Robert W. Consalvo retires from charter school’s board

“If there was something to do, people asked or I was around, that’s all,” he said.

Consalvo grew up on Metropolitan Avenue near Hyde Park High School, where his family moved around 1945. Both his parents were Italian immigrants and worked hard, his father at Westinghouse and his mother as a stitcher. They divorced while Consalvo was young, leaving his mother with much of the responsibility for raising him and his siblings.

“She was the one who was the rock in the family,” he recalled. “She raised us in kind of an old-fashioned way, to be respectful and behave and the like, and passed on the Italian traditions to us, which I hope to pass on to my kids in some way, too.”

The Consalvos were only the second Italian-American family on the street, but even then, he recalled, the neighborhood’s population was always changing, with new ethnic groups arriving in waves.

Upon his graduation from Hyde Park High in 1956, he went on to Boston College, selecting the school almost at random because he didn’t know anything about college options. After two years he left school to join the Army, where he developed his love of teaching while assigned to instruct others on how to use radar equipment.

“The service really teaches you how to teach,” he said. “You have to teach in front of a panel of sergeants and officers, and you have to practice and do lesson plans. It really was a very interesting experience.”

After returning home, Consalvo worked construction with his brother for a while. But while laboring in the sun one very hot day, he said to himself, “Am I crazy? I’m not going to do this all my life.” He then returned to Boston College and completed his studies in biology, graduating in 1964.

Consalvo became a biology teacher at Dorchester High School and completed his master’s degree at BC during his first two years of teaching. He then decided to pursue his doctorate and learned about the college’s new Educational Research, Measurement and Evaluation program.