Voices for Change: Rhiannon Murphy
Welcome to the teachers unify podcast. I'm Sarah Lerner. This episode features Rhiannon Murphy, a lifelong Bronx resident and mom who worked to end gun violence in her community. She shares how she moved her daughter upstate near Buffalo for her education and safety, her forthcoming book, her working community organizing and activism, and much more. We are here with Rhiannon Murphy, who is an author of a forthcoming book entitled How One Bronx Mother Stopped Gun Violence on Her Block, and also launched a program, The Future of Fundraising.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. I found you guys on the Internet, and I said, there's gotta be a place where I can share my story because I know my story is not unique, and I know that I'm representing so many other of us Americans across our nation who are dealing with how we're going to persevere through gun violence and empower our communities at the local level and give thanks with my mother who's a social worker for forty years. If it wasn't for her, teaching me my whole life how to navigate. And then being in the fundraising world, fundraising for arts education and education nationally, I found myself in a pocket of how to make a difference and see a way forward and found these new ways how we can innovate so that I wouldn't have to go on a great migration. Yes.
Speaker 2:I had the opportunity and the privilege to get my daughter out because I had to move her out of New York City due to gun violence, and her school was cut $400,000. And then I bumped into mayor Adams on A Hundred And 20 Fifth Street at one of the vegan restaurants days before I decided to move her away. And I said, listen. I have gun violence on my block every other day. My neighbor got shot on the corner.
Speaker 2:I heard her screaming in our garden. I couldn't go out. I didn't know if it was fireworks or not. Children are running at 03:00 from bullets around the corner from my house, right up the hill from Yankee Stadium, and then no police officers come for four to six hours. For me, when I got the head of his office's number, she forwarded me to the head of the Bronx, and then he told me to figure it out.
Speaker 2:So I said, but children are running at 03:00 from bullets. I have to figure this out. Like, what do you mean? We packed up my daughter, moved her upstate outside of Buffalo, my mother-in-law who's Puerto Rican, and we had the privilege because she lives in a white wealthy neighborhood to get our daughter out and get her access to everything. And she went from forties to nineties in one semester.
Speaker 2:It wasn't her that was failing. It was the school system that failed her. And then dealing with the gun violence on my block, I said, my daughter is coming home in June. I don't know how it's gonna happen, but it's gonna happen. And after the mayor's office told me to figure it out, I contacted NBC News and told them our story and had records of all the incidents, and they covered it.
Speaker 2:They had a helicopter over my block, covered six to eight shootings, no police officers for four to six hours. I emailed the head of the office cc'ing the head of the Bronx, and I said, do I still have to figure it out? In twenty four hours, there were a hundred foot officers in my neighborhood and two cop cars on either side of my block, and it got addressed. The book that I'm writing is about my personal experience organizing on the local level down to calling the senator's office to get ahold of the attorney general's office because my First Amendment rights are being violated. Any kind of way we don't know how to navigate.
Speaker 2:We're taught how the government works, but not how to make it work for us and how to hold them accountable. And if you're unsatisfied, go up the chain of command. Keep going until you're satisfied to the point where I was unsatisfied and I had to go to press. So the book also covers a section of safety, also covers conditioning. Because a lot of the things that I was fighting on the local level, had I had community going with me on it, it would have gotten done faster.
Speaker 2:And people were afraid for their lives. There was shame. I also noticed a lot of shame that gets associated with not having the means to move your children in a safer place or not being able to provide what you need to provide. And it's also removing and disappearing the shame that is associated with living in poverty or having a sense of worthiness, I would say. There was, like, worthiness was missing that, you know, I'm worthy of living in an environment like this.
Speaker 2:I grew up in New York City, born and raised, and never have I ever had to lay on the floor of my living room every other day because I was afraid I'd get shot by bullets because my living room's on the Ground Floor. This is where the rubber met the road for me, and my mother and I decided I said, mom, if there's anything, you're retired, we can leave this behind. Leave behind that people can have the knowledge to transform their lives, you know, and you don't have to settle for this. And the reason why we have rights in America is because people fought for them, not because we accepted it and we just ran away. And I put my life at risk.
Speaker 2:And I had a brick thrown at my car and broke my windshield because my car was parked in front of my house, had my car totaled in front of my house. And it can get very scary, and so there's a chapter about safety and how to protect yourself because there were things I had to do to protect myself. Like, I was speaking at my district rep meetings, and one of the police officers, the head of the precinct, was fired for being associated with the gangs. So even you think you're talking to an officer who's supposed to protect you, but they might be inter intertwined with the very crime that you're trying to get rid of. And by very well speaking, you're exposing yourself.
