Allan Appel Photo
She spoke French to the kids. She filled the school with instruments from flutes to tubas. She wowed them with her own arpeggios as a dramatic soprano. She came to school wearing heels and pearls.
And she greeted each kid by name at the door. Every day.
Those were some of the recollections Ramona Gattison shared as she cleaned out her office and prepared for retirement after 45 years in the school system as teacher and most recently as principal of the K‑8 Lincoln-Bassett School. One theme of her recollections: The value of music in education.
A trained singer, Gattison auditioned several times at the Metropolitan Opera and has performed as a soloist at the Connecticut Opera. She was inspired to sing by a music teacher at Troup when she was a little girl.
Ever since she has brought a sense of performance, emotional communication, and high expectations to her educational career, which began with teaching third grade at Beecher School.
She was among the school system’s first wave of staff developers at the Helene Grant School, eventually was promoted to principal and returned in that role to Beecher. After two years as supervisor of social development for the system, she said, “I wanted to get back to the action, with kids and parents, and do what I had to do. I was on a mission, and still am: When people come from certain economic statuses, [others] have preconceived ideas they can’t succeed.”
Not at Gattison’s Lincoln-Bassett, where she took over as principal in 2000 and helped oversee the building of the new school. The motto: “Excellence without excuse. Let it begin from within.”
Lincoln-Bassett is a Comer model school where emphasizes communication, hugging, and seeing the whole child in context of life outside the school building. It takes a leader to bring reality to those principles.
Gattison began doing that at Lincoln-Bassett. She brought in community groups, an extensive program of tutoring and mentoring provided by members of the Church on the Rock and other congregations.
In 2002, members of the Yale Class of 1957 were put in contact with Gattison. Public funding was being cut for the arts; these Yalies wanted to help staunch the artistic wound. They wanted to launch a kind of music initiative in New Haven.
Gattison recalled guiding the potential funders into her conference room, which she calls “the situation room.” With shiny yet cozy table and red leather chairs that swivel, it feels like the board room of a corporation or law office.
Gattison presented the Old Blues data showing how students in band or other music classes were doing better in math and the academic subjects. All she needed were more instruments, more music instruction.
“When you do music, you’re talking measures, fractions, sequences,” and the vocabulary that goes along with it, she noted.
The principal’s awesome key ring.
Seed money was provided to the tune of $1 million. Gattison’s school soon had a chorus room, a string room, a band room, a keyboard room and more instruments in total, she said, than any other school in New Haven.
Each year Gattison had to keep proving the connection between the music and other academic accomplishment. Inspired by the Lincoln-Bassett experiment, that the Yale philanthropists gave $5 million to the school system to spread the music, and the accomplishment.
In looking back on her career, Gattison paused and then teared up as she shared an email she had just received from a former student. He had heard she is retiring. He recalled how, as a little kid, he set eyes on her for the first time: “He said I said, ‘Good morning, young man.’ I greeted him with a smile.”
Then her email interlocutor, who is off to college now, wrote that he remembered her “impeccable taste in clothing and fashion, and your voice. I remember you in the cafeteria. If we were loud, you’d walk in and say, ‘Excuse me.’ Ms. Gattison, I’m the young man I am today because of you.”
Gattison’s successor will be Yolanda Generette. Gattison doesn’t plan to return “I don’t think it’s fair to the new principal,” she said.
In May, Gattison’s teachers and parents threw a soiree for their dedicated principal. It was called “Come and Swirl with the Lady of Pearls as she Twirls into Retirement.”
Gattison in the band room with PTO prez Florence Caldwell.
Her future plans so far include spending more time with her three kids and three grandchildren. She also plans to start singing more.
As Gattison ushered a reporter out into the vestibule where she greeted children all those mornings of all those years, she switched her prodigious ring of keys from one hand to the other.
Two keys fell to the floor. “The keys,” she said, “don’t want to leave.”