It’s an annual tradition in Baltimore. Each summer, the district hemorrhages hundreds of teachers and scrambles to fill vacancies, just before welcoming more than 77,000 children back to school in late August. 

“Baltimore is a high turnover district,” Cristina Duncan Evans, teacher chapter chair of the Baltimore Teachers Union, told Baltimore Beat. Roughly 600 teachers leave each year; some retire, others move to suburban districts, some give up teaching altogether.

Under normal conditions, the district is able to deal with this annual migration by finding teacher applicants, interviewing them, and filling the vacancies. By the first day of school, many of those new teachers are at the whiteboard drawing up lessons. But this isn’t a normal year. The COVID-19 pandemic added additional strain to a profession that already demanded long hours for little pay. 

Baltimore City Schools officials reported they were still short 220 teachers on the opening day of school on August 29 — a figure disputed by union officials, some of whom believe the district could be short many more educators. Duncan Evans told Baltimore Beat, for example, that she doubted how reliable numbers supplied by City Schools could be, because officials have been slow to send the union reports on staffing.

For parents and children, the shortage meant a district charged with closing the achievement gap was, and still is, ill-prepared to do so. 

“Our CEO talks a whole lot about equity, [but] there’s really no equity across the board when you look at it because you can be in one area in one neighborhood and there may be 28 to 32 kids in the classroom,” said Tyrone Barnwell, a parent and education advocate. “But then, you know, just across the bridge, across the way, you’re looking at about 38 to 42 kids in one classroom, and maybe one class has an aide and then the rest of the classes don’t have an aide. It looks different all across the board.”

The shortage has been a slow-rolling crisis, which has played out over years. But throw in a pandemic, a national teacher shortage, and increased demand for classroom teachers to fill vacancies and help districts close the achievement gap, and Baltimore City Public Schools faced an unprecedented personnel crisis. 

At the end of the 2021-22 school year, Baltimore City Public Schools had about 1,300 vacancies to fill — nearly double the average gap the school district needs to fill each year, according to Sarah Diehl, executive director of recruitment and staffing services. Some of the vacancies were due to retirements and attrition. But the number was especially high this year because new positions were created to close the achievement gap between Black and Latinx students and their white peers. According to data collected by the state, white children in fourth grade are more than twice as likely to read at grade level than Black and Latinx students. Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, which lawmakers passed to address racial disparities in funding and education outcomes across the state, increased the amount of money the state sent to schools, and in Baltimore it meant the district could hire more educators to address educational disparities.

Lawmakers hoped the funding would help, and agreed to spend $3.8 billion each year over the next 10 years. This money has already shown up in the Baltimore City Public Schools budget and prompted the district to begin hiring teachers earlier to fill even more vacancies. By July, Baltimore city schools hired 700 educators. 

But even though Baltimore City Public Schools started its search for teachers earlier than in previous years and had more money for hiring, the district found itself with 600 vacancies, with less than a month before school opened in late August. 

“Schools have been adjusting and adapting their staffing to prioritize their remaining vacancies, and so we knew we knew that 600 vacancies did not mean that 600 classrooms of students were going to be without teachers,” Diehl said.

There were just fewer teachers to pick from, Diehl said, pointing to statistics that found there are fewer people enrolling in and completing teacher preparation programs. And the money sent to Baltimore City Schools to help hire more teachers? Well, that money was spread to schools across the state, in other districts with high concentrations of poor and minority students. In short, other school districts were also on a hiring spree, and so officials here had to compete for teachers. 

Then there was the Great Resignation’s impact on teaching. Maryland lost more than 5,600 teachers at the end of the school year, according to the State Board of Education. The COVID-19 pandemic was at least partially to blame for pushing some veteran teachers out of the classroom. Baltimore teachers have expressed frustrations about the district’s own COVID-19 policy, which kept school doors open during the omicron variant surge in late 2021. Teacher shortages, like the ones in Baltimore and Maryland have played out across the country. School officials in Florida estimate the state is short 8,000 educators. Meanwhile, nearly one in five classes in California were taught by someone lacking the proper credentials.

“Education personnel in America are leaving their jobs at almost double the rate of other occupations, and this crisis is particularly acute in schools serving majorities of students of color and students living in poverty which experience the highest teacher turnover rates,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told board members at the board’s September 13 meeting.

“Children’s learning conditions are also educators’ working conditions, and they are often in trouble,” Weingarten said.

For new teachers, even some veteran educators, Baltimore City seemed like a far less attractive place to make a career. The district has lagged behind school systems elsewhere in the state in keeping up with building maintenance and construction. As recently as 2017, Baltimore City schools spent less than half the amount spent by Anne Arundel County on facilities. Both districts received more than $40 million from the state to help with school construction. But Anne Arundel County could afford to add another $100 million in local money to help pay for facilities. 

