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03/21/2018 08:30 AMShe’s Sarah Cody, a correspondent for WTNH NEWS 8 at work, but in Essex, she wants to be Sarah Cody Rector, mother, active board member of the Essex Elementary School Foundation (EESF), and committed supporter of the school’s PTO.
“That’s my mom life,” Sarah says.
In that mom life, Sarah is married to Paul Rector and is the mother of Sam, 14 and Ben, 12.
EESF, a non-profit organization, supports a wide range of supplemental enrichment programs for Essex Elementary School that are not funded through the school budget. Contributions support the foundation.
One of the foundation’s enrichment activities came as a direct result of Sarah’s other life as a television reporter, when she did a story on a middle school in Coventry that used 3D printers to make an artificial hand. She thought working with similar printers would be a creative challenge for Essex Elementary students.
EESF purchased two printers for the school, and funded an after-school program with school faculty as well as a Project LEARN expert. The school faculty members were trained in the use of the equipment. This year was the second in which Essex Elementary has offered students the opportunity to work with the printers, creating small objects of their own design like pencil holders, rulers, picture frames, and key chains. In addition, the printers are now being used for some classroom projects.
Sarah is also enthusiastic about the Lego-engineering project, underwritten by EESF, in which students create their own programmable robots.
“My own kids loved Legos and it has been a really successful program at school,” she says.
In addition, EESF paid for the iPad laboratory, now a regular part of the school day, as well as a recent author-in-residence day, featuring children’s book author Jarrett Krosoczka. It also underwrites the Justus W. Paul World Culture Program for 2nd graders. The students have already had all-day learning sessions on China and Haiti, with a program on India coming up in May. The world culture’s program is named in honor of the late Justus Paul, a longtime Essex resident who was one of the founders of EESF.
“I’m proud to support the kids in school; this is not something I am doing as a news reporter, but something I am doing as a mom,” Sarah says.
Still, there can be some confusion between the two. Sometimes, she says, people call her Mrs. Cody, using her television identity, and other times Mrs. Rector.
However she is addressed, she is eager for more people to be aware of the programs EESF supports.
“I wish more people knew about the great work it does,” she says.
The foundation’s website is currently being revamped, but should debut in May at www.essexesf.org.
Sarah is a great friend to the school,” says Essex Elementary School Principal Jennifer Tousignant, who added that in addition to her membership on EESF, Sarah chairs the Cultural Arts Committee of the PTO. The group recently brought a program on Russian music and language to Essex elementary as well as a juggling duo, the Gizmo Guys.
Juggling is something Sarah knows a lot about herself, balancing the demands of high-powered career and family life. Once she did general assignment television reporting, available to cover breaking news stories as they unfolded. Now she works part-time, doing a variety of features that she can arrange to match her sons’ school schedules more easily, often stories on arts, travel, and interesting people and places in Connecticut.
In addition, she writes a column, Current Parent, for The Hartford Courant and is a contributor to Hartford Magazine.
“I juggle. It’s a big challenge, work and family, and every woman figures it out differently. If I have to get up at 4 in the morning to write something, that’s what happens,” she says.
Over the course of a career spanning more than two decades, Sarah has gone to Bosnia with a Connecticut National Guard Unit assigned to peacekeeping duties shortly after 9/11, and recalls vividly the destruction she saw in the city of Tuzla, where the unit was headquartered. On the day of 9/11 itself, Sarah was at the Metro North railroad station in Stamford talking to people returning from New York City. For the next year she often interviewed families who had lost someone in the disaster.
The experience, she says, was transformational for her.
“It brought me wisdom and compassion,” she says.
Sarah has interviewed celebrities like Ozzie Osbourne, Mark Wahlberg, and the late Debbie Reynolds. She has said that she and Reynolds got along “like old friends.” Still, at a recent conversation when she was answering rather than asking the questions, she admitted she found it “much more comfortable to be the interviewer.”
Sarah, who grew up in Massachusetts, graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, where she met her husband Paul. She says she knew from early on she wanted to work in television news. She had internships with TV stations in Connecticut and in Massachusetts. At her first job in at a Boston television station, she worked from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. The pay was $8 an hour.
“I could have made more babysitting,” she admits, “but it was all good. Never boring.”
When she started working in television, Sarah recalls, there was no Internet, and reporters carried beepers so they could be reached.
“Newsrooms have had to adapt to the times; we want to stay relevant,” she says.
Now Sarah describes herself as having jumped into social media.
“There are lots of ways to tell a good story,” she says.
After nearly 20 years at WTIC-TV, the Fox affiliate in Connecticut, Sarah recently moved to WTNH News 8.
“It was time for a new challenge,” she says.
Over the years she has won three Emmys for her reporting and in 2014 won a Hero Award from the Food Allergy Education Network. No one in her family has food allergies, but she learned of the problems from friends who must cope with children suffering from them.
Sarah and Paul, chief executive office of RJ Health Systems, a medical software company, have lived in Essex for 11 years.
“We fell in love with Essex, the small-town feel, the water,” she says.
They share their house not only with their two sons, but also with Lucy, a four-year-old black and white rescue dog that Sarah describes as “precocious”; a tank of tropical fish; and a leopard gecko.
Sometimes, when people recognize Sarah, they’ll not only shout out a hello, but tell her they have a great story for her to cover. The recognition prompted her younger son, to ask if they were famous. Her older son had the answer.
“He said we were not famous, but we were known,” Sarah recalls.
Still, locally, Sarah’s goal is to be recognized as something besides television reporter.
“I want to be known as a mom,” she says.
To contribute to the Essex Elementary School Foundation, send checks made out to EESF to:
Essex Elementary School Foundation
P.O. Box 882, Essex, CT 06426
Email questions to: info@essexesf.org
A revamped EESF website is scheduled to come online in May at www.essexesf.org.