{"id":5084737,"date":"2017-04-10T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ctlatinonews.com\/hartfords-new-superintendent-a-product-of-citys-school-system\/"},"modified":"2017-04-10T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T04:00:00","slug":"hartfords-new-superintendent-a-product-of-citys-school-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinonewsnetwork.com\/ctln\/2017\/04\/10\/hartfords-new-superintendent-a-product-of-citys-school-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Hartford's New Superintendent A Product of City's School System"},"content":{"rendered":"

Photo credit: Inquiring News.com
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\nIt was the late 1980s, the dawn of the notorious gang wars in Connecticut’s capital city that plunged sunny days into darkness, when a petite ninth-grader at Hartford Public High School found her escape hatch.
\nThe girl had been restless in English class, frustrated with the rote traditions and predictability. She asked why school couldn’t be more interesting until her teacher finally had enough of the criticism: “Leslie, do you ever stop talking? If you don’t like things around here, then you<\/em> should become a teacher.”<\/p>\n

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“I said, ‘No, no, no,'” recalled Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, now 42, in her corner office in a downtown high-rise, the conference table decorated with a fresh bouquet of congratulatory flowers from her mother. “‘I’m going to become a principal.'”
\nTorres-Rodriguez remembers saying: “That way, I will be in charge.” She also envisioned a career that could be her way out of Hartford, away from the poverty and violence that cut down her friends and neighbors in drug-infested turf battles that peaked in the 1990s, ripping families apart.<\/p>\n

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