Annemarie Roeper

Annemarie Roeper
Information
Title	Annemarie Bondy Roeper

Annemarie Roeper (August 27, 1918 – May 11, 2012) was one of the founders of the Roeper School.

Roeper was born on August 27, 1918 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary.

Because Roeper was the daughter of educators, she started to observe strong independent educational ideals very early in life. Gertrud Bondy – Roeper’s mother – was a medical doctor as well as a psychologist in training with Sigmund Freud. Gertrud and her husband Max founded a series of school focusing on, “psychoanalytic understanding of human development and a desire to educate children to build and thrive in a pluralistic, democratic society.” As the Bondys were Jewish by heritage, when the Nazi party came to power in the 1930s they were forced out of their school and fled to Switzerland then to the United States in 1939.

Roeper never fully finished any higher education past high school. While a medical student at the University of Vienna in 1937, she was the youngest person to ever be accepted by Sigmund and Anna Freud to study child psychoanalysis with them, although in March 1938 the German invasion of Austria prevented her from being able to truly begin her studies. Roeper was able to flee on the last train across the Austrian border before the Germans invaded while Sigmund and Anna Freud fled soon after. Eastern Michigan University awarded an honorary doctorate to Roeper and her husband, George Roeper, in 1978.

Roeper and her husband, George, established The Roeper School in 1941 with only nine students. Today the school serves over 630 students, from preschool to 12th grade, still focusing on an intense recognition for every student’s needs, and a profound appreciation for emotional and intellectual commitments.

Roeper is recognized as a pioneer for gifted education.

In 1941 Roeper and her husband were invited to Detroit to direct a nursery school and also established a grade school. Their schooling techniques caught on quickly, and the school grew rapidly. The Roeper School began expanding so much that in 1946 they purchased a campus in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and in 1981 they purchased a campus in Birmingham, Michigan.

In 1946, they purchased a campus in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and in 1981 the school expanded to include a second campus in Birmingham, Michigan.

In 1956, the same year that Roeper and her husband George established the first board of advisors for the Roeper School, they also congregated a panel of national experts and developed a curriculum for gifted children. In September 1956 the Roeper School became only the second school in America to focus solely on gifted education. Annemarie Roeper’s ideas about young childhood cognition caught the likes of Joan Ganz Cooney, and together they worked and consulted on the development of Sesame Street. Roeper was a workshop consultant while working on the show.

...
Wikipedia