Tom Porton’s remit as a teacher at James Monroe High School in the Bronx was English grammar and literature. But he taught much more: empathy, self-confidence, sophistication and, for the price of a subway token, engagement with the world that would have been beyond the reach of most teenagers in the school’s Bronx River neighborhood in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
Mr. Porton died on July 12 at 74 in an assisted living center in the Bronx. No cause was given, but he had been using a wheelchair and an oxygen tank for months, his son, Christopher Porton, said.
Mr. Porton’s title at Monroe, coordinator of student affairs, hardly captured his impact. He collaborated with Project Bravo, an H.I.V./AIDS volunteer organization affiliated with Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, to train students to educate their peers about the disease. He disbursed health information from a minivan; devised a reading and writing curriculum to motivate students to write letters of support to patients coping with the disease; and started the AIDS Lives in Every Neighborhood Players, a group of teachers who presented dramatic productions to teenagers and community organizations.
A bearded bear of a man, Mr. Porton was, in 1995, the first New York City teacher inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame. In 2011, he won a Kennedy Center/Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teacher Award. He retired in 2016.
Former students described him as their cheerleader — as the rare teacher who stimulated a love for learning by, among other means, wangling Super 8 movie cameras and assigning a class to “go out and film the world.” He persuaded students to consider — often for the first time — attending college and helped them apply.
“He introduced us to literature, film, poetry, the performing arts and the broader world — a world that was not readily available to kids in the Bronx in the early ’70s,” said David Gonzalez, a storyteller, poet and educator who graduated from Monroe in 1973.
When they learned Mr. Porton was ailing recently, a few former students, including Mr. Gonzalez and Michelle Washington, who became a teacher herself, helped organize an online memorial. It was held on Sunday over Zoom.
“I would never have had the confidence to do what I do without him,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “He changed my life forever.”
Ms. Washington, who graduated in the mid-1970s, recalled Mr. Porton’s “humanitarian way of functioning in the world before diversity, equity and inclusion became a thing.”
“We stopped seeing differences in each other,” she said. “He made it such a comfortable atmosphere for all of us, no matter where we came from or what we looked like.”
Mr. Porton “made a choice to remain at Monroe and try to influence people — that a life of service was a good thing,” Charisse Penalver, a 1976 graduate who was president of her senior class and who became a prosecutor in New Jersey, said on “The Bronx Buzz,” a cable program hosted by Gary Axelbank.
Mr. Porton would bring students to Broadway plays and encourage them to join school theatrical productions. He’d visit their homes and meet with their parents. He’d enlist students in voter registration drives and in efforts to assemble gift baskets and create greeting cards for hospital patients.
He was bursting with energy, possessing more ideas for civic engagement than the multiple pockets in the vest he wore regularly. (His students weren’t sure whether all the compartments were tailored for photographic supplies or for fishing gear.)
“He was never bombastic, was nonjudgmental,” said Charles Lane, who repeated the 10th grade three times until he became one of Mr. Porton’s acolytes (and, after graduating, earned a college degree and became a filmmaker).
Thomas Jeffrey Porton was born on Oct. 18, 1949, in Massachusetts to Jerome and Alva Porton. His father was the manager of a paper plant. After the family moved to New York, Tom Porton graduated from high school and enrolled in New York University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1969 and later a master’s degree in media ecology. He began teaching at Monroe High School in 1970.
In 2016, though, he clashed with the school’s principal, who disapproved of Mr. Porton’s distributing H.I.V./AIDS education fliers that listed nonsexual ways of “Making Love Without Doin’ It” (one suggestion: “read a book together”). Then, he said, the principal eliminated his early morning civic leadership class.
“My career has always been based on the emotional and social well-being of the child,” Mr. Porton told The New York Times after announcing his retirement that year. “Now, I don’t know where teaching is headed. I just know I can’t anymore. I find it torture. I’d rather separate myself from the classroom doing something that is distasteful and try to spend my days doing things that are important.”
Even at the New Jewish Home’s Kittay Senior Apartments in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, where he lived most recently after being in and out of hospitals for years, he established a Kindness Club for fellow residents, booking musical groups and arranging other social activities.
“I just can’t stop doing what I do,” he told Mr. Axelbank on “The Bronx Buzz.”
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Debra (Corbett) Porton; a daughter, Heather Chambers; a brother, Richard; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
“He was a man who not only stimulated your love for learning; he taught us how to love,” Sarah Mejia, another former student, said. “I’m a teacher now, and I’m able to love my students now in a way he did.”
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