Pizza Toppings and Special Education Students Have Provided the Spice of Bob Smith’s Rewarding Professional Life
Along his professional journey, Roxborough High School teacher Bob Smith M’23 has faced the heat of the retail kitchen and the special education classroom and has the chops - including a 16-year run as successful franchise owner and a prestigious 2024 Lindback Award for distinguished teaching - to prove it.
A native of Marlton, N.J. and a history graduate of then Glassboro, now Rowan, University, Smith embarked on what he believed would be a long career in education, teaching one year in an alternative school and then next seven years in the Woodbury School District. But the early grind and admitted burnout for the young teacher, coupled with a level of familiarity and comfort with the food industry, pushed Smith out of the classroom into the purchase of a gourmet pizza franchise which he set up in Havertown, Pa. – first “Mom’s Bake at Home” and then “Bob’s Bake at Home,” when the franchise went out of business.'
“I felt the need for a change in my life, and the food industry was calling me,” Smith said. “The opportunity was there, so I jumped into it, and I left teaching. We had a good run, but at the end of the day, I was getting really tired of working 12- to 13-hour days, seven days a week, without a guaranteed paycheck and no weekends. I had a long conversation with my wife and decided that I missed teaching.”
The move was a bold one for a now middle-aged man, literally a leap out of the pizza oven and back into the education fire.
“I have not one minute of regret in returning to the classroom,” said Smith who enters his sixth year at Roxborough and has spent past three as an autistic support teacher in social studies. “I love my job. I love what I do. I love impacting kids and seeing growth. The classroom is where I belong. After all those years as an owner/operator in the food business, I realized I wanted to finish out my career where it began. I love the unique personalities that cross my classroom threshold each morning and throughout the day. I embrace the challenges that inevitably pop up and hope that students leave my classroom feeling better about themselves.”
Smith’s decision to return to his roots was further validated last spring when he was announced as a Lindback Award winner, a recognition that humbled and honored him as the third straight winner to emerge from the school in the past three years. He attributes much of the success that he has had to the transferrable skills that he brought with him from business, to his colleagues who have helped facilitate the transition, and to Holy Family University, from where he earned his master’s degree at the age of 54.
“When I made the decision to go back to teaching, I knew I wanted to get my master’s,” he said. “I needed to catch myself up on what I missed for 16 years. The program at Holy Family was pretty daunting at first. I hadn’t been a student for 30 years. My Saturday and Sunday mornings were cups of coffee and my laptop. It was so much reading, and almost all of my classmates were much younger. I used my time at Holy Family to focus on two things – improving my assessment capabilities as well as digging into the emerging educational technologies available in the classroom. This old guy learned so much! My confidence has never been higher when assessing a student’s level of performance, and I have incorporated several of the new technologies that were introduced in my studies.”
He also leveraged the important skills, maturity and life experience that he mastered in business - including building relationships, managing people, organizational and time management skills, and dealing with results - for success in education.
“My peers at Roxborough, whom I can now call my colleagues and friends, were so open to me,” Smith said. “Both the history and the special education teachers helped me to develop my approach to the classroom and to find resources that I would never have found on my own. They got me through that first year. I have tried to pay that back and show new teachers the ropes. I think being older, you have an easier time managing the classroom. The students that I work with are wonderful kids who come from supportive families which makes my ability to advocate and form relationships with their parents much easier.”
Now, when you enter the award-winning classroom of Bob Smith, you are sure to see students who enjoy being there, who are engaged and are increasingly more emotive and better equipped to dialogue back and forth as the school year progresses, and who are being prepared to be productive and self-sufficient when they age out of the program.
“There are more lucrative careers to pursue besides education, for sure,” he said. “But if you want a career that allows you to interface with people across all spectrums of life, that provides a good salary and benefits, but more importantly a high sense of self-worth, then teaching is a great choice. It is gratifying being a steady, consistent presence for my students. I am also allowed to be silly and tell Dad jokes and show a little vulnerability. Humor goes a long way to winning over classrooms. Some students still drag themselves into my classroom, despite my being in their face and welcoming them at the door every day. That’s the challenge, but eventually I will get a smile out of them. Every day is an interesting day, and I find value in what I do.”