Speaker 2:So it was wild not even my husband. He was just like, no. She could have my three minutes to speak. And there I am, like, taking his three minutes to speak for him because there is a fear associated with all of that as well. And so in this book, Breaking the Silence and, like, it's so important because it's a cycle that's perpetually repeating itself generationally.
Speaker 2:And it's something that I noticed that even I I noticed my elders behaving this way. I noticed these programming or these mechanisms that we have to suffer in silence, and I chose I will not suffer in silence. I will speak because I just like yes. I had the privilege to get my daughter out, but what about everybody else? And just even having prayer of light over my neighborhood.
Speaker 2:I went from spiritual to taking action as high level as I could so that our children are safe and our families are safe.
Speaker 1:And I applaud you for everything that you have done, not only for your daughter and her safety and her future, but clearly for your community because it's not just you and your family. It's everyone who lives on your block. It's everyone who lives in your neighborhood, in that part of the Bronx. And I grew up in New York. Well, what we call Upstate New York, which is about two hours north of the city.
Speaker 1:And I know how rough certain parts can be to look at this from a systemic perspective and see that this is a public health crisis, and to do your part is outstanding. So I I definitely applaud you for that. You covered a lot of what I was gonna ask you.
Speaker 2:People see the result. Oh, wow. The big shiny thing. I got the mayor's office to do what he needed to do, and I got a hundred foot officers in there, but they don't see the sacrifice that comes behind that. Like, the moments that I didn't think I was gonna make it, and I'm getting on a eight hour bus to see my daughter, and I had to do a GoFundMe.
Speaker 2:And then the lack of diversity and this discrimination and racism my daughter have inexperienced and her mental health declining. And people don't see the threads and the impacts of this generational impact where we have to go to neighborhoods that are wealthier so that we can get an equitable educational chance. Like, if you're a student in a c performing school, you can't compete in a performing school once you get to these Ivy League universities. Most of our kids don't graduate. So it's like, I've been part of the education interrupting the school to prison pipeline for about twenty years of my career in the nonprofit sector and using it through the arts and through education.
Speaker 2:This is just a microcosm of a huge systemic issue that we have a chance to actually rectify should we choose to acknowledge it, should we choose to educate ourselves about how we can organize at the local level, should we have the courage to face our programming, our shame, our fears so that we can create a better country to live in that's safe for our children.
Speaker 1:Piggybacking on something you said about, you know, the more privileged areas. When the shooting happened at my school in 2018, you know, it's a predominantly white affluent area. There was so much news coverage. There were so many resources thrown at us, which, you know, yes, it was a mass shooting, and, yes, it was terrible. And I certainly don't wanna minimize or diminish what was done for us.
Speaker 1:But there are so many communities that are riddled with gun violence on a daily basis, multiple times a day, community gun violence, not even school shootings. And as you experienced, they don't receive the resources that we did. And granted ours was an isolated incident, but still, resources should be made available to all communities that experience gun violence, regardless of form or fashion, and having to wait four to six hours for police presence is absurd. I'm sorry that you all have to go through that. My perspective is different.
Speaker 1:I get it. Over the years since the shooting at my school and since we founded Teachers Unified to End Gun Violence, I have spoken with people who only know a world of gun violence because of their communities. Just hearing these stories like yours and worse, unfortunately, it's like a gut punch because there's so much more that needs to be done and that can be done.
Speaker 2:And I think the biggest piece is, like, what is the value of one life to this country? How much does anyone know how much I've poured into my child? How much has been poured into me? It's a miracle I'm sitting here to speak today. One of my business partners, Joe Hagan, he has one of the VIP booths at Yankee Stadium, and he had no idea right up the block he could walk to my house that I was dealing with that, where if police knee were needed at Yankee Stadium, they were there, but not one officer could my tax dollars pay for to get to me when I needed them the most over and over and over again.
Speaker 2:And then what I also discovered was a lot of them weren't trained properly on the laws, where I'm telling them what the laws are. And we have officers on our streets who aren't educated about not only when it comes to code for housing laws or code for what happens when there is a threat or harassment and they come. If you go to another county outside of New York City, they would have arrested that person immediately. But the head of my precinct said, we have a 14 year old who shot 21 people still walking our streets because of the revolving door laws. And the revolving door laws, there's nothing I can do about it, but I have to talk to my legislator's office about it.
