His Story
When Ron Foreso arrived at Parsippany High School in 1974, he later wrote, “school spirit was at ebb tide.” The football team was coming off a twenty-four game losing streak, there were no community service organizations, the marching band had twenty-five students, and the homecoming dance drew fewer than thirty-five couples. He made it his personal mission to turn that around, and over twenty-six years he did. In his first year he organized the Pep Club, then helped rebuild Homecoming into the school’s premier fall social event, attended by more than six hundred students each year, and revived the Varsity Club and the History Club. Since 1976 he has been the advisor to Interact, a service club that began in his early years, and for more than twenty years he co-coordinated the school’s Institute for Political and Legal Education (IPLE) program.
Before teaching, he attended the United States Military Academy at West Point from 1970 to 1972, a background he says shaped his lifelong precept to “always choose the harder right way to do things over the easier wrong way.” He earned a bachelor’s degree in social studies from Seton Hall University, a Teacher of the Handicapped certification from Jersey City State College, and has also studied at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (1999). In the mid-1970s he wrote and instituted a U.S. Military History course, at a time when support for the military “was neither fashionable nor popular.” It later grew from a semester elective to a full-year course, and one of its students went on to serve as a military aide to the President.
His honors include New Jersey State Teacher of the Year and Morris County Teacher of the Year for 1999, along with a place among the finalists for the National Teachers Hall of Fame in 2000. He was invited by Governor Christine Todd Whitman to Panama to witness the final transit of the U.S.S. New Jersey through the Panama Canal, was inducted into the U.S. Cavalry’s Order of the Spur, one of the few civilians to receive the honor, and received a Congressional Citation for his “Books for Bosnia” campaign. His nominator, his wife Kathleen, wrote that Ron “continues to bring honor to the teaching profession.”
Beyond the Classroom
The best known of his projects began with a letter. Lieutenant Colonel Mark Littel, a 1975 Parsippany graduate commanding a peacekeeping squadron in Bosnia in 1997, wrote to him that schools there had “ZERO supplies,” with no pens, paper, maps or chalkboards. Foreso and his students launched “Books for Bosnia.” With support from the Postal Service, local businesses, civic groups and private citizens, the campaign shipped two thousand boxes of school supplies, about twenty tons, to Bosnian children. A parent wrote that when the books began to come in, he and his students stayed after school to pack them for shipping.
He also advised Interact for a quarter century. Under his guidance, the club’s food and clothing drives collected tens of thousands of cans and thousands of pounds of clothing, volunteered at the New Jersey Food Bank and Special Olympics, raised thousands of dollars for the March of Dimes and the National World War II Memorial, and sent “care packages” to troops during the Gulf War. He has been the voice of Parsippany football and basketball as the home games’ public address announcer, has hosted pep rallies, and has coached winter cheerleading. For twelve years he also volunteered at Seton Hall University, sharing his knowledge with its ROTC military history classes without pay, and he assembled a large collection of Civil War, Indian War, Spanish-American War and World War I artifacts and uniforms that he brings into his classes.
Philosophy Into Practice
Foreso quotes Theodore Roosevelt, “With all my heart I believe in the joy of living,” and says that is how he feels about teaching. He sees a teacher’s role as being an advocate for students’ involvement in their school and community, and he believes a social studies teacher needs “content mastery and enthusiasm.” His IPLE students research and write their own legislation, call legislators, forge alliances to pass their bills, and defend them before model congresses, and they have designed a human settlement for the Mars Millennium Project. His Room 408 is full of historic photographs, student posters, sayings from Franklin Roosevelt, George Patton and Theodore Roosevelt, and a bulletin board of postcards and wedding and birth announcements from former students.
“A history teacher is not just something I do; it is who I am.”— from his essay, “Philosophy of Teaching”
“I feel no greater satisfaction than when a student says to me, ‘Mr. Foreso, I never really liked history before, but now it’s my favorite subject.'”— from his essay, “Philosophy of Teaching”
In His Own Words
I believe that an army travels on its heart. Like an army, a school has a heart, too…the spirit, the pride, the self-confidence and self-respect of its students.”— from his essay, “Professional Biography”
“Honestly, I don’t consider myself exceptional at all. What I am is persistent and the hardest worker I can possibly be.”— from his essay, “Getting to Know You”
“Being a teacher at Parsippany High School is inextricably woven into the fabric of my soul. This is where my heart lives… it’s who I am.”— from his essay, “Getting to Know You”
“My solution to the problem of school violence can be found in community service. I have always taught my students that service is the greatest of civic virtues.”— from his essay, “Educational Issues”
“The lessons my students drew from this project will remain with them throughout their lives. For me, these lessons are truly what teaching is all about.”— from his essay, “Outside the Classroom”
What Others Said
“Standing first among equals, Mr. Foreso is self-effacing and ever willing to share credit with others. True leadership, however, lies in those endowed with the ability to induce others to act, sometimes unwittingly.”— Richard J. Konet, Ed.D., Principal, Parsippany High School
“Ron embodies the qualities we wish all of our teachers to emulate.”— Eugene J. Vasile, Superintendent of Schools, Parsippany-Troy Hills
“Anyone who has observed him ‘in action’ knows that he teaches kids first and history second.”— Warren J. Curd, Director of Guidance, Livingston High School; colonel (ret.), New Jersey Army National Guard
“Due to his military background, Mr. Foreso had developed such exceptional organizational skills that his planner was considered more accurate than the official school calendar.”— Ann K. Greiner, Teacher of English, Parsippany High School
“He is a role model for our children as well as a benchmark for us all as fellow educators, mentors, and adults.”— Deanna J. Chuy, Brooklawn Middle School; parent and colleague
“For PHS students, the pride of their high school is Ron Foreso.”— Janne DeMarco, parent of a student
“Mr. Foreso is recognized as a role model by every student who has passed through PHS during the past few decades.”— Brandi M. Marks, former student, Office of the Governor of New Jersey