Manny Scott—author, motivational speaker and pilot—speaks at the Syracuse City School District development center for teachers all over Syracuse. Scott says his journey from being a high school dropout with a broken home in the streets of Long Beach, California to earning two degrees and a PhD began with his teachers.
“I didn’t know how to study, I didn’t know how to comprehend what I was reading,” Scott said. “I didn’t have the basic disciplines of going to bed at night and getting up early. So I had to break so many bad habits.”
A story that inspired the hit movie Freedom Writers, Scott grew up exposed to drugs and gangs, skipped school and eventually was deemed illiterate in English, his first language. Viola Paris, a Math Teacher at Franklin Elementary School, remembers the movie as she listens to Scott speak.
“I remember it being just an incredible experience,” Paris said. “I cried because the power of teachers came out in that movie; the power of teachers to basically change lives."
Inspired by the impact the English teacher who taught based off of not Shakespeare, but rap music, Scott urges teachers to become students of their students. Matt Lochner, a math interventionist at Dr. Weeks Elementary School, gained perspective on teaching from Scott’s story.
“I believe in everything he said in terms of getting to know the kids, getting to know their backgrounds because, really, you can’t teach them until you reach them,” Lochner said. “Our jobs really are important because it shaped his life into what he is today.”
Scott seeks to inspire the citizens of Syracuse, where the poverty rate is amongst the highest in the nation.
“I mean the poverty is so crippling: there’s a lack of jobs; lack of education; lack of affordable housing; lack of healthcare," Scott said. "In spite of that, though, I tell people keep walking into those dark, broken places and be the hope that these people need, because there is hope."
Scott is headed to a school in Texas, where he will speak in assemblies that give him the drive to transform lives and improve education.