Mr. Carroll Is Mr. RMHS
Graduate, Coach, Teacher, Hall-of-Famer, and Substitute
Mr. Carroll, currently a substitute teacher at RMHS, has a long history with the school.
October 25, 2022
It’s rare to find someone who has been dedicated to a community for longer than Mr. William Carroll, who has made his mark at RMHS as a graduate, teacher, coach, and much more.
Since first entering RMHS as a part of the class of ‘67, Mr. Carroll has played many roles in the school’s history. He began as a scholar and hall-of-fame athlete at Reading, playing football, basketball, and baseball. He was a starter for all three sports and was named an all-league performer in two of them. After graduating, Mr. Carroll attended Amherst College before returning to continue his legacy at RMHS as a social studies teacher and head boys basketball coach.
If your relatives have been living in Reading for multiple generations, it is almost inevitable that Mr. Carroll has influenced your family. Whether his relationship was as a friend, a coach, a teacher, or a substitute, it has been nearly impossible to go through RMHS since 1963 without coming in contact with him at all. His impact on this community goes beyond just interacting strictly with the people of RMHS. In Reading, he is a baseball umpire, sports announcer, and has joined committees such as the one that organized the building of the new high school. In fact, he jokes of his role on that committee, “If there’s ceiling tiles falling, you can probably blame me.”
When asked about his relationship with Mr. Carroll, Mr. McSweeney of the English department said, “I’ve had the great pleasure of being his student and his player and working alongside him.” When questioned about Mr. Carroll’s impact on RMHS over the years, he describes, “He is a great champion of young people, he’s a great champion of Reading Memorial High School and all that a student can get out of Reading Memorial High School, and he has made his classroom as the lead teacher–and now as the substitute teacher–a welcoming place and a place where kids like to be. And there’s no price you can put on that.”
Current students even see his dedication to teaching. When asked about what sets him apart from other substitutes, RMHS senior Thomas Kessinger said, “I think that he’s really personable. He always wants to talk to other students when other subs would just kind of sit at the desk and just leave you alone. He really wants to make an impact on your learning and your life.”
When Mr. Carroll was asked about why he has stayed at RMHS for so long, he said, “The short answer is the culture of academia. I love the whole concept of school and passing it on from generation to generation.” It is certain that he has done a great job of passing his knowledge on through multiple generations. However, Mr. Carroll mentions a possible alternate reason for staying as well. After being asked the same question, he said, “Well, it might go back to my wife thinking, or telling me, that I must think I’m still 17 years old or something.”
When answering what his favorite role was at RMHS, he explains that it is substituting. He recalls, “I’ve been staffed here for 38, 40 years and there were parts of the school I’d never seen. So I got to see every part of the school. And it’s really interesting being in the different classrooms and the different subject areas, and like I said, just the whole culture of academia is represented in all the different places.” This style of teaching allows him to let time slow down. He notes, “The coaching and the teaching, it’s so fast–it goes by so fast–and I’m wondering if I ever appreciated it on a daily basis.”
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