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.
That work produced a series of inquiry-based curriculum units to be taught in social studies classes, as well as professional guidance for teachers with context and background materials supported by book studies such as Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You. Hobson said the goal is to implement an anti-bias, anti-racist (ABAR) pedagogy. “We’re trying to create essential studies for students that engage multiple perspectives as culturally responsive curricula,” he said. “We engaged a lot of folks, including state leaders, and now these inquiries that we developed have replaced the multiple-choice assessments [SOL tests] for social studies credit statewide.”
Hobson said his background is more in secondary education rather than elementary, and that his “reason for leadership is really around the instructional side of things.” “What I’ve told the staff is, you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast,” he said. “It’s really about cultivating what has already been a positive culture and trying to create a sense of belonging for all students, and to use that as a foundation. We can do that by leveraging our collective capacity to make real change.” He has told every eighth-grade teacher that he’ll teach a lesson in their advisory period. “My best mentors have always considered themselves, in different roles, a teacher first.”
Since principal Beth Costa’s seven-year tenure ended in 2022, Henley has had two two-year principals in succession before Hobson. Although Henley scores well in the state’s performance framework and its overall SOL pass rates are above district and state averages, Hobson noted there are wide achievement gaps for economically disadvantaged students in reading and math. “Climate surveys show a lot of those children aren’t feeling that sense of belonging at school for a variety of reasons,” he said. “I’m tasking our mental health support specialist to really focus on chronic absenteeism [this year] and get to the roots of it. Sometimes for families it comes down to a little bit of, ‘do we trust the school?’”
Hobson and his wife Vicki—a former county elementary teacher and now a professor at Longwood University—have two sons in the system, one entering 7th grade at Henley and the other a freshman at Western Albemarle High. He described his wife as a close collaborator and “my biggest confidant,” and outside of work he’s an outdoors person, enjoying hiking, kayaking, and following his sons’ sports activities. Welcome, Principal John Hobson!
