On his first day ever as a full-time schoolteacher, Joney Bermudez greeted each of the teenagers trickling into his classroom with an enthusiastic “Good morning.” Some said it back. Others didn’t and walked with little expression straight toward a desk.

That hardly mattered to Bermudez, who watched them settle in as he stood in a classroom corner.

It was Tuesday, the first day back after summer break for Roosevelt High School students. To Bermudez, the significance of it all was just beginning to sink in. Saying “good morning” to students for the first time was the crystallizing moment of what the job meant.

“These are my kids,” he said. “They are not someone else’s. They are my kids that I have to take care of.”

First day

Joney Bermudez attends a new teachers orientation meeting in the library at Roosevelt High School on Aug. 30.

Bermudez joins about 35,000 full-time classroom teachers in more than 120 public school districts and six public charter schools on Long Island to welcome students back to a new year.

Unlike many of his peers, all of this is new to Bermudez, whose path to becoming a full-time teacher was anything but direct.

He is 33 years old. He once dropped out of community college. And it took him years of studying to earn a bachelor's degree and a master's in teaching, after he was laid off from a job in another field before the pandemic.

In Roosevelt, his first day of school was not without hiccups: He had three periods of business finance and two of sports marketing in three different classrooms. He had no keys to any of the classrooms, or to the bathrooms. He couldn’t access the printer and lost his webpages in the middle of a class due to tech issues.

“I live in the process of being comfortable in the uncomfortable,” he said with a smile, in the face of what seemed like endless logistical problems.

Throughout the day, he stopped to give directions to students wandering the hallways looking for their next classrooms. In class, he helped them log on to their Chromebooks and then into Google Classrooms.

By noon, he was feeling dizzy.

The night before, his dog, Nilla, had swallowed a squeaker in a toy. Bermudez and his wife, Helen Carcamo-Bermudez, took the golden pomsky to the animal hospital and stayed up until 3 a.m.

In his rush to leave his Brentwood home for work, as traffic was worsening, Bermudez didn’t eat breakfast or pack lunch.

After asking a security guard by the cafeteria about food options, he bought a chicken panini for $6.50 — a snack to tie him over until the end of the day.

In his new classrooms, he introduced himself to students, telling them about Nilla's emergency hospital visit and his status as a new teacher after a career switch. He also told them how much he loves soccer. One fun fact he gave was that he’s a fan of Manchester City FC, a professional soccer club in England. It's a choice some of his students disapproved of, with moans and head shakes.

For those who are fans of the renowned Spanish soccer club FC Barcelona, he tied their interest back to sports marketing, one of the classes he was teaching. How does Manchester City market itself, versus the strategies used by Barcelona? If they watch the Super Bowl, what about those commercials?

"It's about telling all the ins and outs of what it takes to advertise, or the sales part, or all the Super Bowl promotion commercials that you see," he told the students. “It's getting all that information in the background.”

The teaching profession

Joney Bermudez, second from right, poses for a photo with the new hires for the district at Roosevelt High School.

Bermudez is entering a profession that has grown increasingly difficult as schools continue to recover from the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and face hot-button issues such as political battles over curriculum.

A Pew Research Center survey of K-12 teachers in April found a majority of respondents say they are feeling frequently stressed and their job is overwhelming. The teachers named poverty, chronic absenteeism, and anxiety and depression as major problems students face.

Yet when it comes to student achievement, research showed that teachers matter more than any other aspect of schooling, a point Eric Nezowitz, Roosevelt’s assistant superintendent for human resources and professional development, emphasized to Bermudez and other new teachers in an orientation Aug. 30.

In the high school library that day, Nezowitz asked the more than two dozen teachers which they would choose for their own children: a great teacher with a large number of students in class, or an ineffective one in a smaller-size class?

“Let's say you have the greatest teacher in the room, but that teacher has 60 kids,” he said. “Then you have another teacher who's awful but has 10 kids. Which class [would] you want your kid in?”

The answer was clear to all — the one with the 60 students.

