Border Crossing: The Juvenile Resource Center and Yearbook Photography

Jessica Willis
April 2012

Introduction
In the three years since the founding of the Juvenile Resource Center (JRC), the Pittsfield Public School district’s new alternative school, the yearbook photographers from the district’s two high schools have never visited the JRC to take pictures of the students. The objective of this intervention was to form a partnership with the high schools and have the yearbook staff visit the JRC and take pictures of the students.
At the same time, the researcher (who is a teacher at the JRC) sought to discover, through interviews and surveys with students, teachers, and administrators, what past and present barriers have prevented the JRC students from being included in their yearbooks. On a deeper level, the study sought to help students become connected to their school, classmates, and community through inclusion in their yearbook.
Interview data suggested that students who spend all or part of the day away from the campuses of their sending schools are unlikely to be represented (either through formal portraiture or informal photos) in their yearbook, and this absence may have negative repercussions for the student. Research suggests that yearbook and school photos provide a connection between the student, the school and community and “[w]ithout a school portrait, a modern childhood, at least as an aspiration, is in a sense incomplete” (Burke & Ribeiro de Castro, 2007, p. 215). At the same time, unflattering or insensitive school photography may also perpetuate stigma toward students with special needs and “[underscore] their status as less than desirable” (see Pfeiffer & Pfeiffer, 2011, p. 50).
The JRC is the campus for 52 high school students and 10 middle school students with moderate to severe behavioral issues from the Pittsfield Public School district. Students attend classes at the JRC for all or part of the school day; part-time students at the JRC return to their sending schools for other classes or go to work and/or volunteer commitments in the community.
The JRC is run by the Berkshire County Sheriff’s Department and the school district and is located in the county’s former House of Correction, a 140-year-old building that still retains much of its visual identity as a jail. The original bars are still on the windows, metal doors still close and lock with a heavy thud, and razor wire remains coiled atop the chain link fence surrounding the schoolyard.
There are fifteen 9th, 10th, and 11th graders currently enrolled in the researcher’s classroom at the JRC. Twelve of those students have Individualized Education Plans (IEPs); eight have a primary disability listed as Emotional; four have Multiple Disabilities.

Method of Intervention and Inquiry
The researcher interviewed three school staff members: one high school principal, one teacher/yearbook adviser, and one veteran special education teacher. Eight students were interviewed: five were from the researcher’s classroom and three were from the dropout prevention program for seniors. All students were interviewed in person at the JRC. The teacher/yearbook adviser was interviewed in person in her classroom; the principal and special education teacher responded to emailed surveys. The special education teacher and the teacher/yearbook adviser were from one sending school and the principal was from the other. All in-person interviews were audio taped and transcribed, and all participants were given pseudonyms to protect their identities. Students were chosen based on their availability and their willingness to be interviewed; every student invited to participate agreed to be interviewed.
The researcher chose to query staff members based on her prior relationship with them: Did she know them? Did she have a prior relationship with them? Did she like them?
During this part of the process the researcher recognized her bias about forming partnerships with her co-workers and realized that she may be missing out on fruitful collaboration experiences because she was hesitant to work with people whom she did not know well (see Canter et al, 2011).
Survey questions were as follows: “What, in your opinion, are the past and present barriers which have prevented the JRC’s inclusion in your high school’s yearbook?” and “Is there a way that the JRC’s programs could be more visible in a positive way in your school?” The last question, aimed at the yearbook advisers, sought to introduce the intervention objective: “Is it possible to schedule a time for you to visit and photograph students at the JRC?” In-person interview questions generated more conversationally but they were based on the survey questions.

