Annemarie Roeper

Roeper died from pneumonia and other health problems on May 11, 2012, in Oakland, California. She was 93 years old.

She retired from the Roeper School in 1980, although she remained on the board of trustees until 2002. In 1989, Roeper received the President's Award from the National Association for Gifted Children for a lifetime of distinguished service to the field.

After retiring from university teaching and leading the Roeper School campuses in 1979 and 1980, the Roepers settled in Oakland, California. Her husband George died there in 1992, at the age of 81.

In 1956, the same year that Roeper and her husband George established the first board of advisors for the Roeper School, they also convened a panel of national experts and developed a curriculum for gifted children. In September 1956 the Roeper School became only the second school in America to focus solely on gifted education.

Roeper was active with the Merrill Palmer Institute in the 1950s, which was a group of pediatricians, psychologists, and educators in Detroit that met to discuss children's emotional development. Roeper was the president of the Metropolitan Preschool Association in the late 1950s and early 1960s, served on the Michigan State Advisory Council for Early Childhood Education from 1965 to 1968 and was on the Oakland University Advisory Council from 1966 to 1968.

Roeper and her husband, George, established Roeper School (Michigan) in 1941 with only nine students. Today the school serves over 630 students, from preschool to 12th grade, still focusing on an intense recognition for every student's needs, and a profound appreciation for emotional and intellectual commitments.

In 1941 Roeper and her husband were invited to Detroit to direct a nursery school and also established a grade school. Their schooling techniques caught on quickly, and the school grew rapidly. The Roeper School began expanding so much that in 1946 they purchased a campus in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. In 1961 they expanded by purchasing a second campus in Birmingham, Michigan. George was head of the lower grades school in Bloomfield Hills until 1979; Annemarie headed the high school in Birmingham until 1980, when she retired.

Annemarie married George Roeper in New York City on April 20, 1939, and began a new adventure.

Though the family consisted of mainstream Lutherans, the Bondy family were of Jewish heritage. After the Nazi party came to power in Austria, Max Bondy sold the school, struggling with this Nazi notion that he was not German because of his heritage. He and Annemarie fled in the spring of 1938 with the help of George Roeper, a student in her parents’ school. They escaped Germany before the German invasion of Austria was complete. They left just ahead of the train out of Germany that carried Anna Freud and her parents. They fled first to Switzerland, joining her mother who had fled a year earlier. Then, in 1939, they went to the United States. Prior to the German invasion of Austria, Annemarie had planned on higher education with Anna Freud.

The March 1938 the German invasion of Austria prevented her from being able to truly begin her studies. Roeper was able to flee with her father on the last train across the Austrian border before the Germans invaded while Sigmund and Anna Freud fled soon after. Eastern Michigan University awarded an honorary doctorate to Roeper and her husband, George Roeper, in 1978.

Annemarie Roeper never fully finished any higher education past high school. While a medical student at the University of Vienna in 1937, she was the youngest person to ever be accepted to study child psychoanalysis with Sigmund and Anna Freud.

Annemarie Roeper (August 27, 1918 – May 11, 2012) was a pioneer in gifted education who founded the Roeper School (Michigan) with her husband George in 1941. The school continues on two campuses: lower elementary grades in Bloomfield Hills and Middle-Upper Elementary in Birmingham, in Michigan.

Annemarie was born on August 27, 1918, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to parents Max and Gertrud Bondy.