Oceanside teacher Yves Jean-Pierre has 20-plus year perfect attendance record

Oceanside High School math teacher Yves Jean-Pierre learned an important lesson early on in his career. He started by picking extremely difficult, challenging problems for students. Then a teacher told him to focus not on stumping students, but setting them up for success.

“You have the knowledge you need to teach. You have to teach ‘for’ the students,” Jean-Pierre, 59, of Valley Stream, said the teacher told him. “And I started to do that. Every year, I got better.”

A Haiti native, Jean-Pierre has succeeded by helping students understand concepts and not simply to get the correct answers.

“You have to make them believe that they can be successful,” said Jean-Pierre, known to students as J.P. “Every day I tell them that success today doesn’t guarantee success tomorrow. But you have to have the desire and the drive to work hard every day.”

When students have questions, they can call him over and get time they need, rather than only answering in front of the whole class, said Madison Moore, a 17-year-old senior at Oceanside.

“J.P. gives you the tools to learn and grow for yourself. It’s very personalized,” she said. “It’s a class setting, but often, it feels like it’s one-on-one.”

Fellow teacher Jim Smith, 59, of East Northport, noted Jean-Pierre has a perfect attendance record, difficult to maintain over so many decades. “He, in 23 years at Oceanside, has never once been absent,” Smith said. “Students come back and want to visit him. He’s an unassuming, low-key guy. The kids love him. He’s very popular in the math department with his colleagues.”

Jean-Pierre grew up in Haiti, in the Caribbean, speaking French and attending Institution Saint-Louis de Gonzague in Port-au-Prince, a primary and secondary Catholic school, and in 1985 came to New York, where his aunt lived, to study.

“I really wanted to come. My dad believed in education. He wanted me to go to a good university,” he said.

Jean-Pierre graduated from what is now the University at Buffalo in 1989 with a degree in aerospace engineering. “I thought it was going to be for flying airplanes,” he said. “It wasn’t really that. It was mostly research.”

His cousin, who got a degree in math from the same school, started to work as a math teacher. “I thought I could try to be a math teacher, because I was really good at math,” Jean-Pierre said.

He taught in Manhattan and then Brooklyn, he said.

He was hired by Oceanside in September 2002 and pretty soon was known by a new nickname. “One kid said, ‘Can I call you J.P.?’ I said, ‘You can.’ I didn’t think it would last,” he said. “It stuck. Everybody in Oceanside knows me as J.P.”

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