If you saw the way people have responded to him in public, you’d think he was a star. And to many, he is. He’s a longtime area grade-school art teacher.
On a simple errand to grab one or two items at the supermarket, you could feasibly bump into John Fossa as the two of you are headed inside, and you’d be on your way out with a brimming basket of groceries before Fossa has even picked up one thing he needed. It’s because everyone knows Mr. Fossa, and everyone wants to say hello.
“He has been teaching for so many years that it’s impossible for him to go anywhere without running into former students,” Fossa’s wife, Tricia Fossa, wrote in an email to The Signal. “What always warms my heart is that he always remembers their names and something about them that was special, no matter how many years it has been. The kids are always kind of shocked that he remembers them. Many of his former students are now in their 30s, and if they see him out and about, they will let him know what an impact he had on them.”
Fossa, who’s 55 years old, was born and raised in Beverly, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. He told The Signal in an interview that he doesn’t have some amazing story about how he got to where he is today. He laughed, saying he recalled watching the Olympics over the summer and seeing very compelling stories about how some athletes found their sport, how they got to the Olympics.
“Their life stories are so awesome,” he said. “I don’t think I have any awesome story. I didn’t get struck by lightning or anything like that. I never thought I was going to be a teacher. I thought I’d be an architect.”
But back in the early 1980s, as his high school years went on, he found himself straying away from the math and physics and science classes, the ones he’d need to get into architecture.
“I wasn’t enjoying those classes,” Fossa said, “really because I wasn’t putting in the time it takes to actually get satisfaction from or to get the success of being in classes like that.”
Fossa leaned into being more social-services-oriented, but even that didn’t seem to be what he was looking to do. He ultimately felt he wanted to make an impact on people earlier in their lives.
“I don’t mean to belittle social work,” he said, “but at the time I felt like, ‘If only someone could’ve helped these people 10 years ago.’”
After high school, Fossa went to U. Mass, Boston, and double-majored in social psychology and elementary education. He graduated in 1991 and was, as he said, recruited from there to the Newhall School District.
Fossa attended a job fair at the Ritz Carlton in Boston, and he sat down in a kind of speed-dating setting, meeting potential employers for 10-minute interviews. NSD was one of the school districts he met, and they told him they’d love to have him.
Fossa didn’t waste any time. He took a job as a fourth-grade teacher at Wiley Canyon Elementary School, thinking he’d perhaps get the experience and eventually go home to Massachusetts. But he fell in love with the area.
In 1995, when Stevenson Ranch Elementary School opened, he took a job there as a fourth-grade teacher, but he’d also teach third and sixth grade. He even worked as assistant principal there, though it was nothing like he thought.
“I didn’t love it,” he said. “I think I was too young, honestly. My principal at the time was encouraging me to do it, and I didn’t hate it, but it definitely showed me that I cared about teaching more. I think it’s the same with sports where a player becomes a coach. The skills are so different — being an effective coach versus being an effective hockey player or whatever.”
As Fossa developed his teaching style, he said he felt at one point that something was missing. He worried his students weren’t using their creativity, which he believed was an important skill to develop as they went through school.
And so, he set a personal goal to learn how to teach art. Fossa would go back to school to get an art credential. Along the way, he picked up art as quite the hobby for himself.
Fossa had been teaching a little over a decade when, in 2007, an opportunity came up that seemed perfect for him and what he wanted to do.
“We were getting this arts block grant funding from the state,” he said. “The superintendent was looking for ways we could use this money, and we put a proposal out to create a position for a traveling art teacher, kind of modeling it after the traveling music teachers who went from school to school. The school board liked the idea, and I was lucky enough that they hired me. I went from school to school — all 10 schools that we had — one hour here, one hour there, and I’d go from class to class.”
According to Suzan Solomon, NSD governing board president, Fossa’s vast instructional knowledge and experience, coupled with his artistic abilities, gave students enriching opportunities to learn new skills, appreciate the arts, and learn about themselves.
“When California finally recognized art as part of core education and gave schools money to move forward to teach the art standards,” she said, “who knew we had a secret art-talented teacher who open-heartedly took on creating, implementing and teaching the visual arts in the classroom at all campuses?”
Right away, Fossa saw the rewards of the work he was doing.
“Really, what it comes down to is that sense of agency,” he said. “I’ve literally had students shout out in class, ‘I did it!’ when they got the sculpture to stand up or the wire to work the right way or whatever it was they were doing. I can tell you that doesn’t happen on a math test.”
What he found to be most exciting was that students were creating something, not just memorizing material that other people thought up and wanted students to commit to memory. That’s powerful, he said.
According to former student Kyla Jones, who’s a senior screenwriting student at the University of Southern California, Fossa’s visits to her classes in the early 2010s at Valencia Valley Elementary School were always the highlights of the week. He made art fun, she said, and he gave students the freedom to explore their creativity.
“Then there were the times we ran into him at school functions,” she told The Signal in an interview. “You could very much feel the energy. Everybody was going up to him purely just to check in. It was like he was that fun uncle you got to see on special occasions.”
