General
Tom Porton, Hall of Fame Teacher on a Humanitarian Mission, Dies at 74
At James Monroe High School in the Bronx, he inspired students to embrace the arts and to be engaged with the world, through AIDS programs and other community service projects.
Tom Porton’s remit as a teacher at James Monroe High School in the Bronx was English grammar and literature. But he taught much more: empathy, self-confidence, sophistication and, for the price of a subway token, engagement with the world that would have been beyond the reach of most teenagers in the school’s Bronx River neighborhood in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
Mr. Porton died on July 12 at 74 in an assisted living center in the Bronx. No cause was given, but he had been using a wheelchair and an oxygen tank for months, his son, Christopher Porton, said.
Mr. Porton’s title at Monroe, coordinator of student affairs, hardly captured his impact. He collaborated with Project Bravo, an H.I.V./AIDS volunteer organization affiliated with Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, to train students to educate their peers about the disease. He disbursed health information from a minivan; devised a reading and writing curriculum to motivate students to write letters of support to patients coping with the disease; and started the AIDS Lives in Every Neighborhood Players, a group of teachers who presented dramatic productions to teenagers and community organizations.
A bearded bear of a man, Mr. Porton was, in 1995, the first New York City teacher inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame. In 2011, he won a Kennedy Center/Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teacher Award. He retired in 2016.
Former students described him as their cheerleader — as the rare teacher who stimulated a love for learning by, among other means, wangling Super 8 movie cameras and assigning a class to “go out and film the world.” He persuaded students to consider — often for the first time — attending college and helped them apply.
“He introduced us to literature, film, poetry, the performing arts and the broader world — a world that was not readily available to kids in the Bronx in the early ’70s,” said David Gonzalez, a storyteller, poet and educator who graduated from Monroe in 1973.
