Jessica Friedlander

Education in education

As described on the educational background page on this site, Jessica's undergraduate and graduate degrees were in music education. Thus, after getting married and moving to St. Louis in the summer of 1958, she indeed worked in music education until Rachel and David were born. Then after a break, she returned with early childhood music and then early childhood education generally.

Conway School, Ladue School District

After graduating from UIUC in June 1958 with her master's degree and getting married in July 1958 in New York, Jessica moved to St. Louis. That fall she started her first job out of graduate school, doing exactly what she had trained to do: public school music. She taught vocal and instrumental music for grades 1 to 7 at The Conway School (now Conway Elementary School) in the Ladue School District, a community about four miles from Jessica and Michael's apartment in Clayton. (Both Ladue and Clayton are in St. Louis County, just west of the City of St. Louis.)

She taught there for two school years (September 1958 to May 1960), but did not return for the following year because Rachel was born that August.

One notable aspect to this was that some of her Conway students turned up as parents of prechoolers when she was at Temple Israel Nursery School roughly twenty years later. Those parents were floored that this was the same "Mrs. Friedlander" they had as their music teacher decades before. (This happened multiple times to her!)

Washington University, private teaching

During the 1961-1962 school year, Jessica was a part-time instructor in piano and harpsichord in the Washington University Department of Music. Around this time, she also began to perform with the Early Music Society. In addition, she taught private students.

She did not return to the Music Department for the fall of 1962 because Michael had won a Guggenheim Fellowship, so they spent the year in London.

Temple Israel Nursery School

An inaugural staff member of T.I.N.S.

In 1970, Temple Israel, a Reform congregation in the St. Louis suburb of Ladue, announced that they were opening a nursery school that fall. The founding director was Joy Dubinsky, who had taught at the Washington University Nursery School for five years. (She had been David's teacher there.) Jessica was hired in March as an inaugural staff member as music specialist and an assistant classroom teacher, starting in September. The following February (1971) she was promoted to be a lead teacher.

Folk Songs

It was during these years that Jessica shared with the children her love of folk songs. She believed that they were immediately grasped by young children, and could also serve to introduce the children to other cultures across the country and from around the world. Her music lessons were engaging for children and parents alike. She presented her views on music and young children in numerous places over the years, including an invited workshop on Music and Preschoolers presented in May 1996 to the Child Day Care Association of St. Louis. (This is more than 20 years after she was introducing such concepts at Temple Israel!)

She also built up a collection of such music, shown at the bottom of this page.

Jessica's 1974-75 TINS class

At some point along the way between 1979 and 1983, the school was renamed to be the Deutsch Nursery School of Temple Israel. (For example, see the brochure below.)

In January 1983, Jessica made a recording of herself singing, accompanying herself on autoharp, on cassette tape (to be duplicated for children at the nursery school?) with a variety of songs. It includes songs in Swahili and other international sources. Linked below is Side B of the cassette (technical problems prevented archiving Side A, at least as encountered 40+ years later trying to digitize it).

1983 cassette tape of Jessica singing with autoharp

Undated: appreciation
for workshop

Over the years, Jessica made many presentations and developed workshops on a variety of topics. Because of classes she had taken and extensive outside reading, her talks were informed by and liberally sprinkled with references to research or other leading figures in the field of early childhood. This occurred over more than 16 years (1980-1996, at least), encompassing her tenure at both Temple Israel and the Ethical Society (see below).

Examples include a December 1980 workshop she led entitled Helping Children Deal with Death and The Importance of Play, which she presented at the fall 1983 Open House for the nursery school near the start of the school year. (These are her working notes, and both are hand-written and pre-computer for her!)

March 1983: Jewish Preschools article
See middle of column 2, paragraph #4

Winter 1982: Jessica with children at table
Photo by David

Fall 1983: Jessica with autoharp and child
Parent and Toddler program, Temple Israel
Photo by David

July 1986: TINS summer program
Photo by David

1983ca: TINS brochure
Photos by David (first three photos)

Forest Park Community College

After Jessica elected to leave the Temple Israel Nursery School in the summer of 1987, she spent the following academic year, 1987-1988, as Child Development Field Trainer for the St. Louis Community College at Forest Park. This was a mentoring role, helping student teachers who planned to go into early childhood education at either day care centers or nursery schools/preschools, and were earning Child Development Associate degrees.

Ethical Society Nursery School

1988-Summer: Ethical Society newsletter,
page 4 announcement of Jessica's hiring
Here's the full 4-page newsletter.

By the late spring of 1988, Jessica had been named director of the Ethical Society (of St. Louis) Nursery School. She already knew prior longtime directors of the school, and had admired their philosophy of early childhood education, as it meshed closely with hers.

In addition to director duties, she also brought her distinctive music lessons to the school environment.

Nuturing the children also meant exposing them to all sorts of ideas, so she presented the Science of Sound to children, helped them navigate the death of a pet at school, and helped coordinate an introduction to civil rights issues at levels that preschoolers could understand. For example, the unfairness of people not being allowed to sit where they pleased on public buses, during a unit on Rosa Parks. (See the 1998 newsletter below for another such example.)

