Lake County’s
first black female school administrator, Joyce Miller McTier, dies at 91. She once was assistant principal at Mount Dora High School.
Denise Spann Gould, a black girl from New York City, was a freshmen at Leesburg High School in the late ’60s when commotion broke out over a Confederate flag painted in the school parking lot.
Black and white students were on the edge of conflict but steady amid the strife that day, Gould said, was her aunt and Leesburg High School biology teacher, Joyce Miller McTier.
“My aunt was the type of person — I don’t remember her cussing or fussing — what she did was keep order because, you know, they were ready to fight,” Gould, 61, said Monday.
McTier — who in a trailblazing career became the first black female administrator in Lake County schools when she became assistant principal at Mount Dora High School in 1979 — had been in declining health and died Sept. 5 at 91.Married to boxer Solomon McTier, a sparring partner of Muhammad Ali who died in 2012, the Eustis native received her graduate degree in New York because Florida colleges at the time only offered master’s degrees to whites.
McTier was remembered as a woman who placed right and wrong above white or black.
“You have to keep things in order, otherwise you’re going to be defeating the purpose,” Gould said. “You need to do things right. … She had a lot to do with the woman I am today.”
Gould was a 14-year-old cigarette smoker when she arrived in Florida for her Aunt Joyce to “straighten her out.” Moments after the plane landed “Mama Joyce” snatched her pouch purse, peered inside and and saw the cigarettes.
“‘Oh, so you smoke, huh? Well, now you don’t,’ ” Gould recalled McTier telling her.
McTier’s great-grandmother, a slave, first learned to read, and it was she who “passed down education to us all,” McTier said in 2002.
Growing up, she recalled not being able to sit at the counter at a drug store to get ice cream and having to climb fire-escape stairs to get to the balcony of a theater to watch movies. She was in her 20s when Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall allowed mobs in 1949 to burn down homes in a black hamlet near Groveland.
But McTier didn’t allow discrimination to defeat her. She graduated from the all-black Eustis Vocational High School in 1944 and taught biology at several schools in Lake before rising to administration after desegregation.
Former longtime Lake County principal Claude Pennacchia, 67, who taught alongside McTier at Mount Dora High School, said the fairness of “Mrs. McTier” enabled her to be a bridge between white and blacks in the school system.
Parents “knew they had someone who would watch out for their kids at a time when they may not have a trusted authority,” he said. “As long as she was there, they felt whatever the decision was, it was in light of the best interest of the student.”
Pennacchia and McTier would
often team together. At McTier’s request, Pennacchia would often pay a visit to a tardy student’s home to get the teen out of bed.
“It wasn’t trying to get him into trouble; it was trying to keep him from getting into trouble,” Pennacchia said.
He credits her for his promotion from teaching into administration after she recommended him to the superintendent. More than 40 years later, after attending what is now Eustis Middle School, she also returned to be its be assistant principal.
During her decades as an educator, there was one thing her youngest daughter, Cherryll McTier-Garner, said her mom didn’t teach.
“Truly, I don’t remember having that conversation [about race],” said McTier-Garner, 54, of Eustis. “She always taught us to treat people the way we wanted to be treated … She didn’t teach us color.”
Public visitation for Joyce Miller McTier will be held 6-8 p.m. Friday at 360 S. Bay St., Eustis. A homegoing service will be held 11 a.m. Saturday at LifePointe Church at 3551 E. Orange Ave., Eustis.