In honor of Women’s History Month, we spoke with Dr. Rhonda Richetta, the Principal of City Springs Elementary / Middle School, since January 2005. City Springs has partnered with Baltimore Curriculum Project (BCP) since 1996. Dr. Richetta, who first came to City Springs as a special educator in the late 1990s, has seen many changes to the East Baltimore Perkins Square neighborhood that City Springs has served since the 1960s.
Here she shares her unexpected path to school leadership, the women who inspired her, and the mantras that feed her passion for education.
Q: Did you always want to be a teacher?
A: I wanted to be a teacher, but I never wanted to be a principal. I was happy being a teacher. I never wanted to come out of the classroom. I was a special educator for 20 years before becoming an assistant principal and then principal.
When I first started college, I wasn’t thinking about being a teacher. I either wanted to be a psychologist or a lawyer. I started off at East Stroudsburg University as a psychology major and took a class called The Psychology of the Exceptional Child. The person who taught it was from the university’s education department. I found that course so interesting. Sometimes I would stay after class and talk to the professor. That professor convinced me to switch my major to teaching.
Q: What was your first teaching position?
A: I taught for six years in my hometown of Easton, Pa. When I moved to Baltimore, I started as a special educator at other Baltimore City Public Schools before moving to City Springs as its special educator in 1997.
Q: Who was your early female role model?
A: Definitely my mother. She was a very strict mother, but there was one thing she used to say to me over and over: “’I can’t’ is not a word in the dictionary.” I would tell her that it was two words, and she’d answer “Exactly, not a word in the dictionary.” When she died, I had a dog tag made with her fingerprint on one side and that saying on the other. The other thing she used to say to me all the time was, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” I said that to myself when I first became principal at City Springs. That first year was a very, very challenging year.
Now I have a sign in my office with that phrase. The other sign reads, “Never, never give up.” I also got that saying from my mother. That was my mom all the way whether I was in school, learning gymnastics, learning to swim and dive. She did not believe in giving up.
I still repeat these phrases today. When someone tells me that I can’t do something, my comeback is always, “’I can’t’ is not a word in the dictionary,” and my “I’ll show you” attitude takes over.
Q: Any female mentors in your educational career?
A: City Springs’ former Principal, Bernice Whelchel. She was my assistant principal when I was a teacher at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary Middle School in Baltimore. She left to become the Principal at City Springs. I actually quit teaching for one year because I had become very disgruntled with the system. I sold real estate for a year. That whole year I was miserable because I really, really missed teaching. Every holiday, I would think about what I would be doing with my kids and classroom that day. I was embarrassed to tell my friends that I missed it because I had complained loudly about teaching and how I was going to have a “normal job.” I felt like I couldn’t go back because I had made this decision.
I got a phone call at the end of the summer [1997] during that year from Mrs. Whelchel , asking what she needed to do to convince me to return to teaching. I said, “Nothing.” I told her how much I missed teaching and that I would love to come back. She said that she had this whole speech planned, but I told her she didn’t need it.
Q: Where there’s a will, there’s a way, right?
A: Absolutely! But it was really good for me to leave for that year because what I learned from that was 1) teaching is what I really loved to do and that I wasn’t going to let anything outside of my classroom influence me like that. And 2) that year gave me such a sense of gratitude for being a teacher. Since then, I have always had this idea of not letting things bother me. I don’t complain. I come in every day and do my job to the best of my ability. When I returned to the classroom, I promised myself that I would enjoy my work regardless of what is happening at North Avenue [Baltimore City Public School headquarters]. I was just going to savor my life and career.
Q: Is this still your approach 19 years later as Principal at City Springs?
A: It’s why I am still here. I could’ve retired by now. When people ask when I am going to retire, I tell them that I will when I stop loving my job. But it will probably be before that, because I’ll be too old to keep working. I can’t imagine getting to a place where I don’t love this place anymore.
Q: How did you become Principal at City Springs?
