Educational Background
High School: A.B. Davis High School, Mount Vernon, NY
Having skipped two grades at different points when she was younger, Jessica graduated from high school at age 16.
She was an excellent student and salutatorian of her high school class, ranked second out of 420 in her graduating class.
Most of her high school activities centered around music (described elsewhere on this site). She was also a member (and officer) of other organizations, such as the San Souci French club.
13-page excerpt of high school yearbook
Pages of interest re: Jessica [24MB]
College: Eastman School of Music
George Eastman Scholarships (all four years)
(Signed by Howard Hanson, Eastman director)
Jessica was awarded the George Eastman Scholarship for each of her four years there. These certificates mention "outstanding" or "distinguished" "achievement in all regular subjects of study." The certificates were signed by Howard Hanson, the Director of Eastman, who was also a well-known composer.
She also received the Rochester Prize Scholarship. A Google search in 2025 indicated that this was prestigious but is no longer offered. The 1953 and 1957 newspaper articles shown on this page both mention it, as well as her entry in the "Student Directory" page of the 1957 Eastman Theme and Variations yearbook ( PDF excerpts), but I have not (yet) found certificates in her files showing this.
Through some careful web searching with AI tools, however, I was able to glean some more info about the Rochester Prize Scholarships.
Jessica joined Sigma Alpha Iota, an international music fraternity, in December 1954, at the end of her third semester at Eastman. At the time of her graduation, she won a certificate for the highest scholastic average for the Eastman chapter of this organization and was president of the local chapter. This two-page PDF document shows the entrance certificate and the award; a photo of the group is in the yearbook excerpts).
In the 1957 yearbook excerpt at right, the reference to M.E.N.C. in her Student Directory entry is the Music Educators National Conference (MENC), now known as NAfME, the National Association for Music Education.
Jessica majored in Public School Music Education, with a minor in piano.
Graduate School: University of Illinois
An article in the Daily Argus (the Mount Vernon, NY hometown newspaper) summarized her recent achievements and announced that she had won a stipend plus full tuition to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “On completion of her graduate work, Miss Kramer plans to teach music in the public schools.”
In May 1958, Jessica was elected to the University of Illinois chapter of Pi Kappa Lambda, the international music honary society.
The next month (June 1958), she graduated with a Master's Degree in music education.
Post-Graduate Study: St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute
From the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, as her career developed as a nursery school teacher and director, Jessica took for-credit classes at Washington University and Webster University in subjects such as Learning Disabilities, Child and Family Psychopathology, Education and Psychology of Exceptional Children, Learning Theories, and Individual Assessment in Educational Settings. These whetted her appetite to continue her studies in a more formal curriculum.
In February 1986, Jessica completed a two-year program of classes with the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute for their "Child Development Project" (CDP). The Institute accepted a new cohort of CDP students every other year. By this time, she was already the director of the Temple Israel Nursery School.
