Dr. Alice Geoffray: Finalist for NOLA Public School Facilities Renaming
Her 40+ Year Career Changed Countless Student Lives and Opened Equal Career Opportunities
In 1946, a young Yugoslavian woman named Nevenka Charia stood on the deck of a steamship leaving Europe. Fleeing the terror of Nazi and Communist rule, Charia was headed to America and an unknown future.
When she arrived in New Orleans, she was terrified. She knew no one. She spoke no English. She was, in her own words, a lost soul. After a period of acclimation, Charia enrolled at L.E. Rabouin Vocational High School to study business English, typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping. Charia was determined to learn how to support herself in her new country.
Fortunately, she landed in teacher Alice Geoffray’s classroom.
“…With kindness in her eyes and a friendly smile on her lips, (Alice Geoffray) kept assuring me that I would be able to learn English shorthand, and someday, in the near future, enter the business world without difficulty. This unbelievably patient and understanding teacher helped me to achieve in a few months what before seemed impossible,” Charia said in a magazine interview years later.
Charia’s story is a testament to the lasting impact Geoffray made on her students and Louisiana’s vocational education system during her 40-year career, which most famously included running the New Orleans Adult Education Center. The Center prepared Black women to integrate America’s largest corporations in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Now, to celebrate Geoffray’s tireless championship of equal opportunities, the Orleans Parish School Board is considering naming a new Career and Technical Center in her honor.
Fitting tribute for a quiet hero
Dr. Alice Geoffray. Click image to enlarge
It’s a fitting tribute to a woman, called a quiet hero by some, whose work forever changed the trajectory of countless lives.
“I am beyond excited to see her name on that list,” said daughter Jeanne Geoffray.
“Alice Geoffray fought for career and vocational education throughout her lifetime,” added son Jeff Geoffray. “If I were a student or teacher at the Career and Technology Center, I’d want to know it is named after someone who stood up for me, not once, but in thousands of instances.”
“Dr. Alice Geoffray” actually is on a shortlist of new names for buildings at two schools: McDonogh 15, which is a K-8 campus, and the old McDonogh 35 high school in Tremé, which is being transformed into the state-of-the-art vocational center. The renaming is part of a broad school board effort to strike the titles of slave owners, segregationists, and Confederate figures from 21 buildings. John McDonogh was a wealthy recluse, philanthropist, and slave owner who died in 1850.
Geoffray, who died in 2009 at age 84, is best known as director of the New Orleans Adult Education Center during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a powerhouse of social justice and social change that prepared 431 graduates for the workforce between 1965–1972. Not only did the Center teach hard skills like typing and shorthand, it also was the first to teach African American history. The Center was recognized by leaders such as U.S. Congressman Hale Boggs and National Urban League’s Clarence Barney as one of the most successful programs in Louisiana during President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.
Pamela Cole Wimbley was one of four sisters whose lives were transformed by the Center. At a 2019 reunion, Wimbley said that by graduating from it, “We exchanged a life of poverty for a life of prosperity.”
Today, the Center’s legacy lives on with The 431 Exchange, a nonprofit organization and scholarship fund founded by Geoffray’s children.
Dr. Alice Geoffray’s Career highlights
Geoffray’s accomplishments during her decades-long career extended far beyond the Center.
Click any image to enlarge
Highlights from her illustrious life:
Dr. Alice Geoffray in the Times Picayune. Click image to enlarge
In 1944, Geoffray received her bachelor’s degree from St. Mary’s Dominican College and launched her life as a wife, mother, and lifelong teacher. Perhaps inspired by the nuns who taught her in high school and college, Geoffray believed in a holistic approach to education. She felt that even students seeking technical and business education should strengthen their critical and communication skills and, ultimately, their sense of purpose and well-being.
In 1952, at the age of 28 (with five children, soon to be seven), she began teaching career education to sixth graders and most memorably organized a field trip to a newspaper printing building and guided the students’ production of a Picayune, Jr. newspaper.
As a young teacher at Rabouin Vocational High School and Francis T. Nichols Senior High School in the 1950s and early 1960s, Geoffray was named National Classroom Teacher of the Year for her imaginative approaches.
Dr. Alice Geoffray with Adult Education Center Graduates. Connie Payton ‘71 (R) and unidentified graduate (L). Click image to enlarge
In 1965, former Dominican priest Timothy Gibbons, co-founder of the Adult Education Center, brought Geoffray on board as a secretary. The role quickly turned into director when Gibbons left New Orleans. The work wasn’t easy; the Center struggled with funding and intense racial biases that even impacted the school’s ability to rent a building. Yet, in the end, the Center’s success was astounding, with 94% of graduates placed in jobs with salaries above the national average.
In 1968, Geoffray was featured in WDSU-TV Emmy-Award Winning documentary by Mel Leavitt, “The School That Would Not Die: The Story of the Adult Education Center”
Geoffray encouraged lifelong learning and led by example. She earned her master’s of education degree from Tulane University in 1970 and her Doctorate in Educational Administration from the University of New Orleans in 1978.
Dr. Alice Geoffray being honored as Louisiana’s Vocational Outstanding Educator of the Year in 1983. Click image to enlarge
Geoffray served as Louisiana’s first State Coordinator of Career Education. She crisscrossed the state in her little yellow Volkswagen to meet with teachers in nearly all 66 Parishes. She was responsible for funding scores of innovative programs, including one that would become the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Geoffray served as the director of career education, continuing education, and counseling and guidance for the Orleans Parish School System. Her accomplishments included creating a job placement center for high schoolers. There were practical programs in nursing, commercial art, printing, and typing just to name a few. In 1980 alone, more than 1,000 students were involved in work programs.
Geoffray spoke out when the school system was increasingly focused on college readiness and vocational education faced massive budget cuts. In 1980, she told the Times-Picayune, “Vocational education is an asset to college-bound students who may need, for example, to work their way through. …Even if a skill is not used as a means of earning a living, it gives students background training for fulfilling personal goals.” She added, “It’s a matter of producing doers, as well as thinkers.”
In 1983, Geoffray was named Louisiana’s Vocational Educational Teacher of the Year.
Geoffray co-authored four textbooks, including Communication Skills for Succeeding in the World of Work (McKnight Publishing and McGraw Hill); Pounding the Pavement (Louisiana State University Press); A Crash Course in College Cash (University of New Orleans Press); and Business and Professional Speech (published by the Adult Education Department in conjunction with St. Mary’s Dominican College).
In 1987, renowned journalist Angela Hill produced a special television documentary series featuring Geoffray. Called “Quiet Heroes,” it aired on CBS affiliate WWL-TV. In the documentary, Hill said Geoffray’s “career, her life, has been teaching students the importance of having a dream, then showing them how to make that dream come true.”
Geoffray received multiple awards in her lifetime, including the New Orleans Martin Luther King Torch Bearer Award in 2001.
A change agent who made a lasting impact
“She did more to expand and keep alive high school career and technical education while she worked for the New Orleans Public School District than any other person,” said longtime schools director Rose Drill Peterson. “Alice had to overcome many barriers to push for these programs… She did this with enthusiasm and optimism.”
“She forged a path that taught us how to be successful for students,” Peterson added, “by thinking and acting boldly.”
Geoffray was a change agent who created other change agents. In doing so, New Orleans, its school system, and the country are better for her efforts.