For the past three years, John Baxter has been teaching government and law at Princeton High School. In the fall, he also will be in a classroom, but this time as a student, as he starts a master’s program at Rutgers-Newark, thanks to a James Madison Fellowship.
By: Jeff Milgram
For the past three years, John Baxter has been teaching government and law at Princeton High School. In the fall, he also will be in a classroom, but this time as a student, as he starts a master’s program at Rutgers-Newark, thanks to a James Madison Fellowship.
The fellowship will pay $24,000 of Mr. Baxter’s studies for a master’s degree in American history. The fellowship will not keep Mr. Baxter from teaching at PHS. He thinks he can complete the five-year night-school program in three years.
It will be Mr. Baxter’s first return to a college classroom since he got his law degree from Georgetown University in 1981.
"Although the past doesn’t change, our understanding of it does change," Mr. Baxter said.
He added that women’s and urban issues were ignored when he was an undergraduate in the mid-1970s.
A lawyer, Mr. Baxter also coaches Princeton High School’s mock trial team.
Mr. Baxter’s is one of 61 fellowships that were awarded by the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation, an independent part of the federal executive branch.
The fellowships are awarded on a competitive basis to college graduates who want to teach American history, American government and social studies in secondary school, and teachers of those subjects.
Before coming to PHS, Mr. Baxter taught in Maine.