As a student, school was literally family for this Tindley teacher

Chalkbeat journalists ask the people we come across in our work to tell us about their education stories and how learning shaped who they are today. Learn more about this series, and read other installments, here.

ShaDe’ Watson is a special education teacher at Tindley Accelerated School. She also graduated from Tindley in 2009 as part of the school’s second graduating class.

I grew up in a single-parent home, and I was just always active in education. My mom, in the summers, we were in the library doing the reading program. I just kind of knew — I never really felt the struggle, but I knew my mother worked hard.

I finished sixth grade in Wayne Township. I didn’t do seventh grade at all, and I went to Tindley for eighth grade. My mother had heard about Tindley, and she thought it would be a good school for my brother. I’m usually the kind of student who can excel anywhere, so she took me there.

It was a little scary, but I was able to do it with my good grades.

My mother is from South Carolina, and so I did eighth grade at Tindley and in ninth grade I went back (to South Carolina) because my grandmother got sick. She had cancer. The feel wasn’t the same. The care of the students wasn’t the same when I was in South Carolina, and I was in a magnet school where you’d think it would be, but it wasn’t.

So my mother sent me back, and I stayed with my older sister for a while, but I moved in with Mr. Robinson and his wife. And I’ve been there ever since. At the time, Marcus Robinson, he was our principal, and he was like our dad. He’s my father figure — I’ll call him “dad.”

I wasn’t the only scholar who they took in. And there were other teachers who took in students whose parents were out of town. Every adult at the school took on a child, went the extra mile to make sure we were good where we were.

There was always a teacher there to correct you, a parent there to correct you, and it didn’t have to be your parent. It could be anyone’s parent. I think that’s what got us so close, our graduating class. Even if we don’t talk a lot, we’re there. It’s just something I’ve never experienced before at a school. Those are my brothers, those are my sisters, those are my parents, those are my aunties.

That’s probably why my loyalty to Tindley is where it is now, and I was willing to come back and teach. I trusted the people that said I could do it.

I felt like these people aren’t just here to teach me, they actually care about my life outside. I try to do that now with a lot of my scholars. We’ll be at the school until 8 o’clock to make sure they have what they need. If this child might not have eaten, I’ll make sure I have someone to give to them.

I don’t know if a lot of people realize that taking this extra step means the world to a child.