City students use YouTube to protest conditions

Rochester School District eighth-graders, unhappy about a carousel of teaching changes in their Spanish class, recently applied lessons learned about the civil rights movement to voice their complaints to the district.

Eighth-graders in the Boys Academy at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School 9 on North Clinton Avenue say they've had two Spanish teachers plus a series of substitutes, making it impossible to learn.

The boys learned about civil rights protests last month as part of a national Martin Luther King Jr. day event and decided to put that knowledge to use by creating a YouTube video detailing the problem and asking for a solution.

"We are very unhappy that we are not as advanced in Spanish as we should be," academy president Isaiah Stewart said in the video, addressing Superintendent Bolgen Vargas directly. "Our eighth-grade brothers have been working very hard in Spanish class, but whenever we get a new teacher, we can't move forward because they're unsure of where we are and what we need to learn."

This is the second time the issue of teacher instability has been raised at School 9 this year. In September, parents of students in a bilingual class said they'd had four teachers in the first three weeks of the year, including one who didn't speak Spanish.

The district did not respond immediately to a request for comment on the more recent complaint.

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