To Teach in Baltimore City

I wrote this piece in 2021 for a course on Literary Journalism. I chose to focus on someone of great inspiration to me: my mother, Jill Thomas. Some may consider interviewing your mother to be lazy (and, still in the thralls of COVID, I was) but I have always been profoundly amazed by her drive to teach in historically neglected communities in the city. At the time of posting this, my mother still teaches on the high school level in North Philadelphia, and shows no signs of stopping.

It was 2010, and Jill Thomas was in her first year of teaching at Francis Scott Key Elementary and Middle in Baltimore City. Categorized as a Title 1 school, more than 52% of Key’s students fell below the poverty line. She wanted to teach middle school English and special education at Key for that very reason—she believed she would be useful. So, when a student in her eighth grade homeroom began to skip classes and fall behind, Thomas felt an obligation to pull him aside and ask why.

“My education isn’t important,” the thirteen-year-old told her. “I’m gonna be dead by the time I’m eighteen, anyway.”

He was wrong. He would make it to twenty before being shot and killed.

Thomas would come to realize that this experience would, in a way, describe the climate of teaching in Baltimore City. A survey found that 33% of students at Key believed that student fighting was not an issue. For many of her students, violence was a norm and ingrained in many aspects of life. It was common for students to bring weapons to school.

“[Students] only have weapons at school because they feel like coming to and from school, they aren’t safe,” Thomas says. “In Baltimore, we hear repeatedly about loaded guns being found on school property.”

Students entered through a metal detector. The air-conditioning was broken. The water supply, contaminated with lead. She would have to pay for many of her classroom supplies out of her own pocket. Breaking up the weekly—sometimes daily—fight was part of the job. Still, Thomas was sure this was where she belonged.

Born in upstate New York, a desire to teach seemed to be woven in her DNA: her father was the principal of the local high school; her mother, a career English teacher; brother taught history; sister had recently received her degree in education. Once Thomas’s children had grown old enough for her to feel comfortable re-entering the workforce, she was prepared to carry on the family legacy. Now a resident of Columbia, Maryland, she began her trajectory like many others: as a substitute teacher. From there, she worked her way up to becoming a para-educator, then received a teaching certification out of the Baltimore City Residency Program.

Rather than teaching for her local school system—often ranked one of the bests in the state—Thomas chose instead to commute half an hour away, to a small building located in the shadow of I-95.

She would discover that Baltimore City had an incredibly high turnover rate among those in her profession. One report found that, from 2014 to 2017, over 2,500 teachers left their teaching positions within the city. According to Thomas, there are around 150 to 200 new faculty members hired every year, despite no new schools being built and no significant increase in student populations.

To teach in Baltimore City, you have to truly want it.

As a special educator, Thomas works in a self-contained program for students who display learning disabilities and emotional disturbances. The program, which contains anywhere from 10 to 15 students per grade, is voluntary—students are often placed in it at their parent’s request. In many instances, it can be the deciding factor for the students to stay in school.

In her first year, Thomas had a student dictated by habit: always to himself, always sleeping at his desk. Always by a window, which he would always perch open, from fall to winter to spring to summer. Always masked by a strong and pungent odor and always bullied for it.

“He sleeps because he’s bullied, he sleeps because no one is taking the time to get close to him,” Thomas told herself. He needed a reason to stay awake in class.

Through her own observation and discussions with co-workers, she came to realize that despite low reading skills, the student was exceptionally comprehensive when read to. Thomas would utilize that knowledge and try her best to keep the student captivated. Over the course of the year, he would stay awake in class more and, on good days, even participate.

The student opened up to Thomas. He told her about how he rarely had a bed to sleep in at home, nor did he have any blankets. One thing they did have, was cats. Cats that frequently urinated in the house and were rarely cleaned up after. Cats that made him smell.

At the end of the year, Thomas went to break up a fight in the hallway outside her class. She found that same student lying on the floor, his mouth bleeding. Other teachers filed in and tried to help him up. He would swat them off, wriggling himself free from their grip, not allowing anyone to touch him… except for Thomas.

“The nurse gave me an ice pack, and he would only let me hold it up to his mouth,” Thomas recounts. “And as I’m doing this, the tears are just running down my face.”

Years later, after graduating from Key and moving on to high school, Thomas’s former student returned. He had cleaned up: a new haircut, new clothes, and a newfound sense of happiness.

“That was great… Unfortunately, we have fewer of those stories than we do the other ones.”

Another student, years later: a sixth grader, small in stature, but with an explosive temperament. By Thomas’s analysis, he had a big mouth to compensate for his size. The boy would stand up to anyone, regardless of their position, and often found himself fighting because of it.

Like many other students at Key, the boy fought out of self-defense. For many students in Baltimore, the exposure to fighting is constant—it’s what you see at school, it's what you see out your window, it's what you see on your commute. It’s how issues are resolved.

So when Thomas’s diminutive student went after someone twice his size, she knew it wouldn’t end well for him. She placed herself in the classroom doorway, blocking the student’s path.

“Get out of my way,” the boy said in a rage, looking up at his teacher. “Or I’ll hit you.”

“Okay,” Thomas said. “Take your best shot.”

He punched her in the mouth. To the student’s surprise, Thomas did not move out of the way like he had expected her to.

“He was horrified when he actually connected with me,” Thomas says when retelling the story. “He didn’t really want to hit me, but I had called his bluff, and he just had to follow through.”

Like others privy to student life in Baltimore, Thomas knows that some kids will give off only the showmanship of a fight—squaring up and throwing missing punches—when an adult is around. This way, when the fight is broken up early on, students can look tough and willing to stand up for themselves without being injured.

The student would be reprimanded, and receive a suspension for hitting Thomas. He has since been killed.

