Reseña del libro "Can I Get A Witness ? (en Inglés)"
Can I Get a Witness? is a powerful nonfiction institutional record by S.M. Phoenix, documenting systemic neglect, trauma, and policy failure within the Baltimore City Schools system. The manuscript presents itself as a teacher's testimony, built around contemporaneously written journal entries from a full academic year inside a large urban public school system.This book is not written as a traditional memoir. Instead, it preserves firsthand evidence of school conditions, administrative responses, student and staff exposure to harm, and repeated failures to meet educational, legal, and contractual obligations. Through detailed documentation, historical context, legal analysis, and policy-based conclusions, the author asks readers to confront what happens when unsafe and damaging school conditions become normalized.The journal at the heart of the book records daily observations from a large urban public high school, including extreme classroom temperatures, chronic disruption of instruction, exposure to drugs and violence, inconsistent safety enforcement, and administrative failures to address known concerns. Rather than presenting isolated incidents, the book reveals patterns of institutional breakdown through repetition, documentation, and lived experience.Combining personal record, educational history, public policy analysis, and social critique, Can I Get a Witness? examines how systemic racism, discrimination, neglect, trauma, school safety failures, and policy non-enforcement affect teachers, students, and communities. It is a serious and urgent work for educators, parents, policymakers, school administrators, civil rights advocates, and readers concerned about the future of public education.Raw, documented, and deeply challenging, this book asks one central question: when harmful conditions are known, observed, and documented, who is responsible for acting?