Speaker 2:Because there's no stop gap that rehabilitates our youth before they go back into our communities because now the the gangs were targeting our youth because they can no longer get trialed as an adult under the age of 18. So, well, what's the stop gap? What does rehabilitation look like? And if you cut the schools in the community, if you cut the resources in the community, I started to actually look up, does Yankee Stadium give funding to our precinct that they use so much of the resources of my precinct that I can't get access to when I needed them? But they're there for when all the people arrive from outside.
Speaker 2:And then I started to look at the new settlement community center. So Yankee Stadium donated that as a center where people can go to, like, not be on the streets and end gun violence, but that's not gonna actually deal with the root cause of it. We have legislative issues. We have police officers who aren't trained properly. We're like, when my car got totaled, I couldn't get a police officer.
Speaker 2:I had to flag a cop car. We're chasing them, and imagine me running down the street to get the cop to stop so that I can get a police report so that maybe my insurance can pay for my car. So, like, just basic needs and how we're disenfranchised, and I did everything society told me to do. I got an education. I became a functioning member of society.
Speaker 2:I'm active, and yet it is as if our lives have less value than others. And I think now we're all in the same bucket, which is why I call this the great awakening because now we're all being so it's unfortunate, but now we're all being exposed to the gun violence. We're all being exposed to our national crises. And now we must riddle with them. We must face them.
Speaker 2:We must rectify with them for the future of our generations, our nations, and now our planet. It just reminded me of I would walk down the hill, and I felt so disturbed that all the officers were there. And, you know, I don't mean to talk about color, but I have to speak about waves of white people coming into town, and they're there to protect them. But my community up the hill of decent people of color, working class people who are educated, who are working, who want a better life for themselves, we can't get access to the same resources and safety when we need them. And that was the big piece that I saw.
Speaker 2:Even with a black mayor and leadership, it didn't even matter. So there's, like, biases within biases and divide and conquer within our communities still, which, you know, are the foundations of the beginnings of this nation. So we you know, I'm also indigenous, and I'm Afro Cuban. So I have, like, these indigenous roots of what I've been raised with, and then my dad, who's South African, raised me. And he raised me with the thought of the village.
Speaker 2:If one person does something wrong in the village, we must all help them get back on track. Because when you say, oh, it's not my problem. Someone else will deal with it. Someone else isn't gonna deal with it. Maybe you're the person that is here to make that change.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's you that's here to make that difference and not somebody else coming to save the day. And that's where your leadership and your power and your strength can step forward, where you're like, you know what? I'm gonna make a difference in this. No one was coming to help our community. No one was coming to help my neighbor's kids running from being shot at in the park.
Speaker 2:And if it wasn't for him having a taser, which is illegal in New York City, he would have had his face slashed instead of his hand. We're also without the power to protect ourselves. And, you know, going in our train stations every day, there's not one day that I don't have an incident where I have to call an officer or call go and reach out to the conductor and ask for help because mental health crisis is real in this nation as well. And the system is breaking people, and people are unraveling. The rents have been tripled here as well, and poverty is a source of crime.
Speaker 2:It's unfortunate that our private prison system also feeds off of our children failing in school. In New York City, as of third grade, they submit that your child is failing data to the private prison system, and that's how many jail cells they know how to build. And this is where, you know, I I worked also in interrupting the prison, like, recidivism pipeline. For five years, I was part of an organization called Network Support Services. We're in eight prisons in New York state.
Speaker 2:I recently stepped down as the board chair to focus on these initiatives and the book and everything that I'm doing now. But when I discovered, it's about a $46,500,000,000 business in the private prison system to have prisoners make the things that we buy on our pharmacy shelves. And they get pennies on the dollar, probably 44¢ an hour. For example, we were arguing if they could get $60,000 a year salary, then they can at least send money home to their families to make a difference for them not being present. Because them being present also has a monetary space that's missing, and at least something can be provided to help their families.
Speaker 2:But when you look at all of this being by design, where there's a great book called The New Jim Crow. And that's an incredible book because Alexander, she's an attorney. She found more than several judges that were paid by private corporations to put our black and brown youth in prison. And it was systemic to do that, you know, it's like a plantation all over again, basically. When I see the gun violence and I see what's happening in our education system, if they cut education for generations, my dad rest his soul, said, if they keep cutting education, we keep having a nation that is unable to critically think for themselves.
