Veteran educator John Hobson took the wheel as principal at Henley Middle School this year and he arrived feeling already connected to the community. “My kids went to Crozet Elementary, my wife did her student-teaching at Ivy Elementary and taught at Brownsville, and I was at Murray Elementary and taught at Western, so the whole feeder pattern is very familiar to me,” he said. All told, Hobson has spent almost 25 years in the district as a social studies/history teacher, administrator, and instructional coach.
After beginning his career at Western Albemarle High School (WAHS), teaching there for seven years, Hobson made the jump to instructional coach at the school division. “It was a really great opportunity to see how things are done differently at the division level because when you’re in one place you start to make assumptions about how things are,” he said. “That experience really inspired me to want to get back into the classroom, and I came and taught here [at Henley] for two years and then two more at WAHS.”
At that point Hobson began taking graduate classes to be licensed to work in administrative roles. He became Lead Coach for social studies at the school division and helped launch a transformation of the social studies curricula called Reframing the Narrative. “After August 11 and 12 of 2017 [Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally], I thought it was a moment to reexamine what our curriculum looks like,” he said. “We connected in a partnership with [staff at] Montpelier, who were similarly working on the story they were telling up there in terms of enslaved people.” The group received a $300,000 grant to support professional development for teachers and curriculum-writing for 6-12th grades originally, later scaled to include K-12…