“On a material level we have the oldest facilities in the state. We have brand new 21st century schools that have pest rodents, mold, building design issues,” Duncan Evans said. “Some of our 21st century buildings have teachers floating from class to class because we don’t have enough classrooms.”

The exodus across the state and the country was a problem Baltimore had known for decades. 

“The rest of the country is catching up with Baltimore,” Duncan Evans said.

With districts across the state short on teachers, and districts like Baltimore County moving fast to hire teachers, candidates in line for jobs in Baltimore City were quickly accepting offers in districts outside of the city, Duncan Evans told Baltimore Beat.

“Baltimore has always been one of the most challenging places to teach and support teachers in the state of Maryland. Baltimore City is competing with places with higher demand and better working conditions,” Duncan Evans said. 

Baltimore City School officials turned to substitute teachers, certified central office staff, and even paraeducators to fill the gaps before school opened. By late August, the district claimed it had reduced the hiring gap from 600 down to 220.

Across two school board meetings in late August and September, educators from across the district raised concerns about the shortage and the work conditions they believe are driving the crisis. Staff pleaded with school board officials and City Schools executives to do something —- fast. 

“Right now we are underpaid, we are overworked. Sometimes we do not get a lunch break,” said Valerie Taylor, a member of support staff at ConneXions: A Community Based Arts School. “And for the new teachers, we are that backbone. If we miss a day, that teacher has a hard way to go.”   

Baltimore City Schools cut spending as recently as 2021, and even with the additional money from the state to help close the achievement gap, district educators said their pay makes Baltimore less competitive with schools outside the city.  

“The board needs to face economic reality,” said Alan Rebar, who teaches at both Sinclair Lane Elementary and Barclay Elementary. “This school board must compete or the students will continue to suffer. This means paying educators and other staff the COVID bonus. In the case of salaries and other staff, a real raise is long overdue.”

For parents, the teacher shortage and the lack of communication by the district caught many families flat-footed and unprepared for what was to come when school opened. It meant sending their children off to school without a solid idea of that to expect when they arrived at their classrooms. 

“You know, from a parent’s perspective, how do I help prepare my child — and I don’t even know, you know, what they need to be prepared for,” Barnwell said. 

“So a lot of kids showed up to school the first day without even knowing their homeroom class, who their homeroom teacher was. That was a huge concern for the parents,” he added.  

The post Baltimore Can’t Fill Teacher Vacancies, Kids Suffer appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

According to reports, the student whose name has not been released because he is a minor, allegedly pulled out a gun and shot Brogden. The suspect fled, pursued by Baltimore City School Police who apprehended a 17-year-old boy blocks away and located a firearm. Brogden died at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The 17-year-old junior was hours away from playing his first varsity football game of the season.   

Homicides have been on a record setting pace in Baltimore this year, with 242 through September 2. The epidemic has weighed heavily on the city’s children. Brogden became the 16th child murdered in Baltimore in 2022, and the 12th killed by gunfire, matching the total number of children killed in all of 2021. In fact, the first two homicides of the year took the lives of 17-year-old Bernard Thomas and 16-year-old Desmond Canada, the two boys killed shortly after midnight on January 1. 

Kids have been at the center of some high profile shootings in the city as well, including Brogden’s murder, the killing of Timothy Reynolds and the fatal shooting of Nykayla Strawder. 

This was supposed to be the year things began to turn around. Mayor Brandon Scott came to office promising to reimagine public safety. He vowed to take a public health approach to safety, pivoting away from the law enforcement focused strategies of prior mayoral administrations. The city, Scott promised, would provide help to those closest to the violence. City Hall would help nonprofit partners expand their operations and coordinate their efforts in slowing the pace of violence. 

But the rollout has been slow. The city didn’t release a coordinated gun violence reduction plan until the end of 2021. And while the gun violence reduction strategy is reporting some successes in the handful of neighborhoods where it’s being implemented, the program is not yet citywide. 

In the fall of 2021, following the nonfatal shooting of four children in East Baltimore, the city touted its investment in parks and after school programs to offer kids an enriching alternatives to violence and criminal behavior. Still, the bloodshed continues. 

 A week before the shooting on August 25, the Baltimore City Council held a meeting to address youth violence. Led by City Councilman Robert Stokes, the three-hour meeting included testimony from the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, Baltimore police Commissioner Michael Harrison and members of the City Council. 

“Solutions to violence come with changing to conditions for people in their lives, the conditions that drive people to crime in the first place and create crime in the first place,” Baltimore police Commissioner Michael Harrison said. 