Contractually, class size in academic subjects cannot exceed 33 at Roosevelt High, and Nezowitz said in a follow-up interview most classes average in low 20s.

Nezowitz told the teachers classroom size matters and he doesn’t advocate for bigger sizes. The hypothetical question he raised was to drive home one point.

“The point being, the most important thing is that the teacher is great,” he said.

Journey back to school

Joney Bermudez asks a question during new teachers orientation.

Bermudez had a great teacher in his life. It was Johnny Velez Jr., a social studies teacher at Central Islip High School whom Bermudez has known since he was 12. Bermudez didn't take Velez's classes but played soccer under Velez as coach. In fact, it was Velez who kept telling Bermudez that he would be a good teacher himself. Bermudez had coached youth soccer for years, and Velez saw what he could do in his ways of working with children.

But Bermudez’s dream was to become a professional soccer player. After graduating from Central Islip High School in 2008, he went to Suffolk County Community College but dropped out to pursue that dream.

“I didn't care for school, which is ironic,” he said of his teenage self.

When that didn’t work out, he began working for Capital One, until he was laid off in 2019.

Soon afterward, Bermudez went back to school and studied business at Stony Brook University. When Bermudez graduated with a bachelor’s degree, Velez reminded him of teaching and the role he could fill as someone who is bilingual, speaking Spanish with his parents, immigrants from El Salvador.

"We're a culturally diverse society," Velez recalled telling Bermudez. "You have the potential to help excel the students in our area, especially the fact that you were just one of those students who came up also in a bilingual household."

Minority full-time teachers on Long Island were at 9.5%, while public school student enrollment was 52.8% minority, according to data Newsday obtained of the 2020-21 school year. Of the Island's teachers, only about 2% were minority men.

Bermudez went on to earn a master’s degree in education from SUNY Oswego. Collectively, he accumulated $60,000 in student loans.

Before landing the full-time job in Roosevelt over the summer, he was a student teacher in Central Islip and a substitute teacher at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Bethpage.

To Carcamo-Bermudez, whom Bermudez married in 2019 and has known since they were students at Suffolk County Community College, the transition was natural. Carcamo-Bermudez said they would constantly run into Bermudez’s former student-athletes when they were out to malls or restaurants.

“When you think of Johnny, you think of a teacher, or a coach, or a mentor,” Carcamo-Bermudez said, referring to her husband by his nickname. “When he finally decided he was going to go into teaching, to me, it was like, ‘Of course, why wouldn't you? I don't understand why you even took this long.’ ”

Bermudez was hired as a business teacher at Roosevelt High School in August, at an annual salary of $67,504.

The hard work

Joney Bermudez on his first day teaching at Roosevelt High School.

Bermudez’s ninth and last period on Tuesday was hallway duty. By now, he had received a key to a classroom and the bathrooms.

The afternoon sun shone brightly through a large window as he stood at a corner connecting two hallways, watching as students hurried past.

Bermudez grew up in Central Islip. His father has worked for a landscaping company and his mother stayed at home to care for him and his younger sister. Since as early as he could remember, he translated for his parents, from legal documents to technology.

Bermudez feels good about working at Roosevelt High School, where 58% of the more than 1,000 students are Hispanic and 40% are Black. He spoke Spanish to students who appeared lost in the hallways, and to some in his classrooms.

He likes the idea of teaching business.

“Financial literacy is one of the biggest things I can teach the community,” Bermudez said. “I want to start with the kids. They are sponges. They can go back home and give it back to their parents.”

The bell rang and students poured out of classrooms, flowing to the stairs. The first day was over. Bermudez picked up his black backpack and joined the students walking toward the exits. He was hungry again.

Teaching is hard work, Bermudez summarized. "Your brain is constantly on," he said. "You don't shut off. You can't shut off."

He had spent hours during Labor Day weekend working on his presentation slides and knew he needed to put in some more time after work to prep. He remembered what Nezowitz said at orientation.

“It's tiring,” Nezowitz had told the new teachers. But "it's the best."

It's all about the smiles, says co-founder of Beautiful Lives Project

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