Who is Zipporiah Mills?

Principal Zipporiah Mills led PS 261 from 2005 to 2016 and sadly passed away in October 2021. At a community memorial, she was lovingly remembered as the lifeblood of the school and bedrock upon which the community’s dynamic and diverse core was founded.

Before coming to PS 261 in 2000 as an intervention teacher, Ms. Mills worked for 16 years at PS 273 in Brooklyn, teaching second, third, and sixth grades, and special education. “Zipp” (from the Bible, Zipporiah means “little bird”) Mills returned to PS 261 in Brooklyn after serving as assistant principal at PS 59 in Bedford-Stuyvesant for two years. 

Ms. Mills was born and raised in East New York and attended Hunter College. She decided to become a teacher when she was in the eleventh grade at Thomas Jefferson High School and student-taught at a daycare facility.

QUOTES ABOUT ZIPP:

In 2023, in an effort to preserve and celebrate the memory of Principal Zipporiah Mills, which continues to be central to our school, PS 261 parents began collaborating with her friends and family to learn firsthand and record what Ms.Mills means to them and how she lives on through them.  The following excerpts were taken from interviews recorded in Spring 2024.

  • “Our mission talks about voices being heard. And (Zipp) wanted to make sure people knew where they could use their voice, when they could use their voice, why they could do that. And that was true of what I could see when she welcomed me into the community–she made me feel like, ‘You've got this. You can do this. And your voice matters, and who you are matters.’ And I could feel that immediately when I met her.”

    “Going back to the school mission, that is a document that is very meaningful to me because it's helped me understand what matters to the community, so that I can continue to uplift, and uplift in a way that makes sense to me. I think that was the beauty of Zipp… She didn't try to be anyone else. She was herself. And she wanted that for all people.

    [PS 261] “is a really special school community. I could feel it the moment that I walked in here… I went into classrooms and I could see that the classrooms reflected what I believed. And that was very evident within five minutes of being in the school. And the diversity–it's one of the very few naturally diverse public schools. And it was a beautiful community that I wanted to help–wanted to help keep alive–and wanted to make sure that what was alive in the community around equity, around children's agency, around family input, around voice, and all the social justice work, all of that just felt so important to me in that first visit. That this is important. This is special. And this needs to stay alive.”

    “The children in this school are really happy. And that, I think, comes from Zipp. She brought a lot of joy… and I think that that joy and playfulness, for sure, is very much alive. And I think that she was such a fierce advocate of children… I see that in the teaching staff. I see that in families. I even see kids. I see that in this idea that no one is expendable. And that you have to look out and make sure that people are taken care of.”

    “The best way for 261 community to honor Zipp’s legacy is to honor the humanity in everyone, and to continue to fight for equity and social justice.”

  • “Miss Mills loved working here with the kids. And that's why I actually took the position. Because of her energy, her passion for education. She was just very personable. Her door was always open. She loved staff just coming in. If they needed to talk to her for whatever reason. If there's a problem, her door is always open for us. And that was what I admired the most.”

    “She wanted the kids to be treated well. She wanted them to get a great education. And she wanted them to remember why they were there. Making sure that they were involved in every activity in the school. That the teachers were involved with their kids. She's the one who created the Walk On Borough Hall… and it just became a staple after that because she wanted the kids to believe in something… to make sure the kids had a voice, that they were heard.”

    “She absolutely empowered all of us.”

  • “Zipp was somebody who empowered other people. There are so many people in the world right now–women, women of color–who are out in the world leading–running schools, principals, APs, coaches–who are leading in the world after working under Zipp. And I think, because she was empowering–just because of who she was. Because she loved hard and she was honest and she paid attention to what mattered.”

    Zipp “fostered a, feeling of, “You know what? What you say matters and what you do matters on every level.”

    Zipp’s “came into a community that was already very much committed to the traditions of social justice and change… It was a tradition that 261 stood in and she was able to pull the thread and evolve those ideas in the current context of whatever the world was going through... (Zipp) made sure that the demographics mirrored the neighborhood, did all the things you need to do to put in place a tradition that could be carried on.”

  • [Regarding PS 261] People actually gravitated towards it. And once you were part of it, you felt like you were doing something great… You can still feel her presence in the building every day.