This Philly middle-school teacher dreams of letting his students tell their own stories
"Each day, they walk through a million reasons to give up, yet each day, they persist,” teacher Zach Posnan said of his Conwell Middle School students. He's trying to raise $7,000 for equipment.
Teacher Zach Posnan’s Conwell Middle School students are bright and passionate, eager to come to school and eager to learn.
But the challenges posed by the school’s Kensington location are myriad.
On a recent day, right at the start of school, students walked past someone who appeared to have overdosed. Lockdowns are common because of neighborhood violence. It’s not unusual to have to step over human feces in the parking lot. Conwell operates within two buildings, and if students and staff must travel from one to the other, “we make plans for what happens if we get separated,” Posnan said.
The toll on students is undeniable, he said.
“Each day, they persevere. Each day, they walk through a million reasons to give up, yet each day, they persist,” said Posnan, a science and math teacher.
So Posnan dreams of building a digital media lab as a way to help students at the Philadelphia magnet school tell their own stories — through videos, photographs, and writing — to make sense of the world around them.
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Like its close neighbor Mastbaum High School, which sits less than half a mile away from Conwell, the school has seen its enrollment drop precipitously because of conditions in the neighborhood.
In the 2009-10 school year, about 800 students enrolled at Conwell; today, it’s about 176. And while that makes for enviably small class sizes — fewer than 20 students in some cases — fewer pupils means fewer resources.
Inside, the school offers students much: stimulating, rigorous classes; after-school opportunities; staff who care. Principal Erica Green, honored as one of the district’s top administrators last school year, is transforming Conwell into a STEAM school, focusing on science, technology, engineering, the arts, and math. She used prize money from her award to help start a new STEAM lab.
And Posnan and fellow teacher Gerald Dungan started a journalism club to hook students. They produce videos, write stories, and work on newscasts to broadcast to their classmates.
The kids do the best they can with the resources the school has, but Posnan can’t help but think of the technology available to him as a student at Cheltenham High School, and at Germantown Academy, where he taught before coming to Conwell.
“We had so much equipment,” Posnan said of his experiences there.
He priced out software and iPads, and is chipping away at fund-raising the $7,000 he estimates it would take to build the digital media lab that would help students branch out into editing and other skills. The school’s budget will not cover the technology, so Posnan is appealing to the community with a crowdfunding campaign, one of hundreds across the city as teachers grapple with significant student need and a historically underfunded district.
But Posnan is optimistic. It might take months to secure the funds, but the students are worth it.
“There’s a lot they can’t control in the world,” he said, “but we can do this for them.”