Speaker 2:And when you're unable to critically think for yourself, you don't know what the truth is, and you don't know what the lies are. And our society has been conditioned to believe the lies more than the truth. And I am a testimonial to that because I was disregarded, because I was able to go out of New York City to go see my daughter and come back. The mayor's office, he decided that I was safe. And I said, I don't think you understand.
Speaker 2:Every time I come home, every other day I'm laying on my living room floor, I can't bring my daughter home. And that I had to explain myself. He said, well, I live in the neighborhood too, and he made it, you know, well, I live here too, and I have to deal with it too. And I'm just like, you're not hearing and understanding that it's not about me. It's about the community.
Speaker 2:I had videos. I had evidence. And it didn't seem to land until I got press. So a lot of the stories in the book that I talk about are personal experiences that people don't know they have the power to change. I recently had to get my district representative's office to help because my daughter, my mother, and I were approached by a man and he broke into our front doors in front of us.
Speaker 2:And I said, excuse me, what are you doing? Like and then he called me the b word and then he broke into the Second Floor apartment, said he was going to kill my entire family. And my neighbor came out and thank goodness for him and the police arriving quickly, we were able to be safe. But I had to get my district rep's office to hold the police department accountable because 10 police officers are standing outside of the apartment that a wanted man broke in into. He wasn't a tenant.
Speaker 2:He was illegal in that apartment as a tenant. He wasn't supposed to be there, and it takes not one of you out of the 10 could put one brain together how to get this man out. So lo and behold, two days later, after things calmed down, he broke into the door under the staircase of my mother's building and got back into the building and broke back into the Second Floor apartment. And then the building management got the police and they still didn't go in the apartment because the super somehow doesn't have the key to a vacant apartment. This is why I was saying the police are not even educated on housing law, on how to enforce on where they have the power to protect you.
Speaker 2:And these are the things like I can't even tell you knowing my rights and knowing how to organize at the local level and who to call for what, most people don't know that you can get help. They feel like you can you have to deal with this on your own, and you don't have to deal with it on your own, and there is someone to call for it. I have a chart in my book that says what you're dealing with and who to call and how to find the exact congress member to deal with that situation. There are ways that we can navigate, but if we don't call, like when my daughter's school was cut $400,000, why was I the only parent to call? The district rep said no other parent called us.
Speaker 2:You were the only one to call us. And if everyone calls us, then we can say x amount of people called my office and show up at the meeting and interrupt the school budget cuts so that our kids had something to get caught up after COVID. So, like, this is how powerful stepping outside of the shame, stepping into how worthy you are, stepping into educating yourself how to make the system work for you versus knowing, okay. I'm gonna vote. I have to vote.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna participate. Yeah. But your real participation also is making sure that your rights are being fulfilled.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And I think it all kinda goes back to what John Lewis said about making good trouble. You have to speak up. You have to be that squeaky wheel. And I think that people oftentimes figure that someone else is going to do it.
Speaker 1:You know, like, we're all in this school together, and they're cutting $400,000, and someone else is going to take care of this for us, but then nobody does. And if you hadn't, nothing would get done. And going back to what you said earlier about feeling that you have to bring color into this, you can't talk about community violence and gun violence without bringing color into this. Because it's those communities of color, those black and brown communities that are overwhelmingly impacted by gun violence that far outweighs school shootings and other gun violence. As a woman of color experiencing this in your community, it hits different than if you were a woman of color looking at it from the outside.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, you know, for the mayor, who is black, to sit there and say, I live in the community too, then you should know what the problems are. And you can't bury your head in the sand and act like this isn't happening.
Speaker 2:I think the challenge also is that when we have an executive leader in leadership, like our mayor, and you have someone in executive leadership over the borough of The Bronx, when that person speaks, it's as if you're speaking. So if that individual said, figure it out, that is essentially your mouth doing the same thing. So also making sure that they train their staff appropriately. And I also have that in my book because you'll call, and oftentimes, I know more about what their office does than their secretary. And then I have to ask to go up the chain of command.
Speaker 2:I said, can I please get an office manager on the phone? And so it's not just calling because you'll get past the buck or you'll get put on a list of callback, but you gotta keep going up the chain of command. If you're unsatisfied, be unsatisfied and say, I am unsatisfied. I need to speak to someone at a higher level. Thank you so much for your support.
