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Brad Noel, educator who fought to bring opportunity to Hartford schools, dies at 88

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Years before Elizabeth “Brad” Noel was a Hartford school board member advocating against racial isolation and inequities in city schools, she was connecting students to college, one road trip at a time.

As head of guidance at Weaver High School, Noel pushed her students to consider higher education, often driving them herself to visit New England schools like Brown, Boston and Harvard.

“There were kids who got there in part because she believed in them and they began to believe in themselves,” her husband, Don Noel, said Wednesday.

Elizabeth “Brad” Noel is pictured in the 1960s.

Brad Noel died Wednesday at Seabury Retirement Community in Bloomfield due to complications of Alzheimer’s , according to Don Noel, a former columnist for The Courant and Hartford Times. She was 88.

Brad Noel was born in 1930 in West Hartford to Ned and Margaret Foulds. After graduating from Hall High School, she went on to earn degrees from Oberlin College and Cornell University, where she met Don.

A year after they married in 1953, the couple joined the American Friends Service Committee to direct weekend and summer work camps in Japan. It was one of her first projects in a lifetime devoted to voluntary service.

As her husband wrote in a eulogy Wednesday, the pair traveled through Asia and Europe before settling back in Connecticut and beginning to build their first home in New Hartford. Their daughter Emily spent some of her first year living in a tent beside the construction site of the Japanese-style house, which was nearly complete by the time their son Ken was born.

In New Hartford, Noel served as a library volunteer and a member of the town board. Don Noel recalls how the pair became increasingly involved in city and civil rights issues, and eventually decided to move into Hartford’s Blue Hills neighborhood in 1964, just as the working-class area was experiencing a racial shift from mostly white to black.

The couple lived for five decades in the neighborhood, with Brad Noel serving at one point as a block captain and organizing neighborhood activities.

She worked for decades in education, first as a shared-time classroom teacher at Hartford’s Rawson School, then a guidance counselor and department chair at Weaver High School, which underwent a similar exodus of white families. When Brad Noel began there, the graduating class of Weaver was about 90 percent white, according to Don Noel. Four years later, it was mostly black.

“She never thought twice about whether she should find some other school,” Don Noel said. “It didn’t matter. They were kids. She believed they had potential and would rise to their potential.”

Elizabeth “Brad” Noel died Jan. 23, at 88, following a battle with Alzheimer’s.

After retiring in 1992, Noel served four terms on the Hartford Board of Education, her tenure including the turbulent years of the Sheff vs. O’Neil state Supreme Court case that sought to end Hartford schools’ racial and economic segregation. She advocated for more money and flexible labor contracts, for higher education standards and accountability, and for the cooperation of all sectors of the city and its suburbs.

Noel also represented the school district on the Hartford Public Library and Capitol Region Education Council boards, and hosted nearly 200 episodes of her access-TV program, Brad’s Beat, exploring city schools.

Memorial gifts may be made to the Seabury Charitable Foundation or to the Brad and Don Noel Family Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, www.hfpg.org/noelfamilyfund.

Friends may call on Feb. 15 from 4 to 7 at Carmon Funeral Home, 807 Bloomfield Ave, Windsor, and a memorial service will held Saturday, Feb. 16 at 10 am at Hartford Friends Meeting, 144 South Quaker Lane, West Hartford.

Rebecca Lurye can be reached at rlurye@courant.com.