WORKING OUT WITH BLP Kenneth Kopacz

Kenneth Kopacz was destined to be an educator. You might say that it’s in his blood.
“Growing up in a house with two public school educators as parents, I think I was born a public school educator,” says Kopacz, 35, who has been the principal of Washington Community School for the last five years.
His parents are career educators who have been serving New Jersey for decades. His older sister is an educator in the Jersey City Public School system, while his younger sister is a teacher at Bayonne High School. Kimberly, his wife, teaches first grade in Jersey City.
Born and raised in Bayonne, Kopacz calls himself a product of the public school system, but his first teachers were his parents.
It was his father who introduced him to baseball. “My father would come home from his second job as a machinist, and I would ask him to take me to the schoolyard for a catch,” Kopacz recalls. These times together not only fostered a passion for baseball but also taught him valuable life lessons. “He has always been my best coach because he never worried about wins and losses or hits and strikeouts. He only cared about one thing: if I played hard.”
Baseball became an important part of Kopacz’s life; he played at Bayonne High School and St. Peter’s University. “The coaches that I played for were so much more than coaches” he says. “They were mentors and guys I continue to look up to. They all saw the bigger picture.” Like his father, his coaches stressed the value of dedication and community.
After college, Kopacz returned to the elementary school he attended, Henry E. Harris School, to teach 5th grade, while coaching basketball, baseball, and football at his high school alma mater. “Those years of teaching and coaching students are memories that I will hold with me forever,” he says. His experience as a coach and an athlete has also influenced him as an educator.
For him, the best part of being principal at Washington Community School is that he gets to touch the lives of 700 students instead of just the 25 he would have in his classroom. “I get a chance to work with a strong and dynamic staff,” Kopacz says. They live by the adage, “The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book.” He says, “It is something we say to each other all the time. It’s like an unofficial motto.”
In late June Kopacz was promoted to an Assistant Superintendent of Schools in Bayonne.
He learned about volunteering from his mother who encouraged him and his sisters to make food baskets and anonymously donate them to families in need. “It is a tradition we have passed on,” he says. “A random act of kindness goes a long way.” Like teaching, he sees charitable work as a way of giving back to his community. Kopacz has served as the president of The Simpson Baber Foundation for the Autistic and as chairman of the Bayonne Economic Opportunity Foundation. “I challenge and urge all to get involved in volunteer and charity service as it is important to the cause, and the rewards are endless,” he says.
Last November, Kopacz, a Democrat, was elected Freeholder for District One in Hudson County. He has a long list of goals and will “introduce some great new ideas” to improve services, balance the budget, and expand youth programs. As a freeholder, Kopacz has another outlet to serve his community, which, he says, “means more than ever now that I have a three-year-old daughter and a son on the way.”
In keeping with his passion for baseball, he regularly turns up at Bayonne High School games or at the Little League field. “Anyone who grew up in Bayonne could tell you stories about playing on dangerous fields,” Kopacz says. “I am working toward securing funding that will allow our fields to be in the best condition.”
Fielding a few ground balls, catching pop flies, or batting some fungoes, Kopacz is still good with the bat and ball. But he says, “I will always be a teacher and coach at heart.”—BLP