Speaker 2:And make friends in your local level's office. Immediately, it was handled. So you call the number, you can't get ahold of them, call your senator's office. Knowing how to navigate on the local level with gun violence, with all of the things that happen in your daily life, because I do believe that we're gonna need to organize at the local level now more than ever with this new administration, because there's a lot of denial and people are believing lies more than they're believing the truth. There's strength in numbers.
Speaker 2:And if we all step out of our shame, you know, I felt shame when I would get Upstate New York and I'd see people living in these big beautiful houses and my daughter's picked up by a school bus, and I don't have to go through the crazy trains to get her where she used to go. And I would hold on to the grass, and like, my life depended on it. Like, one moment, I was laying on my floor afraid I was gonna get shot. And the next moment I'm in an eight hour bus and I get upstate and I'm in the woods, and I'm just thinking anything greater or higher than myself that I'm alive. And why don't I have the right to have this experience and this safety and this freedom?
Speaker 2:Why can't I afford to have this Why is this life not an option for me when it very well is? This is where we need to awaken where our humanity again as a nation. And I think this is the great awakening and, like, I just refuse to be silent in my suffering, and I continue to share this because I feel like my story is an American hero story. Who can get gun violence off their block in the Bronx? Who has been able to do that?
Speaker 2:And it's been two years. And I'm so grateful that my daughter's home and my neighbors got to move their kids back home. And my neighbors came up to me after, and they said, you taught us something, and we're sorry. Because they were like, we don't want you to talk to us. There's a x on your back.
Speaker 2:Don't call me. Don't talk to me. I don't care if there's a shootout. I don't care. And there was like a fear to associate with me for risk of their life that if they're standing with me, they would get shot with me after the brick was thrown at my car that I am a liability.
Speaker 2:And to have them come and apologize after, but it was their trauma and it shouldn't have been. My friends Todd, Becky, and I, we've had over a decade of leadership training from Landmark Worldwide to Tony Robbins. I went to the Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within in November. In Sarah, I felt like I finally had a chance to heal because I had, like, so many pandemic over 40 losses, relocating my daughter, gun violence, then having to deal with my dad transitioning and being with him for six months until he passed away. So I had felt like girl interrupted, you know?
Speaker 2:And to be able to share this story with you, I'm just like, thank you for giving me the space to share this because I feel like all of our stories make a difference. It's a ripple effect, and it lets each other know that we're not alone and that there is a way forward. When we go through these kinds of traumas like gun violence, it creates a trauma cycle. And things were, like, just setting me off, and I had to recover from PTSD. So I went to the Center for Mind Body Medicine.
Speaker 2:You could interrupt PTSD before it actually happens. And by teaching the communities these methodologies, they then use them within their own communities. So you you leave them empowered, and then you step out. I realized that when I got more of the gun violence, it just kept reigniting it. And there's a point where you have to remove yourself from the environment that is causing that kind of distress in your nervous system.
Speaker 2:The Center for Mind Body Medicine has eight weeks free sessions for you to go to. You can choose age group, race, religion, and it's global, and it's free for eight weeks. And they give you the tools so that you can deal with the mind body trauma because trauma is stored in the body. And so I also include all these tools in the book, everything to, like, really empower people, because I really look at what did I deal with and what was I witnessing. And to be a witness also causes trauma.
Speaker 2:To witness it, and, like, how do I process the witnessing of this? And to have that and those resources, I'm sharing them with all of you because I wouldn't have gotten through this if it wasn't for community. Community is carried me where I felt like I was going to fall back and their hands were on my back so that I would not fall. I do a lot of visualization and manifestation work. If I couldn't visualize my neighborhood as being safe, as a light over my neighborhood that there was no more gun violence, that it happened, that I was celebrating as if it was already happening, then and only then could my nervous system believe that this is possible and keep going.
Speaker 2:When you're in a trauma state, this is what it looks like. Here's the cycle, and we pluck out the beliefs that we have behind that cycle of trauma and that, like, trigger. And so there's a belief or a story that is behind that, and that now you can create a new belief, put it in your nervous system, reprogram your nervous system to get out of a trauma state and into a thriving state again. And these are also tools that you need when you're gonna battle gun violence. If you're able to organize a block watch, which the courage that people have to do that, you know, my block unfortunately, they were too afraid for their lives to do that, and I'm complete with that.