The city and the school district hashed out a deal to create a pilot program aimed at addressing youth violence. The plan includes peer-to-peer mediation, teaching students conflict resolutions skills and attempts to change the perception around violence. City leaders walked away confident that the plan could net results in Baltimore City Public Schools. Eight days later, Jeremiah Brogden was gunned down on campus.  

In an earlier version of this story, Baltimore Beat misidentified Baltimore City Councilperson Robert Stokes. We regret the error.

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Too often, as young people, our voices are overlooked and unheard. We’re deemed too young to have experienced anything that could have deeply impacted our lives. In reality, the opposite is true. According to the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative, 56% of children in Baltimore City have experienced one or more traumatic experiences involving violence, incarceration, homelessness, or substance abuse. More than half of our children in our city will have to grow up with the burdens of life weighing them down. Pent up frustration and anger becomes a formula for violence. It is not a pathology, it is a cry for help. We must listen. 

But creating real change in Baltimore is often a messy business, especially when it involves coming to terms with the legacy of persistent violence in our communities. Many people are so invested in the way things are that they are unwilling to see a way forward. Victims of trauma often see it as an immovable feature of the world they must simply accept, a byproduct of America’s troubled history of racism and systemic oppression. The traumatized often identify with their suffering because surviving it can be a badge of honor. Real change involves a new way of thinking, a new way of seeing how our brains are impacted by the environments they are forced to navigate.  

Additionally, those in authority are often afraid that acknowledging trauma will force them into painful self-examination. Those with power do not like to do the uncomfortable work of admitting how the old ways of doing things exacerbated the suffering of our city’s most vulnerable. It is easier to throw up your hands than to roll up your sleeves.

The hard work of trauma informed care should not be confused with playing the blame game. It is all about understanding how the past can influence the future, sometimes without our knowledge. By refusing to understand what brain researchers are telling us about how trauma influences the developing brain, we are consigning ourselves to a future whose script is already written. We have seen it over and over again. The cycle of trauma repeats.

Learning to see things from this point of view took work for us, too. After a shooting happened at our school, we were asked to testify about the trauma we faced. We decided to speak about how trauma affects our everyday lives as students in Baltimore city. Initially, we were afraid that talking about the obstacles we faced and the trauma we endured might reopen painful wounds. We were frightened that our trauma might be paraded in front of those who simply wanted to feel pity on us or judge us for what we have survived.

It’s scary to say we’ve become accustomed to the violence and traumatic events that happen in our city but it’s our home and we have no choice but to try to survive each day as best we can. We do what we can to make a comfortable life for ourselves inside the endless procession of violence.

People fail to realize that trauma is a generational cycle. It disguises itself as normal for most adolescents living in Baltimore city. But in reality trauma is a distressing event that can scar our lives forever. These specific traumatic ordeals can accumulate inside a person and hang over their head, camouflaging their actual emotions.  

Working with Councilman Zeke Cohen, his colleagues on city council, as well as other stakeholders, we accomplished something that is very difficult: we moved from talk to action. Sharing our trauma became the impetus for change. While the Elijah Cummings Healing City Act is only one step forward, it is an essential step. 

Educating people about trauma is no easy task. We must do this while also ensuring that city agencies interacting with people who trauma are prepared to respond in ways that are supported by research. Doing so will minimize the harm to traumatized individuals and to the city as a whole. 

Baltimore is a beautiful city. Too many of the young people who live here witness horrific things no human should ever see. One day we may be able to change this for good, but for now, this is the reality of the poverty, addiction, and violence that plague our city.

To be numb is to doom the next generation to more and more entrenched traumas. This is why signing this legislation is such an important step for us to take. By doing so, we honor the legacy of the late Congressman Elijah Cummings, who taught us that “Our children are the living messages we send to a future we will not see.” This legislation is an attempt to make sure that it is a message of hope and healing that we send.

Bryonna Harris, Damani Thomas, and Jaionna Santos are students at Frederick Douglass High School. They worked with City Council person Zeke Cohen to push forward the Elijah Cummings Heal the City Act.

The post Breaking Trauma’s Dangerous Silence appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Activist Kim Trueheart says that her Investing in Parents town hall was her New Year’s resolution. For many parents and caregivers, figuring out how to guide their children through the city’s educational system can be confusing and not very inclusive, and she wants to do something about it.

“We’ve made no strategic investments in helping parents navigate the system,” she says.

Things like getting your kids access to needed services or negotiating with a teacher can be stressful and fraught for many parents. Trueheart wants to help parents navigate those processes

Frances Frost, the U.S. Department of Education’s parent ambassador, will deliver a keynote address at the town hall, with Baltimore City Schools CEO Sonja B. Santelises, City Councilman Zeke Cohen, and Del. Mary Washington also in attendance. There will be time for parents to ask questions.

