I struggle with articulating my issues with City Year because they are complicated. I do not like to list negatives without a proposed solution but since the nature of this organization is dealing with a complex issue, I do not really have solutions for a lot of these problems. Please know in reading this list that I am well aware that City Year looks different for every person depending on your role within the organization, depending on the school you work for, and depending on the City you live in. It's also important to note that the experience also varies depending on the manager you report under. I am going to speak solely on my experience as an Americorps volunteer for City Year for a Jacksonville FL middle school in a 7th grade classroom in the school year of 2015-2016. Here are my perceptions of some of the issues the organization has.
First off, idealism alone is not healthy for this work. The culture and curriculum within City Year spends way too much time focusing on the idealistic ideas of service rather than preparing you emotionally, and mentally for the realistic sides of it all. They expect you to walk in with this cloud of positivity and when you are faced with the tragedies of the education system, to lean on these empty ideals for support. And then, they give you these horror stories about the very worst situations and leave you scared of the children. The two extremes are annoying and do not encompass the full picture of service. The best way to cope with service, is to give a person HELPFUL tools to navigate what comes their way. I think City Year Jacksonville has ineffective priorities on what Corps members need for educational, emotional, and physical support in their service year.
I ended up in a first year Teach for America classroom with a 21 year old teacher with NO formal educational training, in a remedial 7th grade reading classroom. This young person was HIGHLY unequipped for this job. Now, I do not blame City Year for this person's incompetency. If I wanted to blame someone, I could write a LONG review on Teach For America's Glassdoor. However, I do blame City Year for keeping me in this environment. They expected me to CONTINUE to work with these kids despite the fact that these children were not learning ANYTHING all year long. I was furious. How do you expect me to do a job that relies on a teacher, and then not actually put me in a classroom with a competent teacher? It was ridiculous because my management basically told me, "If the teacher is not really providing the kids with work, then just make up work!" Yeah okay because go to a group of 7th graders, give them a bunch of reading activities and when they ask "If this isn't homework, why should I do it? It's not improving my grade at all" and then try to explain to them that they are far below the 7th grade reading level due to the racist nature of the education system and that within these 10 months, I am hoping that my reading strategies will take them from a 3rd grade reading level to a 7th grade level.... Yeah that didn't seem like a great option either. So then they tell me to play the "Well I am an adult and you have to do this work whether it makes sense are not" meanwhile they have F's in a classroom with a teacher that can't teach and now I am just another authority figure beating senseless "discipline" into their world without providing them with any substance. This was the daily predicament I faced and there were no real solution to help out any of these kids with their education. It was pretty defeating. I wish my managers had put me into a classroom with another City Year and allowed me to actually do my job. Instead, I spent most of my year breaking up fights and supporting the students emotionally since my classroom became basically a loud scream fest where kids could do and say whatever they wanted. That ended up being cool because I am a solution based person and used this opportunity to get to know my children, but it was extremely draining and I still was unable to make a significant impact on their reading levels.
Another issue I had was with the ABC model City Year promotes. They expect me as the corps member to focus on Attendance, Behavior, AND curriculum all the time as apart of your job. I think this was pretty ineffective because I was working 50 plus hours a week in a difficult environment and it is nearly impossible to do an excellent job at all three. They also assigned each corps members an additional job that we were to oversee across the whole school. I proposed the idea that City Year build a different model of help. Maybe have a few corps members on the staff ONLY focus on boosting attendance and doing community outreach. Maybe their only job is to generate resources for the school, fix up the campus, put on community projects and rebuild attendance. This could have a much better impact on the schools if 10 months was painstakingly dedicated to helping improve conditions. Another area I saw improvement was within behavior. They made us pick 15 students to mentor and then put on daily lunches to help improve these kids’ behavior. What if instead, we put on a school wide mentor and buddy program. We try to give every child an adult mentor whether it is in or outside of school and a buddy so that the child always has friend to rely on. Or maybe develop a work program so that when kids get in school suspension, rather than running that classroom into the ground, they work on rebuilding the campus, volunteering after school, or working on a community garden. Maybe we could work on building a punishment program that yields productivity and is targeted by specific corps members. What if the education part of City Year was integrated into a school wide homeroom and done in a way where City Year came in to survey the kids and get an accurate idea as to what the students are missing. Also, help the teachers build culturally competent techniques for teaching children of color. These folks would spend a dedicated amount of time per school year looking to improve the relationship between kids and the educators and the schools.
You know why this will most likely not happen though? This is a government funded non-profit. Though they do receive large funding from corporations as well, there are so many stipulations and regulations on what the corps members must do within their service year. There is a lot of red tape and unnecessary tasks we must do to keep our funders happy. One example of this was that we had to keep these binders with a specific organizational instruction. When we asked why this was necessary, my managers their strongest reason was that if a sponsor walked into check our data, we must have the necessary information in these binders. There were a lot of things like this that we did that were only to keep up appearances.
I also was to emphasize the NEED for culturally competent education for Corps members. Some of these Corps members walked into these classrooms that were 95% African American having never really interacted with a person of color and with no real understanding on how to teach a child of color. This is a huge problem. My students in the south spoke southern ebonics with a completely different subject verb agreement and vocabulary than the standard market place English I spoke and taught in schools. Rather than creating a bridge between their language and the language they spoke in schools, many teachers and corps members made fun of their speech and thought their way of talking as “improper.” To be an advocate for students (the way City Year claims Corps members are) the organization needs to advocate for the students’ culture.
Last they needed to stay small. I think a location like Jacksonville, grew too quickly without perfecting the model. The education system is overwhelming and I understand the need for improvements everywhere. However, putting a Band-Aid on the problem isn’t really helping either. I think they should have more corps members per school and reconfigure the service model before expanding anymore. They need to make the model as effective as possible before expanding and I think they really missed the mark not doing this. I think there are a lot of ineffective teams operating within the city and Jacksonville children cannot afford to have anymore ineffective adults within the system.
