When his daughter, Tova, was in the eighth grade, Josh Jean-Louis told her: “I think you can be valedictorian if you want.”
“She ran with it,” he says.
Earlier this year, Tova, who lives with her family in Continental Village, was named valedictorian of Walter Panas High School in Cortlandt. “I knew that it was possible,” she says. “It was a matter of actually putting in the work.”
Her father says Tova was always bright. By age 4, she was carefully spelling her name when introduced; by age 7, she had asked her dad for a subscription to National Geographic and made corrections if her babysitter misidentified dinosaurs.
“She still loves dinosaurs,” her dad says, noting that she wrote about them for her college admissions essay.
When Tova was younger, she preferred writing to science. Her friend, Jax Mirchandani, says they often wrote short stories together, typically science fiction, horror and fantasy. But in eighth grade, Tova was inspired by her Algebra I teacher, Asad Sankofa. He notes that, during the pandemic, most students attended class via teleconference. But Tova came in person wearing a mask and was often the only student in the classroom.
“Having her as my student was an honor and a privilege,” he says. Sankofa remembered assigning students to calculate the rate of decay of bacteria. Tova derived the correct answer using “the inverse of the exponential function,” something not taught until Algebra II.
Amazed, Sankofa asked if her dad had helped. “No, I looked it up online,” Tova replied.
Her academic career had a few rocky moments. There was a 70 on a pre-calculus quiz. “I had to draw a graph and completely messed it up,” she recalls. “I was horrified. I realized as soon as I handed it in that I had done it wrong. But I couldn’t take it back.” During her junior year, she was stretched thin taking four concurrent Advanced Placement (AP) classes. “That was insanely more” than the previous year, she said.
As the accolades and awards piled up, her dad saw her competitive streak come forward, with fist pumps each time she walked from the stage with an academic prize.
Tova loves music and sings in the school’s chamber choir. She is also a member of the school’s Equity Club and the Gender-Sexuality Alliance/Gay-Straight Alliance. Her father said that when she was in fourth grade, she walked a friend who was being bullied to the principal’s office to report what was going on.
Tova will attend Princeton University in the fall to study environmental engineering. She says she hopes to help “strengthen infrastructure and promote sustainability, and maybe eventually run for public office.”
