Many stakeholders in the system point to the significant amount of money being spent in the system that does not always seem to reach or benefit students. For one teacher, Paul, getting resources to families is crucial to the district’s ultimate improvement. Here is Paul’s story:

“The biggest point is we are pouring money into the bank accounts of the middle class – teachers, administrators, counselors, social workers, security officers. We’re pouring money into agencies, great agencies, and essentially, we have kids drowning in water and all these people with life jackets are swimming over. These life jackets are the money we’re pouring into the bank accounts. We’re trying to teach the kids how to swim. What if we gave the kids a life jacket? Wouldn’t that actually be better? But that would require us giving money to the children’s parents so they’re no longer in poverty.

“It’s not an education issue. It’s a political issue. I would say schools need to do what they’re doing. The social agencies need to do what they’re doing. Federal, state, local funds, whatever funds we’re using, ask yourself, ‘Why are we giving money to everybody but the bank accounts of poor children’s parents?’”

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The ongoing pandemic has made many of the issues facing the Rochester City School District more severe, particularly engaging students. For RCSD educator Rita, the district did not do enough to ensure that students were attending and participating in remote learning, ultimately meaning those students will leave the system ill-prepared for their future. Here is Rita’s story.

“What I saw over this pandemic with the Rochester City School District kids, it’s shameful, and half the time you’re teaching on the Zoom, you’re teaching the black boxes. I would say that probably 80% of the kids are not even engaged, because they don’t have to respond back to you, you don’t even know if they’re there. Sometimes when the Zoom is over, I just keep an eye out to see how long it’s going to take them to turn it off. They never were there.

“Then last year, what we did was, just kind of mysteriously, our graduation rate shot up, because you know what we did; we just let them go through. There were no Regents exams. When they go to MCC, or when they go to any college, most of the time, our students have to take all these remedial courses, so they use up a lot of their financial aid, trying to get on the same level, on the college level. Because they’re going to take them in, but then the institutions are eating up all their financial aid, so when it’s really time to go to college and take those courses, they have no final financial aid left.”

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Many principals blame a restrictive teachers union contract and seniority rules for trouble helping students make progress. Contract rules often lead to displacements and turnover among staff, fueling a culture of inconsistency that works against students. Here is James’ story.

“I’ve got to say, I think probably the toughest thing is you’ve got a lot of really good teachers, a lot of really good TAs, a lot of really good paraprofessionals, and then you also have ones that aren’t. I think that the most difficult thing was to have to sit and watch teachers who just weren’t in it, and you’ve got such hardworking teachers right next to them. You always, at the end of the year, you lose your most motivated, your younger teachers, the ones who are fresh out and ready to go, and they want to tackle the world. They’re the ones at the end of the year that are getting displaced and getting laid off. It was year after year, seeing some of my best teachers, I’ve got to give them a letter and say, ‘I’m sorry, you got to go,’ and they’re looking at the person next to them saying, ‘But this person doesn’t do anything, and I’m the one that has to go?’ I think when it came to staffing issues, that’s where my biggest frustration was.”

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There are few options for those students failed by the system. And for far too many, the failures of the system put them on a direct path to the criminal justice system – the school to prison pipeline. Here is Fatima’s story.

“I’ll tell you about a kid that I literally think about to this day that I heard about. His name is Shane and he is now sentenced to prison for 25 years to life because he just got charged with his third felony of weapon charges. Shane and I in high school, we were very close because I used to feel bad for him because the teachers would isolate him. I just remember like sharing my notes and letting him cheat off of my exams because I wanted him to pass. Basically, like in school, teachers just looked down on him because of his presence.

“Shane at home didn’t have any support. So his outlet was to go to school. Even in school, he used to get micro-analyzed, I guess you could say. At that point, it’s like how much can a child take? He was 16. I remember just looking at him and I was like, ‘Shane, are you okay? He’s like, ‘Man, f*** this school and f*** life. I’m done.’ He was like, ‘Everyone makes me out to be a bad guy anyway. You know what? I am going to go sell drugs. I am going to go do this.’ He did. Now, he’s in jail for life.”

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Many educators see just one option – a total reboot of the system. That must start with understanding each student, the challenges they face in the classroom, and providing them with the resources they need on the path to graduation. Here is Avery’s story:

“So if you’re saying the district is to become innovative and come into the 21st century in how we’re going to teach kids, we have to meet them where they are. You got to deprogram and reprogram. Summer schools should be not catching up on the work you missed from September to June. Summer school should be preparing you to go back into the school building – not do what you did last year. It should be addressing those issues that didn’t allow you to excel, to be the best person that you can possibly be. There’s a lot of things that could be done, but the people in those positions, it doesn’t benefit them. So they’re not changing nothing. We can talk all day, we can write all the reports. They’re not changing.