“I’d like for parents to ask questions around challenges they’ve had . . . and get credible answers about how to go back and reengage. It’s not a matter of giving up the first time. Your child is worth you trying again and again.”

Trueheart says she wants to plan a parenting institute in March to keep helping city parents help their kids.

“Oftentimes the services are there but you have to ask for them,” Trueheart says. “Oftentimes that doesn’t happen, especially in the instance of a troubled child. The system would rather reject that child than embrace that child.”

Free food, transportation, and childcare will be provided. Call Trueheart at (443) 255-9413 to arrange transportation.

The event will be held on Feb. 22, 6-8 p.m. at the Baltimore City Community College Fine Arts Theater, 2901 Liberty Heights Ave. Go to here to register and for more information.

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For the past five years, I have taught full- and part-time for public schools that serve students  considered to be at-risk in Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Washington, D.C.

Urban education invites a much different approach from the standard white middle class framework for education. As an early career teacher, I have had to pick up most of the unique, unspoken rules by trial and error, but the concept of a warm demander is something I recently acquired from taking certification coursework.

A warm demander is a term used to describe the most effective urban teachers. Warm demanders have a style of behavior management that could be misinterpreted by outside observers as harsh but is based on the concept that Black students are accustomed to a more direct style of management outside of school.

It could be that this style of teaching comes from the different ways Black and white children are parented. At home, Black students might hear, “go to bed, or “put down that remote control,” whereas white parents might ask “Isn’t it time for bed?”

Throughout my time teaching in Baltimore City and Baltimore County, I was encouraged to take on a more aggressive “warm demander” tone as a method to connect with my majority-Black students. I felt like the expectation was even higher for me to be an enforcer because of my status as Black and female. It was assumed by administration and students that because I am a Black woman, I could be “Mama mean” and this would naturally be something I could access in my “teacher toolbox.”

I once asked a student who was coaching me on becoming “more mean” why I needed to be that way. I asked her if I were a white woman, would I need to be “more mean?” She responded by saying “No! You’re Black! The students don’t respect you because you’re not mean enough!”

I gradually learned that this mode of behavior management would not consistently work unless trust was established. I had such a short amount of time with my students to establish the trust necessary to become a warm demander that I reverted back to my cool, soft spoken, authentic persona. Immediately the students seemed to mirror my tranquility and I found that I had less behavior adjustments to make.

I entered the field of education to fight in solidarity for the struggle for opportunity through education and share my love of learning. I have nothing against warm demanders. If it is done correctly, I am confident that it is effective. But I think what it takes to be an effective warm demander is striking a fine balance between discipline and punishment. And too often what I have seen as a teacher in urban settings is the misuse of punishment spilling over to abuse.

It is an open secret that profanity and corporal punishment are used as tools for behavior management with Black students in urban schools. In my experience, the teachers who receive the most positive feedback regularly rely on inciting fear as a method for managing behavior, which only conditions students to an inappropriate dynamic with authority. If students are conditioned to respond to aggression and violence, that only leaves them more vulnerable to interactions with police, which can potentially result in excessive use of force.

The intent of sharing my perspective and experience is not to “call out” urban schools that are already fighting the uphill battle of navigating generations of systemic racism. Anyone can point out what’s going wrong in a broken system. My intent is to begin a call to examine the long term ramifications of using fear to manage the unique challenges we face as urban educators.

It is the norm for many students in urban settings to have experienced chronic exposure to trauma. As a substitute teacher at Digital Harbor, I can recall stories from my students of being in the back seat of the car as their parent was murdered, or having discovered dead bodies in their neighborhoods. A child usually will not make connections between their past experiences, present conditions, and their actions. This is often difficult for adults to understand or accept. This reality can create an environment of mistrust, chaos, and violence if teachers are not well equipped to manage behavior with discernment between discipline and punishment.

Because there is no de-escalation training or discipline and punishment training, fear has naturally been adopted as the primary tool of behavior management and as a path to achievement in urban settings.

In my opinion, the mainstream framework that’s being used is egregiously inappropriate to humanely meet the needs of students in urban settings. All schools, but primarily urban schools, are at the convergence of every unaddressed social issue in one place. To use the same tools in such different environments shows a blatant disregard for the human rights of our children and evidence of a widely accepted devaluation of Black and Brown life.

The writer is a teacher who currently works in D.C. Public Schools and has in the past taught in schools in Baltimore City and Baltimore County. She has asked to remain anonymous out of fear that her comments could lead to workplace retaliation.

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