Rossa Belle Cooley (October 3, 1872 – September 14, 1949) was an American educator. She taught at Hampton Institute and was the second principal of the Penn School on Saint Helena Island, South Carolina from 1904 to 1944.
Early life and education Cooley was born in Albany, New York, the daughter of LeRoy Clark Cooley and Rosa Bella Flack Cooley. Her father was a chemistry professor at Vassar College. She graduated from Vassar in 1893. Career Cooley taught at Hampton Institute as a young woman. She taught at the Penn School on Saint Helena Island beginning in 1901, and became the school's principal in 1908, succeeding Laura Matilda Towne. Grace Bigelow House was her vice-principal. She reorganized the school's curriculum along the lines of Hampton Institute's, to emphasize practical skills including carpentry and nursing. She explained, "Our object was to bring island life into the classroom—into the little world of teaching too bound up in the printed word."
Much of her work involved promotion and fundraising. She wrote two books about the school, and several articles. She visited Poughkeepsie often in this work. Her sister Mabel organized a Penn School Club at Vassar, to collect donations from the student body for Cooley's work. Ella McCaleb was president of the Penn School Club at Vassar in 1932.
Cooley was retired from her position in 1944, by the school's trustees. The school closed in 1948.
Publications America's Sea Islands (1919)Cooley, Rossa Belle. America's Sea Islands. Outlook Company, 1919. Homes of the Freed (1926) School Acres: An Adventure in Rural Education (1930) "A Day's Work at Penn's School" (1933)Cooley, Rossa B. (1930) [ "A Day's Work at Penn School" Project Reconstruction, accessed May 11, 2025. Education in the Soil (1940)Cooley, Rossa Belle. Education in the Soil. Agricultural Missions Foundation, 1940. Personal life and legacy Cooley lived with her sister in retirement. She died in September 1949, at the age of 76, in Greenport, New York."Rossa B. Cooley" The County Review (September 29, 1949): 6; via NYS Historic Newspapers. The Rossa Cooley Health Center was dedicated at the Penn Community Center in 1958. Many of Cooley's papers and photographs are in the Penn School Papers at the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
References
External links
A 1929 photograph of Rossa B. Cooley and Grace B. House, in the Jackson Davis Collection of African American Photographs, at the University of Virginia Library