“To this day, I am the second black teacher in the history of Centereach High school that has received tenure, and the school has been open since 1972. So that's very telling, and I'm still the only black teacher in the building.” Said Vanessa Matlock, An english teacher at Centereach High-school.
Vanessa arrives at Centereach High-school at about 7:20 in the morning. As she walks into the building, she’s greeted by the security guard stationed at the front door. In her classroom, she sets up her lecture for the day while she scans the room to take attendance. She is in front of a very diverse classroom filled with students of different cultures and skin color.
“These students were of all different colors. They were definitely from all walks of life. And when I say that, I mean black students, white students, Asian students, Spanish students, gay students,” Said Vanessa.
Vanessa acknowledges these differences but realizes that the image her students view from looking at her is much different than the rest of the faculty at Centereach. These students of color lose role models while the rest are left with a lack of diversity. Unfortunately, Vanessa may be the only black teacher that her students encounter within their high-school careers. Within the 22 years of her career she has never seen another black teacher to be tenured in her building.
“There are other teachers of color but very few, very few. I can count them maybe one two three. I can count them all on one hand,” said Vanessa
This is the reality for most public schools on Long Island. A recent report by the National Center for Suburban Studies done at Hofstra University conducted in March 2019, has found that 61% of all Long Island schools which makes up for 642 school buildings, does not have one single black teacher in them.
This could potentially have an impact on students of color that attend schools that have a lack of representation of teachers that look like them. A 2018 study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that black students who had a single black teacher were 13% more likely to enroll in college. With two black teachers that number jumped to 32% it also cut school dropout rates by 39%.
“Young black boys are more likely to graduate, if they have a black male teacher figure, It increases their chances of graduating, increases their chance of their academic outcomes and abilities.” Said, Nia Adams, Community Organizer of the Long Island Coalition
According to, World population review site, Long Island is the most populated island in any U.S. territory or state, it has 39% of the total of the population of the state of New York. It is also among the 10 most racially segregated metropolitan regions in the United States.
“About 30% of Long Island students attend a school without a Latinx teacher. The majority of Long Island schools do not have any Black educators. A 2017 Hofstra study showed that even in schools where the vast majority of the school has students of color, 2/3rds of the teachers are White,” said, Jennifer Brown, Associate Professor of Sociology at Long Island University Post, She teaches courses on inequalities of gender and race.
Long Island today is more diverse than it’s ever been before however it is also more segregated, according to Erase Racism
New York. Erase Racism is a regional nonprofit with a mission to expose racial discrimination, advocate for laws and policies that eliminate racial disparities and increase understanding of how structural racism and segregation impacts our communities and region as a whole.
Erase Racism conducted a study in 2015 on the inequities in education on Long Island, they found that there are more than twice as many intensely segregated districts as there were 12 years ago.
“We know that Long Island has a community segregation problem with historical roots. We just have to look at the history of redlining to see why we have such segregated communities.
This means that many of schools are segregated as well, racially and by income/wealth levels. Therefore, it is very important for us to consider if the staff at schools offer a representational diversity that reflects the community,” said Brown.
The reason Long Island is more segregated today is due to a lack of enforcement of fair housing in other words redlining. In 2019, a Newsday investigation used paired testers to conduct a study which showed that black homebuyers were treated differently 49% of the time, while white homebuyers were steered away from communities that were perceived to be more diverse. Due to this redlining, the number of students attending majority “minority” districts has more than doubled, according to Erase Racism.
This issue bleeds into the foundation of the education system. As student diversity climbed dramatically in Suffolk and Nassau county within the past decade the teacher demographic has remained the same.
“We know that students of color, especially students in poorer communities, face additional challenges in their educational journey,” said Brown
While interviewing Vanessa, I acknowledged the fact that she was passionate about the topic, she herself is a victim of a faulty education system. She tells me the story of her hiring process, I can see the tears slowly start to accumulate as her eyes become watery.
“The assistant principal at the time, pulled me aside and told me that I was hired because of my blackness, the two principals at the time, were fighting over me because they needed somebody to fill the quota,” said Vanessa.
She didn’t view this as a victory for herself nor did she feel that this was enough to bring diversity to the school. Before this there was only one other black teacher to be hired in the 50 years it’s been established.
