In today’s New York Times, a terrific piece by John Schwartz about an attorney who traded 20 years of struggling to keep death row prisoners “from the executioner’s needle” for a new job at a middle school populated by poor, at-risk, mostly black kids.
The turmoil of middle school turns many teachers away, said the school’s principal, Danielle S. Battle. Students’ bodies and minds are changing, and disparities in learning abilities are playing out.
“A lot of people will say, ‘I’ll do anything but middle school,’ ” she said.
But this is precisely where Mr. Dunn chose to be, having seen too many people at the end of lives gone wrong, and wanting to keep these students from ending up like his former clients. He quotes Frederick Douglass: “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
Once Convicts’ Last Hope, Now a Students’ Advocate (Image: David Walter Banks for The New York Times / thanks John Schwartz!)