Teachers of New Jersey: Roderick Stevens, Art Teacher at Matawan-Aberdeen Middle School and the K.E.Y.S Academy
I teach Matawan-Aberdeen Middle School art. I also teach art at Keys Academy, which is a recovery high school that started eight years ago. I started teaching there about five years ago. Like everybody else on this planet, our family has been affected by addiction and all that comes with it. All the negative that comes with it, and hopefully, towards the end, the positive outcome. But I’ve always felt very helpless to do anything about it. So, when I was asked to do it, I really embraced it. I was very happy and very ecstatic to give this a try.
I think a lot of times districts find themselves in these situations with these kids who have a lot of potential and have a lot of good qualities, but they can’t get themselves to school, or they’re in and out of rehab. Or their family situation is poor. My supervisor, Janice Nieves, approached Brookdale about having our school there, and Brookdale was very receptive to it, and they gave us a space. Ever since I’ve been there, it’s been a new space every year, up until the last three years, where they found us a little home in the basement of the library. They renovated the whole thing for us, and, you know, they made it. They made it, gave us a house, and we made it a home.
We sometimes get a kid for a few weeks or a few months, and then they want to go back, they feel like they’ve got the tools to go back to their home districts. We’ve also had the same couple of kids there for the last three years, and they’ve done almost their entire high school careers with us at this point.
Sometimes the hardest thing is to help them see that they’re worth something or that they have a future, and I think a lot of it comes from having a great staff. We all meet in the morning for a daily meeting. We have a psychologist on hand, so the students get lots of counseling. We do counseling together. We do counseling individually. We can see when somebody’s off, or somebody’s not right, or somebody’s going through it, or somebody’s in a hole. We see it, we feel it, and we address it as best as we can. Each one of us has a different strength. The health teacher will cook with them, and the humanities teacher will do all kinds of projects with them. We did Lasagnas of Love with them. We try to get them to be part of different communities. We bring in kids from New Hope, which is a rehabilitation, and they come in, and we have parties and events for them. Then there’s The Butcher’s Block, a restaurant in Monmouth County, that donated a kitchen to us.
I always wanted to do something with my art to help other people, and I think the number one thing is it’s not even about the content in the class. It’s just that sometimes it’s just getting them to lift their head off the desk. And sometimes, it’s doing amazing things. We have two kids in an AP art program right now. So, when it starts, we just want to get them off the mat. And it ends with hopefully giving them some kind of hope and some kind of direction for the future. And five years later, I have gotten a chance to see that in a lot of ways with some of the students that graduate. And a lot of the graduates will come to talk to our current students.