A: I was here as a special educator, and Mrs. Whelchel convinced me to go to a district summer institute to train to be an IEP chair to run all the IEP meetings. She wanted me to learn as much as I could. At the end of the training, the district offered me a job as an IEP chair at another school. I told them I had just done the training to support my role at City Springs, but because the training was grant-funded, I was required to take the new position. I spent two years as an IEP chair at a high school and was not happy. I was mostly doing compliance paperwork. I left that position after a year and was the special education department head and teacher at an alternative high school.
I had begun to do the assistant principal duties at that high school since we were down that position. I told the principal that I didn’t want to be an assistant principal, but she kept pushing me. One day, she asked if I realized that I was doing the actual job without the pay or title. She said I might as well get paid for it, so I went through the assessment and passed, and my name was placed on the district’s list of eligible assistant principals.
Then I received another phone call from Mrs. Whelchel. She asked if I wanted to come back to City Springs and be her assistant principal. I told her that I would love to return to City Springs as anything!
Q: Was that a new role at City Springs?
A: Yes, because when I worked with her before, she never had an assistant principal. She always said that she didn’t need one. In my first year in 2005 as Assistant Principal, one day in October, she asked me to walk with her around the school. As we walked the hallways, she told me that she was retiring in December, in just a few months. I remember raising my voice and asking how she could do this to me? What if I didn’t like the new person? She assured me that I would get along fine with the new principal because it was going to be me.
After that day, she started coming in every morning and leaving at 11 a.m. She called me every hour to ask how things were going and coached me through any issues. We did that until she left in December, and I became principal.
Q: What did her confidence in your abilities mean?
A: It means more to me now looking back than it did in the moment. I really couldn’t see at the moment how important [becoming Principal] was for my life and for my growth as an educator and as a woman. Now I look back and see how much Mrs. Whelchel. believed in me. She saw me in a way that I wasn’t capable of seeing myself, but she was right because I did a good job. I took on this role and I gave it my all. And I think she knew I would do that.
That whole “Never, never give up”, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” and “I’ll show you attitude.” Mrs. Whelchel knew that no matter what, I was going to figure it out. That’s how I felt my first couple of years. I sat in the Principal’s Office on the day she left, thinking, “What now? How the heck did this happen?” I remember telling myself that the school was in my lap now and that I was going to give it my best and find a way.
Q: How have you seen City Springs evolve?
A: I brought a lot of things to City Springs that were not here before. When Bernice took over as Principal, City Springs was in deep trouble and close to state takeover. It had the lowest test scores in the state and was considered one of the worst schools in Baltimore City. She turned things around with an unwavering focus on academics. At the time, we didn’t have anything extra. No art, recess, or sports. She said that every second kids had to be learning. She was a woman on a mission, and test scores started to rise and City Springs became one of the top schools in terms of test scores in the city.
For the four years I was gone from City Springs, she decided to stop using the Direct Instruction program with fidelity. When I returned, scores had dropped. The morale was terrible amongst the staff. It was a different place. There’s a reason why BCP promotes DI implementation with fidelity in all their schools because it is very successful.
One of the first things I did was return to implementing DI with the fidelity that I knew would be successful. I met with the National Institute for Direct Instruction (NIFDI), and we returned to a schoolwide implementation of the NIFDI model of DI. Once we did, things started to change.
Q: How did you handle low morale and increasing discipline issues?
A: In my first few months as Principal, my phone in my office rang constantly with teachers calling for help to break up fights in classrooms. People from the district kept coming to tell me that I needed to get test scores back up. I knew that we needed to change the culture of the school before we could start learning anything.
After my first year, I talked to Muriel Berkeley, who co-founded BCP and was the President and CEO at the time, and asked if she knew of a program that could help change the school climate. She told me that she had heard of something called Restorative Practices but didn’t know much about it, but that she’d pay for me to attend a weeklong training. When I went to the training that summer, I just knew that Restorative Practices was what we needed. I brought Restorative Practices to Baltimore City in 2006, and all other BCP schools began using it. Today, public schools across the city and State use it.
Q: City Springs is known for its sports programs. How did they come about?
A: Our sports program came from my own background. My family was very sports minded. My brother, my cousins, and I all played sports. My parents had season tickets to the Philadelphia Eagles, and I was a girl who followed football. My uncle was the most well-known wrestling coach in Easton. I really wanted the kids at City Springs to have the experience that I had as a child because I have such great memories of watching and playing sports.