Speaker 2:I'm okay with that. It is nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 1:So the Center for Mind Body Medicine is something that a number of my coworkers have participated in over the years, mostly in the immediate after the shooting at school, but they still work with it. We have a club at school that's mind body ambassadors. Our media specialist at every faculty meeting has us do soft belly breathing and all of this other stuff. And it is so helpful to ground yourself and to be zen and centered and as crunchy granola as it may be to some people who don't do these things normally, it makes a difference, and it just helps you to, like, reframe things in that moment, and it does give you the tools to help you move through your trauma. Something else that you said, you noticed that things were missing in this space, and that's how we created Teachers Unified to End Gun Violence because when you talk about gun violence, teachers historically, are not part of the conversation.
Speaker 1:And, again, school shootings are such a small part of this public health crisis, but teachers are at the front lines, whether directly or indirectly, because we are dealing with the students who are coming to school with domestic violence that is gun violence. They have witnessed community gun violence. Suicide is gun violence. Like, all of these things, the kids are bringing with them to school. And honestly, some of the teachers are facing this in their own communities and carry that with them to school.
Speaker 1:So we felt that there was this huge void in the gun violence prevention space. Abby Clements, who I know you reached out to, and she's a survivor from Sandy Hook. And then a little over five years later, I am impacted in South Florida at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School. And Sari Beth Rosenberg, who fortunately has not been directly impacted, but teaches in New York City and has students who come from all of the boroughs to her school because it's a magnet school. We sat together in this group chat after the Oxford shooting in Oxford, Michigan, and we're like, this is absurd.
Speaker 1:Like, enough is enough. And that's how we came together to create this organization that is supported by the American Federation of Teachers. We have worked with the PTA. You know, we're working with other gun violence prevention groups not to own this space, but to expand the scope of the people who are, like I said, you know, directly and indirectly impacted by gun violence. And it takes parents too.
Speaker 1:Like, I have two children. You have your daughter. Do you have other children?
Speaker 2:I have one, but look what I went through with one. I had to do a GoFundMe. I lost my retirement starting from scratch all over again financially to save our lives. And why should that happen in one of the wealthiest countries in the world? They shut down TikTok.
Speaker 2:They can shut it down. We're looking at basic gun regulations, basic background checks, basic things that will support people. So when you look at everything that we're surrounded with as Americans, we're dealing with the gun violence, the systemic issues, our mental health crisis. And we look at this, we have all the resources in the world to deal with it. I went to Cuba last year through the American embassy, and I was performing.
Speaker 2:It was the first time ever indigenous exchange between our nations. And for me, it was like taking a break. You know, I got to walk the streets safely without feeling like I was gonna get shot or attacked.
Speaker 1:And you also don't see gun violence like what we have in other countries. Without getting super political, gun violence was up during the first term of this administration, and he was president when the shooting happened at my school. He never came to our community. He never came to see us. He went to the hospital to see some of the victims who were his supporters or, you know, to get a photo op.
Speaker 1:Within a week of the shooting, he went so far as to suggest that arming teachers would have solved the problem. So there are a lot of very very tone deaf people. But I think that what you are doing and the work that we are doing is so critical because it is looking at these systemic problems that we face and coming up with ways to combat them, starting at a local level, but definitely expanding. And we have to make good trouble because we're all at risk regardless of where you live and what your circumstances are. You're all at risk.
Speaker 2:It's like there's a wave of crime growing across the city, and my friends are like, oh, why don't you move out of your neighborhood? I said, yeah. But that wave of crime is gonna end up on your block because they push them out of my neighborhood, and they go into your neighborhood, and they go into the other neighborhood. And it's a wave going across our nation if we really look at it. So we have to pluck out and get to the root cause of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I got to move my daughter out, which I had the privilege to get her out. Like, I realized that that is a privilege, but what about everybody else who doesn't have the privilege or the means to relocate their child for an equitable education? And I feel like the more we get to inner cities or disenfranchised communities, the teachers are also more depleted because they have less resources to deal with. And so this is where the rubber meets the road.
Speaker 2:Back when I was part of the community school initiative with mayor de Blasio, and I know there's mixed feelings about him, but this was something that he did right. He was like, instead of closing over 300 schools, we're gonna fund them properly. We're gonna give them the resources that they need. We're gonna give them the infrastructure that they need to be successful. And some nonprofit community based organizations did a great job, but a lot didn't, unfortunately, because not every community based organization is qualified to go into a school and wrap around them and actually get results.