In the almost eleven years since Thomas began teaching, she cannot count how many students she’s had in her classrooms. She can, however, count the number of former students that have been killed: six.

In her eyes, you never fully adjust to the prevalence of death in Baltimore City schools. It doesn't get easier, she says. You simply learn to compartmentalize—push it deep, and hope it never comes back up to see the light of day. It becomes harder the more you try to force down.

A third student: the one that changed her perspective, the one that made her understand just a little bit more; an eighth grader, a bit too energetic for his own good, and unpredictable; hard to manage. On the more hectic days, he would dart out of class and run all over the school, dipping in and out of other classes. Sometimes, when he became angry, he would throw things—ranging from pencils and books to chairs and tables. Running across desks was all-too-frequent of an occurrence.

The student would often find himself in the designated “support room.” It was an unused classroom, empty aside from some odd tables and chairs. Teachers would bring students there to cool off, or be alone, or take their anger out, whatever they may need. If he threw things around in there, at least no one would be caught in the crossfire.

One day, Thomas had her students write their own personal narratives.

“You can write about anything you want, guys,” she instructed them. “It just has to be a story from your life told from your perspective. You get to choose what it’s about.”

It wasn’t her first time prompting students to write these narratives, so she knew the usual topics to expect: tales of students' families, neighborhoods, best friends and sports experiences were common. She also admits that they rarely conformed to the “normal” experiences most kids would have. When writing about their neighborhoods, descriptions of shootings often came up; on the subject of families, students wrote about lost loved ones.

The narrative from her sporadic and troublesome eighth grader was not a tale she expected.

The student wrote about when he was five years old. His mother left him at home while she went to work and he was charged with watching his two-year-old sister. He wrote about how they were eating hotdogs together, watching Spongebob. He wrote about how his sister choked and died in front of him. Thomas says she will never forget that student and his narrative.

“Once you read a story like that, you’re like ‘Okay. I get it a little more.’ It’s an everyday thing, just a cycle of bad things happening. Moms who are addicts. Dads who are in jail. So much physical abuse. Physical abuse and sexual abuse runs rampant.”

A para-educator, in the same position that Thomas was once in, helped Thomas in the classroom. She was a caring presence to Thomas and the students every day. She was never absent from Key, until the morning she was shot and killed getting into her car in her Baltimore neighborhood. She was mistaken for someone else. It was traumatic to staff and students alike.

“All of these kids in our program, who were just so used to violence and loss. And then, the safe place where they come every day to get away from that, someone that they care about was shot and killed and didn’t show up for school.”

Years in Baltimore City led to Thomas making a theory: if her students had been raised in a different environment, many would be in a traditional classroom instead of her program. The same lead contamination in the school’s water supply spans throughout parts of Baltimore City, and many older homes still have lead paint on the walls. Some of her student’s parents consumed alcohol or other drugs while pregnant with them. Others faced years of abuse, leaving them incapable of socializing in large groups and in need of the social workers and therapists that work in Thomas’s department.

Despite the constant reminders of the morbid reality outside the classroom, Thomas believes it vital to broaden her student’s perspectives outside of their own neighborhoods. Using funds from grants, donations, or their own pockets, Thomas and the other two teachers in her program began taking students on field trips outside of Key.

The early trips would serve to reward students for positive behavior throughout the week and get them outside of the classroom. Teachers would walk the students to the McDonald’s a few blocks away, and buy the students something for lunch. For some of Thomas’s kids, if they did not eat at school, they didn’t eat at all. Other trips would take them on walks to Baltimore’s inner harbor, with stops at local gardens or murals.

Soon, their opportunities expanded. Fort McHenry, a historical monument known for defending Baltimore’s harbor in the War of 1812, began inviting Key’s students and staff to their events, free of charge. Under Armour, which is headquartered in Baltimore, would hold training sessions open to the students, where they would participate in team-building exercises and workouts.

“Most of our students didn’t have families who took them places on weekends. They didn’t go on ‘adventures.’ They didn’t go to museums or zoos. So we tried to expose them to as much around Baltimore as we could.”

Outside of the field trips, Key’s staff also came together to create a community garden, where students could learn to plant and grow things like flowers and vegetables. A recycling program started in the school. Thomas’s co-workers would invite public speakers and organizations that provided science experiments, all in an effort to broaden the student’s perspectives.

As the years went on, Thomas found that the most rewarding aspect of her job was watching her students grow both physically and mentally, and eventually graduate. With no student turnover, Thomas taught the same students throughout their middle school career—from the start of the sixth grade to the end of the eighth. She considered herself lucky: not many teachers get to experience that.

“It feels so rewarding to watch these kids earn their way out,” Thomas remarks. “Well, I don’t wanna say 'earn their way out,' because their parents could remove them at any time… but these are students who are in a self-contained, behavioral-based classroom, who were truly able to rejoin the regular education classes… That is very big, to me.”

Now, more than a decade later, Thomas finds that the issue of violence in Baltimore has not improved—if anything, she thinks, it’s gotten worse. National reports of police brutality, a spike in crime in Baltimore, and a global pandemic have only fueled the flame for many of Baltimore City’s youths. In her eyes, many of the city’s issues are deeply embedded in politics and can be blamed on a lack of attention for underprivileged neighborhoods.

When asked what she has taken away from her experiences as an inner-city educator, she is quick to respond: “Perspective. There’s a huge disparity in our country… You can’t really understand or empathize with it until you experience it.”

When looking back on her experiences teaching at Francis Scott Key Elementary and Middle—the good times and the bad, the uplifting and the devastating—Thomas still has no desire to teach in any other environment. It’s all she has known, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

To teach in Baltimore City, you have to want it.