Jessica accompanies paper towel
horn parade
Photo by David (1989)

1990: Carpool pickup at ESNS
Photo by Michael

1994ca: ESNS parent letter
Jessica with children on playground
Photo by Judy (199x)
The Ethical Society of St. Louis,
an architecturally notable building
Preschool classrooms appear at right.
Photo by David (1994)

1998-01-22: ESNS newsletter
about civil rights and more

In January 2019, nearly 20 years after Jessica retired, she was invited to give remarks at the 50th anniversary celebration of the Ethical Society Nursery School. Her comments showed the sweep of excellence of the school, across its history, with examples of creativity in teaching (e.g, "Michael Angelos" and Rosa Parks).

Some sample kudos from parents and teachers

Over the years many parents and teachers wrote to Jessica to thank her for her good influence on their children and them.

Highlighted here are but a small sampling from well over one hundred notes of appreciation she received over the years from parents, teachers, and others. You can read these on the kudos page on this site.

Zelda Epstein Day Care Center

Although Fred had consulted Jessica for years for advice about the day care center, she was asked to join the Board of Directors by 1994 or so, and served there for more than ten years. She strongly encouraged the Center to seek and obtain NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children) accreditation, showing adherence to national standards for early childhood care and education.

In late September 2004, the executive director of the day care center resigned, giving only about ten days notice. Jessica, who had retired from the Ethical Society Nursery School in May 1999, was approached and asked whether she would serve as interim director. She agreed.

She acted as director for five+ months until March 2005, when a new director was hired and began. Jessica really enjoyed being with children, parents, and teachers once again, but it was very difficult for her, health-wise, due to asthma incidents of increasing severity.

Unfortunately, four months later, by July 2005, there was turmoil in the director position, and the new director left. The Zelda Board again approached Jessica asking for a second stint as interim director. She agreed once more, but stipulated that (due to her health concerns) that she would need to leave before the end of the upcoming December (2005).

2004: INDEECO at 75: pages
about Zelda Epstein and ZEDCC
(Jessica quoted here, too.)

Dec. 2004: Jessica leads holiday party
Photo by Michael

Jan. 2005 Zelda Zipper newsletter
includes music article by Jessica

Lisa Dukakis visit to ZEDCC

Interesting aside: In August 1988, Lisa Dukakis, the daughter-in-law of U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, visited "Zelda" as part of a campaign stop in St. Louis. Jessica (not yet even on the Board) was asked to meet her at the airport. This visit yielded articles in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Clayton Journal, and elsewhere (shown in same document as Dukakis letter, at left).

AEYC

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) is perhaps the leading organization for early childhood education in the U.S. Their web site states:

Together with our members, community partners, and network of Affiliates across the country, we proudly ensure that the early childhood profession exemplifies excellence and is recognized as performing a vital role in society. Alongside you, NAEYC is the national voice of the early childhood community.

The NAEYC also encourages schools to attain NAEYC accrediation, a rigorous process to prove excellence in educational offerings.

For more than 35 years, Jessica was active in the St. Louis ( STLAEYC) and Missouri ( MOAEYC) organizations. She was honored with an Outstanding Service Award in 1990, as detailed on the Awards page on this site. After being notified of this award, she was asked to submit a CV, for which she included an "AEYC Activities" section, which detailed the breadth of her involvement (so "present" means 1990 below!) :

• Member of Association for the Education of Young Children, 1970 - present Board member of STLAEYC , August 1979—May 1983
• Membership Chairman 1979—1981
• Recording Secretary 1981—1983
• Regional Coordinator for Accreditation, August 1989—present
• Member of Directors' Group, STLAEYC , August 1979—present
• Member of Accreditation Teams, Missouri Board for Voluntary Accreditation of Early Childhood Programs, 1985—present
• Workshop Presentations at conferences
• Member of Committees (She said there were too many to mention over the years and she did not keep a list.)
• Action Grants (presently co-chair)
• Program (State Conferences, STLAEYC Curriculum Conferences, and STLAEYC planning)
• Directors Interest Group (program planning)

And continuing after 1990, there was more, for example:

• May 1992: "Science in the Curriculum" [6pp PDF] (Spring Curriculum Conference of STLAEYC). This document had her specific suggestions to teachers for effective lessons. Then it included lesson plans from Jessica and several of her teachers. Hers was on the Space Shuttle Endeavor on page 6.

Accreditation

She was always keenly interested in the accreditation process, on both sides of the desk: She made sure that the schools where she was director were themselves AEYC-accredited (which involved fundamental quality of the school and a lot of paperwork to demonstrate they were ensuring that processes were defined and followed). Additionally she was actively involved in being part of or leading accreditation teams travelling to other other schools across the St. Louis area. Her files show her participation in these teams as far back as 1985 and at least up until December 2006.

Library Thing

The image and link below show 21 books of children's folk songs that Jessica had retained, even 25 years after her retirement. Some of these were more like thin pamphlets but numerous others were 10x12" half-inch thick hardbound books. These were cataloged in Library Thing, a great (and free) online book cataloging web site (with an accompanying iPhone app).

The link below takes you to the Folk Songs collection of her and Michael's overall library, where you can click on individual titles or view as a list to get much more information. (She gave away large portions of her own library circa 2019, and those items were not cataloged by David (which occurred in 2021-2023).)