TEACHER OF INTEREST
The ACCOMPLISHED PRINCIPAL
Principal Corey Collins Heroux speaks to students in an English class at John Carroll High School in Fort Pierce. She taught English classes for many years
at the regional Catholic school and became principal at the start of the current school year.
BY PATTIE DURHAM
With generations of educators in the family, it is
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no surprise that Corey Collins Heroux turned to
teaching as a career. Her mother, Teresita Valdivia
Collins, taught math at many different levels in
Indian River County schools while Heroux was young. But
the decades of family involvement in teaching on the Treasure
Coast date back to the late 1960s. Her maternal grandmother,
Teri Valdivia, had come with her young family from Cuba
fleeing Castro’s communist control. She spent several years
teaching Spanish at then-Dan McCarty High School and later
the newly-built Fort Pierce Central High School.
Heroux’s dedication to the daily work that she loves at
John Carroll High School in Fort Pierce led her to being
named John Carroll Teacher of the Year in 2011-12. She also
received the Lead with Zeal Award from the University of
Notre Dame’s Remick Leadership Program, through which
she earned her second master’s degree. That recognition contributed
to her appointment to assistant principal in 2016 and
to her current position as principal of the regional Catholic
high school.
As a senior at JCHS in 2004, her father printed out for her
some information on a unique program through Notre Dame.
The program, Alliance for Catholic Teaching Fellows (ACE),
ANTHONY INSWASTY PHOTOS
is a competitive search for Catholic school educators to
serve schools in low-income areas in return for a free-of-cost
master’s degree in education. Heroux applied for the program
in her senior year at Notre Dame, where she earned a
dual bachelor’s degree in English and Spanish, with a minor
in education. After graduation, she had a few weeks to rest
before she started classes for the master’s degree in education
and prepared to move into a group home shared by fellow
ACE teachers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
“The unique thing about the program is that they place
you in a community with other program participants,” she
says. “There were six of us young teachers living in a house
together in Baton Rouge. We shared living expenses and groceries.
We took online classes during the school year and then
went back to Notre Dame during the summers to take classes.
“My school was probably the most affluent of the schools
to which teachers in my house were placed. This was surprising,
as when you apply to the program, you expect to
get placed at a very low-income Catholic school. St. Michael
the Archangel High School had been with the ACE program
since it started and was a failing high school in its first years
in the program. ACE was a great program for assisting teachers
and training them. It was a great place to cut my teeth.”>>
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