Providence students say race is a big part of disconnect with teachers

Musah Mohammed Sesay said a math teacher told him that his attendance was so bad he should be in jail.

One of Michellet Brand’s teachers kept expressing shock when she earned good grades on assignments, she said.

Aleita Cook said her teachers sometimes made comments about her hair that she found insensitive.

Jayson Rodriguez said one of his gym teachers would always compare him to black basketball players.

For these four students, all students of color in the Providence public school system, a predominantly white teaching force and what they describe as a lack of cultural competency have led them to feel uncomfortable, stereotyped and belittled by their teachers.

The four students interviewed by The Journal belong to the Providence Student Union, an activist group that has lobbied for an ethnic studies curriculum, an improved bus schedule and more social and emotional support in schools.

“The sentiment that white people hold sometimes can be very condescending, so I don’t need that in my education space where I’m supposed to be trying to grow,” said Sesay, 18, who graduated from Classical High School this year.

The students said they had good experiences with many of their white teachers, but the lack of diversity in the teaching staff throughout their school careers was palpable.

“Out of 40 teachers I’ve had in my past school education, I’ve only had seven teachers of color,” said Rodriguez, 16. “And that’s going from kindergarten to high school.”

In a district where 91% percent of students are students of color, the disconnect can be felt in the classrooms and in the halls, students said.

Students reported inappropriate comments made by teachers, low expectations for students of color, passive handling of racist incidents and a quickness to call in student resource officers or exercise other harsh methods of discipline.

“One teacher like, she thought my Afro was a wig and she said, ‘Oh I would totally wear that,’ said Aleita Cook, a 17-year-old graduate of Providence Public Schools. “I’m like, ‘It’s my natural hair.’”

All of the students said they didn’t realize what they were missing until they had a teacher that looked like them.

Sesay, who attended Community Preparatory School, a private school in Providence, before attending Classical High School, said most of his teachers at the private school were people of color.

“So to have people that look like you, people that came up out of messed-up circumstances like you’re probably coming out of if you’re a person of color in Providence, it’s nice to have that sense of relatability and that sense of no judgement,” he said.

Until she had a Hispanic teacher, one she could speak Spanish with at school, Brand, 16, said she hadn’t understood how close she could feel to a teacher.

“I never realized how connected you could be with a school staff member or just a teacher until you actually see a role model in them,” she said.

For the students, the solution involves working harder to recruit more people of color to become teachers and investing in cultural competency training for all teachers.

Rodriguez said that many young people of color don’t see teaching as a desirable profession in part because they don’t see themselves reflected in those roles, and also because many have had such negative experiences in school that they aren’t eager to think about returning as adults.

“I’ll tell my friends, ‘Oh, you should become a teacher,’ and they’ll laugh because they’ve seen how much a joke education has become because of the things they weren’t provided or how horrible their education was, period,” he said.

For Rodriguez, this is not the case. He does want to become a teacher, and one day a professor.

“Just seeing all the inequities and how I’ve been treated in the education system,” he said, “I definitely feel like this is a system that you have to attack from the inside.”