Speaker 2:Our organization got results, and it was, like, the best experience ever. We used hip hop to teach ELA global studies in US history, history, a program called Fresh Prep, and it helped our super seniors graduate. What was remarkable to me was they turned a room into a meditation room and got chairs donated and that they were doing mindfulness where you have the teachers meditating with the student on their lunch break. And then what they discovered was the fighting went down. And this kind of techniques and these kinds of ways of being innovative, the room was a room they found in the school.
Speaker 2:All the equipment was donated. People came in and the funding was put in to donate for them, but like people and the teachers had a space and the students had a space to be human, but then to also shut off everything. Because imagine if the students are like that what the teachers are dealing with when they're walking in. They have to be a therapist. They have to be a social worker.
Speaker 2:They have to report everything. They also have to meet metrics on how the students are performing. They have to teach curriculums that are not always culturally responsive. Social emotional learning, I remember when all the teachers were like, what? Do I have to ask them how they're doing today?
Speaker 2:Like, you know, and then having to actually train them on, like, when they're already feeling overwhelmed. This is the beauty of the diversity. This is the beauty of the gaps. There's a beauty in all this breakdown and all this disconnect, and there's always a question to be asked. You know?
Speaker 2:What's right about this? What is right about why this is happening right now? What do I do to shift the needle forward on basic understandings of each other? And we have more in common than we have apart. You know, I don't wanna lose any more of our children, and I I really do feel that the legislator's office is a place for us to really start having a seat at the table.
Speaker 2:You have the power to sit with them and discuss policies. And if you show up altogether, imagine if thousands of people show up at the legislators to have a meeting to be like, this is what we want to change, and by when are you going to do it? Because this is unlivable, and I'm unsatisfied. Then you go up the chain of command, you go up the chain of command. You go up the chain of command.
Speaker 2:But the local level is where we have power. President Trump said it himself, I'm gonna leave it up to the states. We have a midterm election coming up. I can speak for New York City. I know that our budgets are confirmed for the next two years.
Speaker 2:Until the midterm election, I know our schools are gonna be funded.
Speaker 1:I wanted to ask you about your daughter. How she's doing, like, transition to going upstate and coming back to the Bronx, like, how how that impacted her?
Speaker 2:So I moved her over there, and she was thriving educationally, nineties, but her mental health was declining because of discrimination and racism. Yet they love the black community. They love hip hop. They dress like us. They talk like us.
Speaker 2:They wanna go to The Bronx, but they treated my daughter as if she had no right to be there. And my daughter came back to New York City saying, mom, this is ghetto. So I fought with the mayor's office to get her into a really good school in the Upper West Side. They had seats available, and there's a greenhouse on the roof. They have a robust science program.
Speaker 2:I get her in there, and it was hard to get her in because even when I got permission, I was getting pushed back from the admin office. Why do you want your daughter to go there? And I said, miss Rodriguez, you know why I want my daughter to go to the Upper West Side instead of East Harlem. You know why. And then they cut the science program, and there was no science program for the seventh graders.
Speaker 2:And they failed her. Like, didn't read her IEP, and she fell through the cracks an entire semester. Her teachers I had to call a meeting, an emergency meeting in January. January. I had to have an emergency assessment, bring her to another campus to get assessed to bring her back.
Speaker 2:The administration had basically collapsed within the school entity because they couldn't afford administrators in the office, secretaries in the office. This isn't right. And she's like, mom, they're smoking, you know, marijuana in the bathrooms in junior high. Like, what's the deal? And I'm having to sit with the principal and address it and them being in denial about the very thing that's happening under their nose, and then it finally gets addressed later.
Speaker 2:Just perfectionism. We all wanna believe that our schools are perfect and everything. She's doing good, but she could do so much better if the schools were funded to the point that they were worthy of our children. I wonder, and I ask our government, like, what does the future of public education look like? How are we pumping out our kids to be ready for the market and the world that they're going into?
Speaker 1:I'm so glad that we were able to connect and do this, and you are out there fighting the good fight. And I appreciate everything that you have done and everything that you will continue to do. And hopefully, we can continue this conversation.
Speaker 2:I applaud you all as well because it takes courage to stand up, to say enough's enough. And by organizing the way you are, you will get movement because when you speak, things move, and it's already moving.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. Don't forget to follow teachers unified to end gun violence on Instagram and threads at teachers unify, and follow the podcast on both platforms at teachers unify p c.