kids and it is okay to be silly.”

The Junior School officially resides in Thompson Hall, which Garrity says is a safe, comfortable, and nurturing environment for Junior School students to learn and grow. Thanks to the tireless and intentional work of Garrity and the rest of the Junior School faculty, the atmosphere reflects this warmth: the walls are adorned with student artwork, photos of Hopkins teachers at the students’ ages, and even a Lego wall.

“It doesn’t have to be school work all the time,” Garrity said with a smile. “There can be some joy through other things too, like the Lego wall. We recognize they still want to play a little bit. So we keep that as a focus.”

From a young professional just starting out her career to a resurrected leadership role thirty years later, Garrity repeatedly centers students as her main purpose and reason for staying at Hopkins.

“Because I’ve been here so long and I started when I was really young, in some ways I feel like I’ve grown up here,” Garrity reflected. “And I also feel like I’m continuing to grow. One of the things I really like about my job is that every day I’m learning. I learn from my colleagues, I learn from the kids, and that’s just a very stimulating environment to work in.”