Doretha Edgecomb reflects on her decades in education

HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — Doretha Edgecomb stepped down from the Hillsborough County Faculty Board far more than five a long time in the past, but she remains incredibly lively these days, most prominently in next the developments with the Children’s Board Household Useful resource Middle in Temple Terrace, which was named in her honor in 2020.

“I consider that this put genuinely reflects what my complete life’s aim was — to do very good for young ones,” she mentioned even though expending time with Spectrum Bay Information 9 at the center located on E. Fowler Avenue.

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What You Need to have To Know

• Doretha Edgecomb labored as an educator in Hillsborough County for several many years
• She served on the Hillsborough County School Board from 2004-2016
• The Dorothea Wynn Edgecomb Children’s Board Loved ones Useful resource Centre in Temple Terrace was named for her in 2020

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Edgecomb claimed that she wants the facility to provide the similar sort of educational activities that her daughter Allison acquired, to every single little one who enters the school district.

“It’s definitely about embracing family members and encouraging them,” said Edgecomb, who served for more than 5 decades in schooling in Hillsborough County.

She worked as a reading through trainer, learning professional, Title I Father or mother involvement coordinator, and principal at Robles Elementary Faculty.

Edgecomb spoke proudly about her five years at Robles, which at the time was labeled a “failing” faculty.

“It was the biggest problem of my everyday living, but it was also the most satisfying,” she mentioned.

Edgecomb explained that she was equipped to alter the local climate there by speaking with learners in each individual course in the school — as very well as heading door-to-door to communicate with mom and dad.

“Our scores went up,” she reported. “We got off that listing, and that was a real testimony to tough operate. Receiving little ones and lecturers to get into your dream for them.”

Edgecomb, 78, is a Tampa native who grew up in Belmont Heights (which she says now is merely identified as East Tampa) when it was even now pretty segregated. She recalled the stark racism that existed when she would see individual water fountains when likely downtown and becoming mindful of exactly where Blacks could and could not consume in specified establishments.

Even so, she was fast to observe that she was surrounded by persons who presented a level of security to all of the “harshness” that existed.

“I referred to as it ‘the village,’” she stated. “Outside of that there was this harsh earth, but in the community, you did not experience that.” 

As much as the strides race relations have, or have not, produced in her time, Edgecomb said that the region should not just be, now in 2022, celebrating the truth that the to start with Black female girl — Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson — will probably be verified quickly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“We’re continue to conversing about achievements as the very first team for people that have been right here for ages, and we’re even now not obtaining like we ought to and could,” she claimed.

When asked if she sees progress because the days when she was associated in the civil legal rights movement while attending school in Alabama in the early 1960s, Edgecomb claimed that she feels Florida, and the country as a total, are in some methods going backwards.

She pointed specifically to recently passed election reform expenses in Tallahassee that critics say will limit voter obtain.

“I’m not far too optimistic,” she reported.

A former member of the Hillsborough County University District for 12 years, from 2004-2016, she has observed the rigorous battles that have taken put in faculty board meetings in excess of the previous couple of yrs for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic.

Some of the vitriol that has been expressed by moms and dads and other customers of the community at those people conferences to board associates is “unbelievable,” she claimed.

“Everybody’s conversing about personal rights, and they really do not see that their personalized legal rights really do not infringe on and demolish the very good of the complete region,” she mentioned.

Edgecomb mentioned there was visible rigidity on the faculty board all through her last term. That was when she was on the shedding side of a vote to choose the upcoming of then-Superintendent MaryEllen Elia back in Jan. 2015.

In the fall of 2015, the exact same four board associates who ousted Elia came again and denied Edgecomb the position of chair. That was viewed as a rebuke, since Edgecomb was serving as vice chair, and as the Tampa Bay Occasions claimed, the board had rotated the posture of chair, providing it to the preceding year’s vice chair, for much more than 20 many years.  

Edgecomb claimed she was “shocked by the behavior” of her colleagues, but understood that the decision was out of her hands.

“So you just just take it,” she reported. “Grow from it, apply your resiliency.”

She extra that she thinks the controversies negatively impacted her mom, who was 100 at the time and died in March 2016.

“We talked about it a minimal bit, and I feel that she was much more anxious about how I was reacting to it,” Edgecomb mentioned. “But I imagine that it impacted her in some methods, completely.”

Edgecomb stays firmly rooted in performing to strengthen factors correct now and not dwelling on the earlier. She lately appeared as a visitor on the “Finest Fan Friday” edition of The Nowadays Demonstrate and was awarded a $500 present certificate to Barnes & Noble, which she intends to use in component to stock up the library at the Useful resource Centre named soon after her.

And she said that although she’s honored and humbled by all of the accolades that have occur her way in new yrs, she never ever envisioned it.

“When I assume about it, absolutely nothing I have ever finished I did with some expectation that I was heading to be identified or that a thing was likely to be named after me,” she claimed. “You discuss about expecting it? Definitely not.”