“We got to get to the young people. We just got to mobilize the youth and we have to sit down and have a conversation, and the conversation starts off with a question. Who are you really? Are you really who you say that you are? What happened? Tell us what happened? And do you seriously want to graduate because if you do truly want to graduate, you got to modify, you got to change. You got to transform, transcend, and transition or else you want to be left behind and you become a pawn in the game.”

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Even those ultimately responsible for the district’s success, members of the elected school board, name a toxic culture as a critical challenge in the district. At its worst, that can mean schools and staff suffer because of board members’ personal biases. Here is one former board member’s story:

“I think one of the most horrendous things that happened when I was on the board was when a principal was not given tenure. There is a protocol for giving tenure to principals and teachers. Basically, it’s up to the chiefs. There’s a whole sort of structure and system around that. The chiefs are supposed to collect information and interview and double-check that people are doing their job. If not, they don’t recommend them for tenure. If they do, they recommend them for tenure and then send it up to the superintendent to make that decision. But it is presented to the board for final approval.

“In this case, there was a principal who had done outstanding work. If you look at the data and see what she had done to turn around a school with a lot of violence and a lot of issues. Very poor neighborhood and there have been many, many struggles. She did incredible work and if you look at the data, you could see that there was steady, steady improvement in student achievement.

“But some people on the board had some personal vendettas against her and they blocked her tenureship based on personal issues rather than the actual work that she was doing. That’s an example of micromanagement of the board. But that was purely political, purely personal vendetta against her.”

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Ultimately, it is Rochester’s children and families who pay the cost of a failed education system. It is a pain all too familiar to parents like Angie, whose son has special needs. For years, she struggled to get her son the support he needed to succeed in the classroom. Teachers were quick to put him out of the classroom, rather than provide him with resources. Once schools went remote during the pandemic, her son lost interest – and hope. He dropped out of the system. Here is Angie’s story:

“It’s difficult because you need to be on them all the time. You need to pay attention to what the teachers do, what the principals do, how they treat your kids. There is a lot of things. For example, you go to the office in downtown, you have to be on them so they can do something for you. You need to fight with them so they can help you, doing what they are supposed to do for your kids’ education and to do the right thing. It was really hard. A lot of things happened at school.

“They didn’t help him the way they were supposed to help him. I’m talking about everything; about the way they treat him, about the way they listen to him, the education. It was everything. This pandemic was the worst thing ever, because it helped him to go away from school. ‘I don’t want to go back, I don’t like the teachers, I don’t like the school.’ My son has ADHD, and it was really hard for me to try to convince him to be in school for a lot of reasons. Like the teachers, how they used to treat him. They used to tell him everything was his fault.  Right now he’s not doing really good. I’ve been trying to do my best with him. He went another way and it has been hard for me too.”

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“I personally didn’t really have a good experience. The teachers were nice but they didn’t help a lot and the student counselor didn’t really help out a lot. The majority of my teachers were pretty nice, but there were some that always had a negative attitude. When we needed help or something, some of them would be smart about it and they just wouldn’t take the time to help. They would just expect us to get stuff done. They were like, ‘Oh, you have to pay attention and you’ll get it.’ But then a lot of us need extra help and they didn’t really offer the extra help needed. Yeah, they were snarky about it.

Some of them, if we would like raise our hand and then ask what they meant, they would be like we should have been paying attention or something when I was paying attention and a lot of people I know were paying attention. It’s just we need assurance and clarity for things.”

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RCSD parent who left the district

“I just couldn’t bear to see him come home in tears, scared, not feeling safe as a result of the years of bullying. He ended up going into counseling, and he also ended up going to the doctors because he was having nosebleeds and bad nightmares as a result of all this. I did it on my own. I wanted to do everything that I could to help my son, because I just felt so bad. It hurt me to my heart to see him so happy and excited to go to school, willing to learn, and then all of that over two years’ period of time dwindled down to, he was giving up on school. He didn’t want to be in school anymore. He didn’t want to be at that school anymore, particularly.

I took matters into my own hands after I saw that I was not getting anywhere with the school board. I took matters into my own hand, doing what I was supposed to do or should be doing as a parent, stepping up doing whatever it takes for my child.”

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“Our district is notorious for holding on to something for two years and then changing it completely because, in my opinion, the admin teams change. So whoever’s involved at central office changes so frequently that they all have new ideas that are going to be different than the ideas before. So they don’t really go with what’s been working and fix that. They just change it completely.

With that said, what they’ll tend to do is they’ll have these great ideas at the central office level, talk about it all summer long within themselves, and then roll it out August 29th or September 2nd. If it’s a new curriculum, the teachers just put it on the shelf and it sits there until the professional development comes through. So it’s never been actually launched correctly.”

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