2025 City Springs Volleyball Team
I wanted to be the only school in the City that had a high-school-type of athletics program for elementary and middle school students. We added wrestling, golf, baseball, and four football teams. We joined leagues and outside rec leagues because there were no other schools for us to play. For middle school, we played Baltimore’s private schools like Gilman and McDonough during their bye weeks. We had cheerleading, stepping, anything we could think of. If we could find a way, we added it.
Q: What did you learn about the school and yourself during your early years as Principal?
A: The most amazing thing to me was that no matter what we added to the school, our kids excelled at it. Then I started to realize that I could look through the school and see the hidden talent. There’s all this talent that is hiding behind the classroom walls. We need to discover that talent in our students. And the only way we’re going to do that is to provide them access to opportunities. The more opportunities we provided for them, the more talent just blossomed in our school.
I’ll never forget when we started baseball. Our kids knew absolutely nothing about the game. I went to the first game and was sitting on the team bench. It was the top of the first inning. After three outs, our team came running off the field, and one kid asked me if we’d won the game. We ended up winning the championship that year and beat fellow BCP school, Hampstead Hill Academy. Their team had been the champions in the league for three years in a row, and we broke their streak. When the championship game ended, my dear friend and principal of HHA, Matt Hornbeck, told me that I broke his heart. That’s City Springs. That’s what we do. We are City Springs Tough!
When we brought back NIFDI, and added Restorative Practices, and our athletic program, the whole culture changed. Kids were excited to be here. They started to feel the joy of learning.
Q: How did Purple Power come about?
A: Purple has always been my favorite color. After my first year as Principal, I decided that summer that I needed to send a message that it’s a new day at City Springs. I called my mom and told her that I was going to paint the school purple and make our colors purple and white. After that first day of school, purple became our identity.
We had a sports program but an old, dilapidated, shameful playground. I would get out of my car every morning, look at it and pray to God to help me to turn it into something that they deserve. There was a basketball court, but we couldn’t use it because there were weeds growing up in the cracks. Sometimes I would let the kids go out there and play, but I would go out there first with gloves and pick up the needles and the beer bottles, because that’s what went on there at night.
I had this dream of the kind of athletic complex that independent schools have. I started a committee and a campaign to get one. It took us seven years, but eventually we had the money to build the Purple Field. I convinced the turf company to make the turf purple for the same price as green turf, which was approved by the City Schools CEO. I didn’t tell anyone at City Springs, so on the day when the company laid the turf, the whole school watched them unroll purple turf. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Q: What is your vision for what public education needs to be?
A: Baltimore City Public Schools do not get the accolades that we deserve. We are doing really good work in this city despite the challenges that we have. I think that a lot of people who are not educators don’t understand that our work in Baltimore, in any urban center, is very different from the suburbs.
There are so many good things happening in Baltimore City Public Schools. In a recent, national report, “City Schools’ students have the second largest growth in reading nationally since 2022 among large urban school districts, [and] City Schools is also one of five large urban school districts that are performing better in reading than before the pandemic.” We are doing great work and don’t get the credit that we deserve.
Q: In honor of Women’s History Month, how do you empower young women at City Springs to have the same kind of empowered life that you had?
A: I love having one-on-one conversations with girls. I tell them that they can be anything they want to be. I tell them that they need to want it badly because it’s going to take hard work but that they can do anything. Remember: “I can’t” is not a word in the dictionary.
As a girl, I was inspired by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy because she was an educated woman with a college degree and career of her choice before she married JFK. I grew up in a very Italian home, and my father believed that women get married and have children. When I told my dad that I wanted to go to college, he said it was a waste of money. That just made me more determined that I was going to college. My there’s a will, there’s a way. My mom really advocated for me, and I went to college.
I love when I meet somebody who is in a career that is typically not a career that women go into. I always ask them to come to City Springs and talk to my students. It’s really important for our girls to see themselves in careers that are not traditionally for girls. I believe in girl power.