One of the school functions that Jones spoke about was the district’s art gallery exhibition. Jones and her classmates weren’t the only ones to enjoy those. Fossa said he loved those events where students from all 10 schools in the district could show off their work.
“The best,” Fossa added, “is when the students are standing there — this happened so many times — and people walk up and say nice things about the artwork while the student is there. And anonymously there. The person doesn’t know, ‘Oh, that’s the kid who painted that.’ And for the students to just hear the way other people react to what they did is really cool.”
According to Solomon, Fossa was instrumental in creating that exhibition, which has since become a highly touted district tradition, she said, something that goes on to this day, even though Fossa is now no longer involved.
“When John Fossa was offered the opportunity to teach art in the William S. Hart Union High School District,” Solomon said, “we in the NSD were sad to lose such a treasure, but we were also very happy for him to be able to expand his career. We also know that our students today who promote into the Hart district still have the chance to experience his great talent, appreciate the arts and learn about themselves.”
The Hart district opportunity to teach art came three years ago. Fossa’s curiosity, just like when the traveling art teacher job came up, pushed him into it.
“Someone texted me and said, ‘Hey, there’s an opening at Hart, I think you might be interested in it,’” Fossa said. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, I really would be.’ And it wasn’t that I was unhappy with Newhall, but in a way, I felt like it (his time at NSD) had kind of run its course.”
Hart High Principal Jason d’Autremont was surprised Fossa wanted the job.
“He applied kind of out of nowhere,” d’Autremont said. “Because I know he’d had a long successful career in the Newhall School District. We were super thrilled and lucky to be able to get him. No. 1: He knows a lot of students coming out of the Newhall School District that obviously matriculated into Hart High School, for the most part. And No. 2: His calm, his here-for-the-right-reasons demeanor and his engagement with students is always the best. He really, truly wants to see them succeed, whether it’s in art or whether it’s in anything academically.”
Fossa’s wife added, “I think what makes him (Fossa) stand out as a truly gifted teacher is that he spent about 15 years of his 34 years of teaching as a traveling art teacher in the district. The traveling was where he would be in another teacher’s classroom while the classroom teacher observed him. His colleagues, who I have met at social events or at the local market, have shared with me how much they admire his teaching and how much they learned from watching the way he controls a room. It is almost magical.”
As a high school teacher now, Fossa can experience what so many elementary school teachers would love, which is to see how the kids turn out.
“I have students who were students of mine in third grade,” he said. “And here they are again, coming back for another round.”
During the first week back to school earlier this month, students got right to work on art projects. In Fossa’s first-period art class that Friday, sophomores and seniors were creating their own magazine covers and producing sketches in their art journals that, as sophomore Anthony Arteaga said, could be anything of their choosing.
Senior Anna Paulsen told The Signal that the class was studying the elements of art and practicing technical skills as she herself worked on a unique design of her own, utilizing line, pattern, color and balance.
Javier Ortega, who was also a senior in the room that day, said he picked up an interest in drawing last year when he took another one of Fossa’s art classes. Ortega has been drawing ever since, he said, adding that he carries his sketchbook around with him almost everywhere, always drawing.
One of the big projects Fossa led while he’s been at Hart was the new mural on campus, which was right around the corner from his classroom on the side of the school’s multipurpose room wall. It was a controversial project, related to the mascot change back in 2021, but Fossa used it to bring people together.
He met with the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians (whose ancestors were the first people to inhabit the Santa Clarita Valley), and he met with the students interested in painting a mural, with Hart administration and also with the school district to figure out what kind of mural they were going to create. The idea was to show respect for and honor the land.
“The students came up with a whole bunch of ideas,” Fossa said. “We passed those on to the principal, and he passed them on to the school board. The process was really interesting.”
Fossa and those students involved did the project during the 2022-23 school year. They worked during their lunch breaks and after school. The group of volunteers grew in numbers over the course of the undertaking.
“When you think about what you want art to do, you want it to bring people together,” Fossa said. “These people probably disagreed on the concept of a mascot change, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, they were working on a project together and became friends.”
Fossa added that these kinds of projects put the football player painting alongside the band member. When two diametrically opposed students are working elbow to elbow on a project, he said, it’s hard not to respect the other person.
According to d’Autremont, such outcomes haven’t gone unnoticed.
“He (Fossa) has truly been an asset for our high school,” the Hart principal said. “With our other new ceramics teacher, the two of them have taken our fine arts program to another level. They’ve collaborated well and their classes are bursting at the seams.”
And all of that, according to Fossa’s wife, continues to make it difficult for Fossa to run errands in the town where he lives and works. Fossa, however, doesn’t mind. In fact, he loves it.
“I know teachers who say, ‘I cannot teach in the place that I live,’” he said. “I’m the opposite. I think it’s good for the kids to see you as a normal person, to just see how people can contribute to their community positively. It’s part of the small-town feel that you want. We’re all just normal people trying to do something good.”
Know any unsung heroes or people in the SCV with an interesting life story to tell? Email [email protected].
