Skip to main content

The Streets Got Him First

That's the headline on an article about the killings in Oakland this year, many of whom are teenagers. One couple has lost 3 sons to homicides in Oakland. It makes my heart hurt. I just wonder how long it will be until it's a kid I know - and when I think about how devastating that would be - for me as a teacher- I just don't know how the families of these kids deal with it.

I also don't know what to do. It's easy to get cynical and hopeless. I've heard teachers talk about second graders, saying that it was too late for these kids. You have to get them earlier to make a difference. Those kids are SEVEN YEARS OLD. But if you were around them, you'd see that it's easy to believe that it's too late.

I've heard that several of my former students are in juvenile hall. My oldest former students are only 13 years old. I don't know which ones are incarcerated, but I'm going to work on finding out and writing to. I'm not sure it will make any difference, but then, we don't know if ANY of this makes a difference. All you can do is hope and pray that it does, and keep doing whatever you can...

Comments

Anonymous said…
Van JOnes at Ellen Baker Center (? I think that's right) in oakland would probably be able to point you in the right direction.
Bronwyn said…
in the right direction for finding out? or...?
Anonymous said…
For finding them specifically, and he may have other ideas as well.

He works on prison reform in the policy sense, and he's a very thoughtful person. I would think he has a relationships with people who work in or near the prison system.
Bronwyn said…
Thanks! I'll try that!
Anonymous said…
http://www.ellabakercenter.org/page.php?pageid=25&contentid=38

Popular posts from this blog

Stuffed Animals

There are several much more serious stories I was going to share, but I'm not in the mood to be made sad tonight, so I'll tell you all about the stuffed animals.  This is a post that needs images so someday when I have or borrow a working scanner, I will add the photos. A few years into teaching, I joined Freecyle.  For those of you who don't know Freecycle, it's a group of people in any given community who are on an email list to get rid of their old stuff and get stuff from other people.  It's a fabulous form of recycling. Somebody posted that they had a huge bag of stuffed animals in good condition to give away and I decided to grab it for my class. I thought that some of the kids would like the stuffed animals, but I certainly didn't think they'd all be into them.  Kids grow up really fast in that neighborhood, and when you have six-year olds talking about how they walk to school alone because their parents say they're "grown," and how

A Loss

  (I have been putting off finishing this blog post for months. You'll see why)  Today, I was cleaning a bookshelf and I found the journal from one of my third-grade students, who I call Fred in my book , in 2001. I still had it because he didn't come to the last day of school to get his stuff this year and I guess it got put in a pile and somehow I've kept it with me.  He didn't come to the last day of school, probably because his family was a mess: dad in prison, mom in an abusive relationship, all the kids (understandably) acting out violently. Fred was expelled from our school in second grade for hitting a teacher. Then he was expelled from the other school, I don't know why, at the end of second grade. He came back on the condition from the administration that he be in my class because I had him as a student in first grade and he listened to me and worked well with me.  We had a really good relationship, although Fred was definitely not easy to have in class.

A New Prison, Part Two

  Second very long part of the prison visit report.   After we got all the paperwork filled out and went through the metal detector, we got visitation slips with the name of the inmate, and made our way over to the other building for visitation. This is not maximum security so thankfully you can just sit next to the inmates, and not be separated by glass or have to use a telephone to talk.    First, you get a gate unlocked and go into a holding pen that is of course in direct sunlight (or rain if it's that season) and surrounded by fences topped with razor wire. You wait there until the gate at the other end is unlocked. This holding pen was a little bigger and less claustrophobic than the other prison (I do not have any claustrophobia and I came very close to a panic attack once at the other place) and they opened the other gate more quickly. Then you walk, again in blazing sunlight (or rain) to the visitation building. This one was less of a walk than the other prison but I still