By April 6, 2020 my world was on its head. COVID was in NYC. I had decamped to near Lake Champlain. I was teaching, or trying to teach, via a computer. It was hard. And it was exhausting. And the news was relentless. Trump was horrible, but de Blasio and Cuomo were behaving like clowns – but clowns whose decisions affect millions of lives. It was too much. I’d lost a second cousin to the pandemic, but I didn’t know yet. And a colleague had passed in an auto accident a week earlier – maybe the trip was somehow connected. An alumni’s father died on the 4th. A peace officer at my school died on the 4th.
My school was started in 2002. I was there from the first. it is a specialized high school. But in those first years the student body was fairly integrated. A few years later we saw a shift, slow at first, and then not slow. We became one of the whitest NYC public high schools outside of Staten Island. There is a story there, a long one, about getting the faculty then our school community on board to address this, and the progress we have – and importantly – have not made. But that’s for another time.
I mention the segregation issue to mention one initiative in particular: our Local Outreach Tutoring Program (LOT). We started LOT four years ago. Me and some students did outreach to local middle CONTINUE READING: A Year Ago – remembering | JD2718