Urban Educators: Don’t be Afraid to Live Where You Teach – There’s Lots to Love about Living Near Your Students

…on living in Camden as a city educator

In the midst of the COVID19 quarantine that is proving to be enormously trying for tens of millions of Americans, I want to wish everyone tidings of safety, peace, and love during these difficult times. And while much has been written about the difficulties experienced by both parents and students grappling with remote-learning, and the hardships of parenting educators who are trying to facilitate distance learning and Zoom lessons for their classes while tending to education needs of their own children, neither are the topic of this piece. There has been, after all, substantive articles written on both topics and in the effort to being additive rather than repetitive, I am opting to leave the COVID19 struggle and its impact on education alone entirely. Instead, I’d like to use this space to share something more personal, but nonetheless important. Perhaps other educators may find this helpful, specifically those working in urban school districts. So with that, bear with me.

Throughout my marriage, I’ve had to improve my skills in communication with my wife. I’d heard ad nauseum that in relationships, “communication is key.” In retrospect, I was a horrible communicator because largely, I didn’t know how to. I was not good at expressing my thoughts clearly nor was I a good listener. That said, over the course of the 18 years of dealing with one another throughout various stages of our relationship, my wife and I both deliberately worked to become communicators for each one another. Fortunately over time, both of us have improved in that area and as such, our relationship has gotten much better and smoother the more we communicate with one another. Recognizing the importance of maintaining open and authentic lines of communication, as a daily custom, between the hours of roughly 7 and 9:30 pm, my wife and I set aside time to simply talk to one another – no distractions. Though we do have a daughter and a dog, we make a point to carve out time to simply talk to one another about our feelings, our day, our fears, our daughter, our future, our work, our concerns and general perspectives on life. (To create the scene more completely: soft music like this is often playing in the background with accompaniment of smoke and libations.) Last night, we talked about our respective professional journeys…

With the CORONA19 quarantine continuously looming over all of us, my wife and I took turns reflecting on how we got to where we are as professionals. My wife’s journey which I shared broadly here, also included her history of being a tried and true, ride-or-die soldier for her family. If there was anything my wife could do to help improve our household’s financial circumstance, my wife was ready and willing to do it to move our family forward. We talked about how she worked in college in various work study jobs paying between $6 and $7 per hour while parenting, and then took various internships through grad school, followed by social work jobs from West Philly to Burlington City. We then began reflecting on my own path: that I never intended on becoming a teacher as it certainly it was never a goal of mine and we recounted the many steps it took to become one. The PRAXIS… the alternate route classes… the paying for various certs… the earnest, heartfelt prayers to not be laid off come RIF season… the prayers that I survived long enough to make tenure… we remembered those days well.

In sum, we acknowledged how our shared journeys and our willingness to really go hard for our family got us to where we are today with our really modest slice of the American Dream: a Parkside rowhome valued at $63,000 (mortgage is $740 per month), a 2005 Ford F-150 for me (no car payment), a 2007 Hyundai Elantra for her (no car payment), and a Camden public school education for our child. We both discussed how those things may not seem like much to most people as certainly the desire for “bigger” (homes), “newer” (cars), “better” (neighborhoods) and “more” (money) are commonly viewed as signs of professional and economic success. Those words would never be attached to the lifestyle we’ve carved out, and yet we both recognized that we have so much to be thankful for throughout respective career paths .

For me as a city educator, I acknowledged how fortunate I am to have worked for the Camden City School District. The District hired me first as a permanent substitute back in the Winter of 2004 which allowed me to make some money, and gain some valuable classroom experience working in Camden High School and later Veterans Memorial Family School. Later that year, they hired me full-time which when I first saw my name in on the Superintendent’s (Monthly) Report (shown to me by my grandmother who was a former teacher in the District) and I saw how much I’d be making as a first-year teacher ($40,003), I remember crying feeling like I made it (similar to how college athletes feel after being drafted by a professional franchise). I recall feeling like all of my financial worries were behind me, that I could do so many things for my family with the money I’d earn and we wouldn’t have to fret over financial matters any longer. From that Fall night in 2004, I vowed, internally, that the Camden City School District would never be shortchanged by me and that I would always do my best for the District that had stabilized my life (and my family’s) financially. Fast forward to April 2007, after living all over the city, and with my wife and daughter living in an affordable unit in Glassboro, I was able to purchase the home we live in now, bringing us all together under one roof for the first time. I have the Camden City School District to thank for that.

At four years old in September 2007, my daughter began attending pre-school at Cooper’s Poynt Elementary School in North Camden, one of the few schools around that had all day pre-kindergarten. My daughter stayed at Cooper’s Poynt until she graduated 8^th grade; and today, she’s still in the District as an 11^th grader and will be here until she graduates. As an employee of the District with a child in city schools, my daughter over the years met a lot of staff who know who she is, whose child she is, and who keep a vigilant eye on her to the point where she can’t get away with anything without me being notified (I love it).  And on somedays where issues arose like her school having an in-service day, or her feeling a little under the weather, my little baby would simply come to work with me and sit in my classes with my students with no problem. My co-workers, students, and players came to know my child as she became a regular face at the schools where I taught.  

And at home, once the school day was over, living among my students and broader Camden community made the work days and my relationships with students progress much easier. Passing students on my way to the corner store, running into them with family in Family Dollar or at the Chinese food store, or even seeing them walk past my house while sitting outside created the reality that I will never NOT be on-duty to my students – (there is no “clocking out” when you live where you teach) but also enabled us to see each other outside of our specific roles of teacher and student, but also neighbors.

So with last night’s conversation, I remembered how awesome the Camden City School District has been good to me and my family, and for that I will always remain grateful. Hopefully, my example could be instructive to other urban teachers, particularly those who are just starting out in the profession. Be open to, and strongly consider, living where you teach as permanent residents. The benefits are plenty, while the drawbacks are primarily based on societal conceptions of what middle-class success embodies. Where there are problems that need solving, urban educator-residents are in prime position to advocate alongside students and their neighbors in pursuit of a more perfect urban public school system and city at large. In residing within the urban areas we teach, the risk is minimal but the returns are far greater than most could quantify.