“I felt disheartened. I felt insulted. Because all the work that I had done, all the energy and the hours that I had put into becoming a teacher in that one conversation was just kind of thrown out the window, for lack of a better term. And I just felt like, I felt so small. I felt so small,” said Vanessa.
When Vanessa was a student herself at Centereach High-school, she had the opportunity to study under the very first black teacher at Centereach, Miss Gilmore and who was a business teacher at the time. Vanessa's smile grew wide as she sat down in her chair reminiscing over her youth and having recalled her experiences of her education while she was in school. She spoke with excitement as she explained to me how important of a role Miss Gilmore had on her as a student of color.
“And she was just... it was nice, not that she treated me any differently than my other teachers, because I have some really great white teachers too. So when I say that she made an impact on me, it was truly, for the most part, just the impact of her existence. Seeing someone, a person of color, a black woman who looks like, you know, me and my family members. It felt good to see her in that position,” Vanessa said.
She went on to say, “I don't know that I realized that at the time when I was a kid, I was in 10th grade. I just knew that I felt a deeper connection with her...than other teachers from the start, and I think I felt that way now reflecting. I think I felt that way, because I saw a role model in her from the start.” Her face said it all as she looked at me with a sorrow but content expression.
Isiah Washington, a 2016 graduate from Centereach High-school, did not have the opportunity of having Vanessa as a teacher but had talked to her frequently throughout his highschool education and noticed that the reason he felt so drawn to her in particular is because of her skin color, he felt that she would be able to resonate with him more then the other teachers because she was black. You can see the tears fill up his eyes as he angrily remembers the lack of representation within his public education career.
“The teacher population and the lack of POCs and BI POCs, the more I think about it, knowing, growing up in it, and then now having the knowledge that I do, it's just so discouraging, but very on brand for Long Island.” Said Washington when trying to recall the lack of diversity within Centereach.
“It's an evident fact. on Long Island with 124 school districts,
it's a very segregated system, and the teaching staff is also very, very segregated. I mean, you go to certain school districts, you hardly find any minority teachers teaching the schools and you'll find that the heavily populated minority students are school districts, such as Wyandanch, such as Brentwood, central Islip, you'll, you'll find an overall presentation of minority teachers and minority interest instructors in those schools. Of course it's part of the problem, there is no question about it,``said Georges Fouron, Professor of Education and Social Sciences at Stony Brook University.
Two different generations but the same school going through the same experiences allowing them to realize after leaving their education career that representation is an issue in the education field on Long Island.
Dr. Zebulon Miletsky, an associate professor of Africana Studies at Stony Brook University, who is a member of the Badass Teacher Association group, who are a group of teachers who’ve dealt with their own discrimination.
“I know for a fact that there's been discrimination in Long Island schools, theres been some issues in places like the Riverhead school district. There's a group on Facebook called the Badass Teacher Association, I had been in dialogue with this group of teachers and administrators who met out on the East end that talked about these issues, so yes, there are problems,” said Miletsky.
Although statistics show that there is an issue with hiring more teachers of color on Long Island, not all educators feel that there is an issue when it comes to faculty diversity hires. Mary Lewis, a white middle aged woman who lives in Centereach, Long Island and is Teacher at Brentwood middle school expressed that she feels that there is already a strong push in the hiring process with looking for more teachers of color, when discussing the issue of discrimination within the eduction field on Long Island.
“You can google different school districts and go on the employment opportunity site and look at the wording. The job descriptions are skewed to interview and hire people of color specifically because there is such a small percentage of them,” Lewis said.
Lewis sent a photo of the job description from Brentwood's website that showed a demand in hiring bilingual teachers. The page had a description under the teacher positions that were being offered such as, Special Education teachers, Bilingual preferred, Elementary general education teachers with bilingual Extension or ENL certification and technology teacher - spanish speaking or TESOL Certified (required).
Even with this slight push in an attempt to try to hire more people of color with these job description requirements, many still view it as not enough due to how systematically racist Long Island is.
“Even if you're making an effort to get teachers of color to teach on Long Island, It's not very appealing because the things that the teachers of color may have to suffer in a school district, where they will be the minority because of the extreme segregation that Long Island has put in place. It's a whole process because of how deeply embedded racism is in every aspect of life here,” said Nicole Grennan, the community educator and organizer for Erase Racism NY.
While Lewis does feel there is a push in the hiring process she does recognize that there still is an issue with the demographic of teachers that you see within a school.
