My interest in poverty, education, incarceration and social issues overall has its roots in my mom. I decided to speak with her and her thoughts, as a teacher, on what schools are doing to help students. 

Credit: Times Online

More than 1,600 Rochester City School District students are in the County Jail each year. Some serve short sentences, some are there for much longer. Most usually come back to the classroom, to face another host of issues.

LaToya Manon, a former teacher at the now closed Dr. Freddie Thomas High School said the problem was frequent.

“There’s about one to two students a year if not more, that have gone through the system, brushed it, or started off the year in it,” she said.  

Although it was just 1 of the 20-30 students in an average classroom, often the presence they created in the classroom was marked.

“It can go to extremes,” she said of the behavior, recalling one student in her own class a few years back.

He sat in the back, she said, intently observing his peers for days. After a few days had passed, she said, he decided which student he believed to be the leader of the class. The very next day, he sat in that student’s seats: a direct challenge.  The two boys fought and were removed from the classroom.

Manon said eventually the boy went back to jail for another crime.

The circumstances leading to the altercation are unlikely to happen among students who haven’t interacted with the system. In jail, there is an extreme focus on status because it’s often all inmates have to define themselves.

“He felt like he needed to prove something, like in jail,” she said.

Eventually Manon left teaching, to return to school. In 2014, she will begin her doctoral program at the U of R studying mass incarceration and its effect on our District and the city of Rochester as a whole.

“It felt like there was an audience I couldn’t connect with,” she said, explaining the motivation behind pursuing a new degree. “I never knew how to reach that group. And I could never say to the kids, ‘I know what you’re going through’ because I didn’t know.”

Hundreds of teachers in the District face the same struggle. The Districts boasts professional development that teachers can take but it’s not mandated. Although it has increased its counseling staff, students also interact with teachers. Therefore, ensuring teachers are properly equipped as well is very important.

“There is nothing in the classroom to help them get re-acclimated,” Manon said. “They’re forgetting the emotional piece. Even if it’s just three days, if they don’t transition well, it can be detrimental to the classroom environment.”

Manon says she believes the District may want a seamless transition from the schooling done in jail and the return to the classroom. However, they don’t account for the maturation many undergo behind bars- and the psychological change is more evident the longer they’re in jail.

However, Manon also stressed the need for a preventive approach. This reactionary approach of helping students transition is excellent, but what if we could keep them from being incarcerated in the first place?

She said that there simply isn’t enough in school to keep students from traveling down this path.

But until we can do this, she said, there is a responsibility to these kids to help them forward.

“We can’t stick them in jail with limited opportunities and wonder why they’re still stuck,” she said. “I honestly feel that from an academic stance we forgot that we should be socializing kids to be good contributors to society.”