On August 28, Bethesda Magazine announced the 2024 Women Who Inspire Recipients - six women who are making change in Montgomery County and beyond.
The Following is an excerpt from the Bethesda Magazine profile written on Rosario ‘Paola’ Velasquez, Principal of Jackson Road Elementary School and a key figure behind The Community Foundation’s Brilliant Futures program which launched this past Summer.
Authorship Credit - Amy Halpern, Bethesda Magazine
As soon as Paola Velasquez opens the classroom door, a swarm of kindergartners drape their arms around her in a tight embrace. Little girls with box braids and pigtails, little boys with cornrows and close-cropped Afros—some with shy smiles, others with excited laughs—they quickly pile on, and the hug circle around their principal grows bigger and bigger. The same thing happens in nearly every classroom she enters.
It’s been five years since Velasquez, 44, took over the reins of Jackson Road Elementary School in Silver Spring’s White Oak neighborhood. It’s a Title 1 school with a minority population of more than 95%, where more than 75% of the students qualify for free meals. She started in the role only months before the pandemic hit. Since she’s been at the helm, the school rose from a 3-star rating to a 4-star, according to the Maryland State Department of Education, making it one of only four Title 1 elementary schools in the county (out of 40, according to Velasquez) to earn a 4-star rating for the 2022-23 school year, the most current rating year available. “Many schools throughout the state decreased a star, but we increased,” she says.
The school now offers free evening English language classes for parents and guardians (along with free child care); a soccer program; two private-practice therapists who administer one-on-one mental health services to students at no charge; a dentist who cleans students’ teeth for free; and an optometrist who provides complimentary vision checks and eyeglasses, says Chris Callisto, Jackson Road’s Community School Liaison.
During the 2023-24 school year, Jackson Road opened a food pantry, and it began sending bags of food home on Fridays to 80 families. “When you are a child … and your basic needs aren’t being met because of poverty, you’re not thinking so much about going to college … you’re more worried about getting something to eat or clothing or making sure that you’re not going to be homeless,” Velasquez says.
Velasquez knows what it’s like to grow up poor in Montgomery County. She came here from Peru with her parents and three brothers when she was 8. All six lived in the basement of a relative’s house in Germantown while her dad worked as a janitor and painter, and her mom cleaned houses. Her parents saved enough money to move into an apartment, and eventually to buy a small home in Germantown.
When Velasquez graduated from Seneca Valley High School in Germantown in 1998, she watched as other students went off to college. She hadn’t been instructed how to sign up for SATs, fill out college applications or plan for her future. Instead, she took a job as an aide at a day care center, saved money to buy a car, then to pay for classes at Montgomery College, and then to earn her bachelor’s degree in elementary education at the University of Maryland, College Park…..
…….“Sometimes, you know, we have kids who … are having a hard time, they’re going through … a crisis, basically [and] it can take … hours out of my day for me to talk to that child,” Velasquez says. “They’re not ready to learn.”
But her goal is to keep them learning and all the while feeling confident and supported. After all, she says, “they’re going to be the ones who are going to be leading us in the future.”…..
Click here to read the full article.
To learn more about Brilliant Futures and how you can get involved, visit https://www.togetherweprosperdmv.org/brilliant-futures