“I would be very interested to see which districts discriminate, I’ll bet the demographics of the district dictate the interview pool.” Lewis said.
Nancy Santos seeps into a grey worn out desk chair as her brown eyes adjust focus onto the laptop screen. You can see the wrinkles around her eyes as she looks up her lessons plans for the day. Her curly, long black hair which sits upon her shoulders given to her by her Puerto Rican descent. Her tan complexion matches more of the student demographic in her district than most of the teachers. Santos is one of the 10 hispanic teachers out of the hundred teachers that work at Central Islip. Central Islip, Long Island is predominantly hispanic and black community. Teaching at Central Islip has been a blessing, she says, because of how diverse the school is.
Black and Latinx are the communities that have the most underfunded schools on Long Island. 76% of all students that attend high need districts are hispanic and black. The percentage of black and Hispanic students who are schooled in high need districts is ten times the percentage of white students in high need districts, according to study conducted by Erase Racism New York. Santos is a third grade teacher. She felt uncomfortable talking about race and education. During our conversation I felt that she wanted to tell me more, that she was holding back.
Santos says that she tries to bring up the importance of race issues to her students within her lessons but due to them being young she finds it challenging. “Today, as a matter of fact, one of our Words of the Week is protest,” she opened up with an example. “So I mentioned it, has anybody seen on the news, people looking like they're walking in a parade. I didn't want to delve into exactly what it's about. But I have one African American student and he mentioned, ‘Yes, I saw that’ and I said that it's in support of positive things for African Americans, because unfortunately, some African Americans have been treated very badly. So those people were protesting because they're against bad treatment against the African American people. That's what I said,” Santos recalled.
Long Island has seen its share of Black Lives Matters protests occurring from Merrick, Brentwood, Levittown, Lake grove, Smithtown, Patchogue, Riverhead, Mattituck and Shirley to name a few.
These protests have been organized to demand an end to racial oppression and police brutality. A common theme in the discussions that have echoed throughout these protests have involved education. "It starts with education."
The education system on Long Island has a clear issue when it comes to diversity with faculty. The idea to see a change within the education system on Long Island has become one of the goals within the protests.
At around 2 pm on the corner of 112 and 347 in Port Jefferson Station a crowd slowly starts to fill the area on the side of the freeway. The air is humid and the sun is beaming down while about 500 protestors gather chanting the names of the victims that have been killed due to police brutality. Skyler Johnson is in the middle of the crowd with sweat dripping down his forehead wearing a button down plaid shirt and shorts. He’s holding up a megaphone to his mouth as you hear him scream “we want change!” When you first see Johnson you might view him as a small skinny light skinned African American young man with short hair but he’s more than just that.
Skyler Johnson is a 20 year old resident from Mount Sinai who recently ran for State Senate as a Democrat in the New York primary election. Johnson did not go on to win the position of state senate but still pushes for change and uses his voice at the protests that he’s attended and organized. One of the major things that Johnson demanded while running for senate was Long Island education reform. Johnson being a native from Long Island has witnessed how the education system is run first hand. He wants the best future for his little brother who is currently in school and has helped with Johnson's campaign. For Johnson, representation matters in all aspects of the education field and he is fighting for a more diverse demographic within the teachers unions and students.
“When I first decided to run for office I did so for a number of reasons. one of those is that I was seeing a gap in representation when it comes to social issues that are facing people of all backgrounds”, Johnson said.
There are many organizations fighting against racial segregation and discrimination on Long Island. Organizations such as Erase Racism New York, which has been around since 2001.
“In 2017 92% of teachers were white and fit, only 55% of the student body was white,” Grennan said. Even though Grennan is passionate about these issues within the school system, she is white and has attended school on Long Island for her whole public education, first at Walt Whitman High School and then in the South Huntington School District, she only had one black teacher throughout this school years. “This was even disheartening to see as a white student,” she exclaimed.
Although Long Island has a large difference in the student diversity compared to it’s teacher diversity, most if not all of the teachers I’ve interviewed have noticed that the role that they play in their students' lives is far more important to them than viewing the color of their skin.
“As time has gone on, I have noticed that the students of color population has grown immensely. I used to know every single black and Latino student in the building and now there's so many that I do not know and it's great,” said Vanessa as she pauses to realize how much has changed over the years of her career. “I love that, I love seeing so much diversity. But I know how important it is to be that role model.”
Hozzászólások