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In a rare move, a Hartford school was recently renamed after a living person. Classical High School now boasts the name of the first Puerto Rican to lead the district.
Hernán LaFontaine was born in 1934 to a mother from Utuado and a father from Ponce, who had made Spanish Harlem their home. After some time in the U.S. military — like his Borinqueneer father — LaFontaine grew up to become a science teacher and, eventually, a school administrator. But the native New Yorker never intended to become one of the first Puerto Rican superintendents in the mainland United States.
The way he tells it: He went to a conference in 1978 for the National Association for Bilingual Education. Afterwards, he got a cold call from someone recruiting for a role in Connecticut.
“I said, ‘I haven't applied. I'm not interested. I'm very happy here. I've been my whole life in New York City. I'm not going any place,’” he recalled.
He learned a Hartford Board of Education member, María Colón Sánchez, nominated LaFontaine. She had opened the first bilingual public school in the state, La Escuelita, in Hartford, and would go on to become the first Latina elected to Connecticut’s general assembly.
So, with that strong reference, the recruiter persisted, asking LaFontaine: “Well, you know, at the very least, can you come to Hartford one time for an interview?’”
The rest is, as they say, history.
LaFontaine was known for his pioneering work in New York, where he spearheaded one of the first bilingual schools in the city. The school system at the time was focused mostly on getting kids to learn English, which LaFontaine promised they could still do in a bilingual setting.
“It wasn't a crime to speak Spanish, but there was a lot of resistance. It was a struggle trying to deal with the population that opposed the use of another language in public schools,” he said in Spanish.
As principal, he says he recruited more than a dozen bilingual teachers from Puerto Rico to Public School 25.
“At the first sixth-grade graduation, in 1970, a young lady who spoke English gave her entire speech in Spanish, and another young man who spoke Spanish gave his speech in English. I'll never forget that,” he recalled in Spanish.
He took the lessons he learned there to Connecticut, where he served from 1979 to 1991. On Oct. 7, 2025, a magnet school in the retired superintendent’s own neighborhood of Asylum Hill became Hernán LaFontaine Classical Magnet.
"It's like a fantasy to me, because it's not every day that you have the opportunity to have such a large impact in the lives of young people,” he said.
The 91-year-old superintendent emeritus is also proud to have paved the way for the Puerto Rican superintendents after him — Christina Kishimoto and Leslie Torres-Rodríguez — and others to come.
Learn more
You can read more about LaFontaine’s legacy in the full Spanish-language feature from El Nuevo Día.
