Millennial Spotlight – Caroline Bennett

Caroline Bennett developed a passion for service as a student at Churchville-Chili High School. She was the Vice President of the school’s Leo Club, a homage to the Lions Club. Some of her favorite memories from her time there are going to the Ronald McDonald House to make food for the families that were staying there and spending time with students from the New York State School for the Blind in Batavia.

Her passion only grew during her college career. Bennett eventually settled on Policy Analysis as her major at Cornell University. She began taking lots of classes that centered around education policy, and ended up becoming a teaching assistant for the Cornell Prison Education Program, which allows qualifying maximum security inmates in Upstate New York to take college courses.

Bennett had learned a lot about inequality in education in her classes at Cornell, but her students in the Cornell Prison Education Program made her realize just how real the problems were.

“The vast majority of them came from low-income neighborhoods where the system failed them again and again, and that doesn’t justify the crimes that they ultimately committed,” Bennett said. “I felt like I was witnessing the manifestation of the school to prison pipeline.”

She even found out that a lot of her students grew up in the Rochester area as well. Bennett says the program helped her decide on her next move.

“It made me want to address the root of the problem and start at a lower level of the education system to prevent that cycle from continuing,” Bennett said.

In December 2017, she was accepted by Teach for America, after taking certification exams, graduating in May 2018, and completing an extensive summer training program in Philadelphia which included teaching summer school, she began teaching at the PS 45 International School in Buffalo. Buffalo was the closest TFA location, as the only other New York location is New York City.

At the International School, Bennett is teaching English as a New Language to sixth grade students, primarily from Yemen, Somalia, and Bangladesh, as well as other countries. Most of her students can speak English with some fluency, and she helps refine their English skills, and tries to focus on teaching them the nuances of words, which can differ greatly from language to language.

“It’s something that you don’t think about because it comes naturally when it’s your first language,” Bennett said. “[I] make sure to take time to go over common phrases.”

Bennett has made a two-year commitment with Teach for America. She isn’t quite sure what her next steps are. If she still has a passion for teaching, she plans on continuing to teach, either in Buffalo or Rochester. Eventually, she wants to go in to education policy, preferably in Rochester, but she says she realizes that if she wanted to do it at the state level, she’d have to go to Albany.

“It would be great to do some work in the Rochester area,” Bennett said. “I definitely want to stay involved in the education system at some level and I really want to give back to our community and the surrounding areas.”

For Bennett, Rochester is appealing because she sees problems and wants to help fix them.