Teacher Stories: Julia Gilmore, English Teacher at the Academy of Law and Public Safety, New Jersey
I teach at ALPS, which stands for Academy of Law and Public Safety, and I teach English there. We have a high graduation rate. We only have 75 kids in the whole school right now, and they go into careers in emergency medical dispatch, CPR, special law enforcement officers, Police, Department of Corrections, and they also go into the Ocean County Sheriff’s Office. I teach them English, where we read murder mystery novels and novels about war. I try to make the novels we read related tangentially to law enforcement or detective work. Even so, I still teach poetry and short stories and the like.
How I started teaching here is actually after I had left teaching. I was kind of lost for a while. I was working at a department store, and was super, super miserable because I wasn’t doing what I love. I was like, “What am I doing with all this education, and I’m just working retail?” And my husband said, “You’re always talking about teaching, why don’t you get back into it?”
I interviewed everywhere, but the only place that called me back was Ocean County Vocational Technical Schools. So I go to the interview, and the superintendent tells me, “Well, we really want to hire you for the JDC.” And I’m like, “What does that stand for?” And he goes “Juvenile Detention Center.”
Later, my husband told me this is a job where I can really give back. And it’s true. This is a job where you can make a difference. And I thought that with my background teaching in the Bronx and teaching on the Lower East Side in Manhattan would kind of pair with, like, inner city kids in New Jersey. So, I took it. And it really had its ups and downs, but I loved it.
At JDC, you would have really smart kids who were both street smart and book smart, and then you would have kids who just were in all special-ed classes. In fact, I had to be a special ed teacher, an ESL teacher, a classroom English teacher, a therapist, a social worker, and a mom, all at once. I had this one kid from Ocean County who, when I got transferred to ALPS, wrote me a letter, and that letter made me cry. It made my best friend cry about how his mom had passed away, and when he met me and I showed him that I cared about him, he felt that I was his jail mom.
At ALPS, I teach students who want to go into law enforcement. When I chose books, I picked books that showed a compassionate side of both. We’ve read about war, and we’ve also read about police brutality. I try to tell them what my experiences were at the jail and teach them that not every criminal is a bad person. Some of them choose crime because of circumstances, and I think 95% of them understood what I was trying to say. Some of them still had, like, very rigid, rigid views about that, but I basically tried to do it through storytelling and through just reminding them that there’s no good and bad. Life is not a movie, and there’s no villain, and then there’s no hero. Life is not so cut and dry.
Interview by Gregory Andrus
Portraits of the Jersey Shore
