Jamaal Bowman

My second year of teaching I was chosen to be a crisis intervention teacher. Our school was a kindergarten through fourth grade school with 1,500 kids, largely recent immigrants from Africa and South America. And it was in one of the poorest zip codes in the country. The classes were too big, the school was underfunded.

Our schools, like so many parts of our infrastructure, are crumbling across the country. Healing our schools can and should be central to our fight to achieve environmental, racial and economic justice.