Findings: “Off –Site, Out of Mind”
Interview data showed that the staff and most of the students agreed that the JRC should be included in the sending schools’ yearbooks, but staff and students identified different barriers to inclusion. The interviews also generated data about how the students felt they were viewed by others, how students and staff viewed the JRC, and how photography could help – or hurt – the facility’s identity as an alternative school and a former jail.
In addition to the barriers of separation from the sending schools’ campuses, social stigma, and lack of knowledge about the JRC by the school population at large, which were identified by the researcher’s students, three seniors in the dropout prevention program noted that the relatively transient nature of the JRC’s population made it difficult, or even undesirable, to be photographed for their sending schools’ yearbooks. Students enter and exit the programs at the JRC throughout the school year and this emerging theme of transience suggested that some JRC students may not wish to be remembered as being a part of the school. This transient theme was exclusive to the high school senior participants.
“This is my first year in the school [district] so I don’t have many memories,” said Violet, 18. Like the other two 18-year-old seniors interviewed for the study, she hadn’t gotten her senior portrait taken.
When asked if he was disappointed about not having his portrait or any other picture in his yearbook, Virgil shrugged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t lose sleep over it. It’s just a picture. In a stupid yearbook.” Earlier, he mentioned that he had just moved to Pittsfield from out of state. Despite their indifference to their presence in the yearbook, the seniors interviewed said they wouldn’t mind being associated with the JRC in candid photographs. “I would do it,” said Natalie.
The researcher had more time and access to the students in her own program, allowing for more in-depth interviews. The researcher’s students identified barriers that were different from those identified by the seniors. Carl, a 16-year-old 9th grader who was enrolled in the researcher’s full-time program, said that one barrier to inclusion in the yearbook was the JRC’s relative invisibility to the school population at large: “Most of the regular students haven’t even heard of programs like this,” he said.
At the start of the interview, Carl expressed his hesitation about being photographed for a product that didn’t matter much to him. “The yearbook is just a means … to reflect on what happened over the year and who your peers are,” he said. “It’s not a big thing to me but I’m … not much of a people person.” He suggested that the yearbook was for students who were “more attached to what the school does.”
Although Carl suggested that he wasn’t “attached” to his school, he became intrigued with the idea of having a photographer from both high schools visit and take pictures for the yearbook, noting that the JRC’s separateness (both physically and philosophically) had kept it out of the camera lens. Inclusion in the yearbook, Carl said, would be a way to “get our program out to the rest of the school,” and he “would actually find that interesting, seeing as how we’re a different program from what it normally would be. I haven’t heard of anybody actually taking pictures of a program like this.”
Carl also said that he had negative experiences with being photographed for school. During the interview, he pulled his school ID out of his pocket and showed his picture to the interviewer. “The photographer was telling me to do this special pose, like sit up straight,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t know why every single picture taken of me looks mean. He wanted me to sit up and look proper.” In the photograph, Carl is slumped over and scowling. When asked if the photo was a fair representation of him, he said, “half the time, yes.”
This exchange about Carl’s annoyance about being asked to do a “special pose” was reminiscent of the themes in “School Picture Day and Self-Concept” (Pfeiffer & Pfeiffer, 2011), where the authors’ son, normally a child with a “wide smile and twinkling eyes” was not encouraged to smile in his school photograph; instead, he started vacantly into the lens “with an expression that screams DISABILITY.” The authors also noted that these bad photographs become “permanent records of the student and class identities,” (2011, p. 50), thereby furthering the permanently negative views of students with disabilities. Studying his glum expression on his school ID, Carl said:
I’ve actually been referred to as like a ‘special ed person’ and that actually offended me. I’m not really special ed. I’m perfectly capable, it’s just harder for me in certain situations. Like with … a classroom full of people, I’m not too comfortable with that. The school system is just attempting to put labels on us. It’s just not fair.
Other students who took part in the study echoed Carl’s desire to be photographed if it would be a positive form of public relations for the JRC. “I wouldn’t care [about being photographed],” said Samantha, a 17-year-old junior and part-time JRC student. “I would just sit here and smile if someone were taking a picture of me.”
Samantha said she liked being a student at the JRC but she was uncomfortable with being in a former jail. “[The bars on the windows] don’t make me feel comfortable here,” she said. “It just reminds me we’re in a jail and we can’t get out.” Carl also mentioned that being “wanded” by sheriff’s deputies and having to pass through a metal detector hen he entered the building made him “feel like [he] was being treated like a criminal.”
Another student, 15-year-old Kevin, felt that yearbook photography wouldn’t help the JRC’s identity. “Pictures aren’t going to change anything,” he said. Then he added, “the bars on the windows ain’t cool. Don’t let them take pictures of the bars.” This last comment suggested that the building (and its students) were vulnerable to being photographed in an unflattering way if they (outsiders unfamiliar with the JRC) were insensitive to how the JRC students wanted to be seen.
In contrast to the students, the high school principal felt that the JRC’s primary barriers to inclusion in the yearbook were related to access, namely, a “lack of communication with the JRC regarding picture day and a lack of access to JRC students.” In addition, the principal reported that “if [JRC students] do not participate in extracurriculars at [the high school], it is highly unlikely they will be photographed.”
Anne, the teacher/yearbook adviser (who also acts as the main photographer), echoed the principal’s statement that a lack of access and non-participation in extracurricular activities contributed to the JRC’s absence from the yearbook. Anne has been the high school’s yearbook adviser for the past 22 years, and in that span of time, more and more off-campus programs have been created. As more and more school programs are located in different parts of the city, it has become a “challenge” to find all of the 210 seniors in the graduating class and managing the yearbook requires “a little bit of detective [work].”
Even the on-campus students who were enrolled in vocational study and didn’t have time to take part in extracurricular activities often were excluded from the yearbook, according to Anne. “They spend three periods a day in their shop,” she said. “They’re not even passing by at bell time. They’re not being seen.” The JRC’s invisibility to on-campus life, compounded by its geographical separation (the JRC and Anne’s school are 2.5 miles apart), made it even more unlikely that the JRC or its students would be included in the yearbook (1).
“I know [the JRC] exists but I don’t know a great deal about it,” she said.
When the researcher mentioned that her students “felt like they have been forgotten,” Anne was candid.
“And they have!” She exclaimed. “To be honest we kind of … yeah, that’s very true. It’s very clear like every single day, whether I can keep up with it or not, what events are going on here. You know and that keeps us busy.”
Anne also mentioned that a lack of time to go off-campus and photograph other programs was a barrier. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t go out to the other places where the students are. I don’t have the time, I’m a teacher,” she said. Anne did try to visit the JRC on one occasion to take photographs, but she had to cancel her visit because she could not get a substitute teacher.

Discussion: The Border Crosser
In “The School Photograph: Portraiture and the Art of Assembling the Body of the Schoolchild” (2007) authors Burke and de Castro make the point that school photography is a “ubiquitous marker of schooling,” and its familiarity makes it “easily overlooked,” thereby hiding its importance (2007, p. 214).
The observations of Carl and Kevin indicated that the two youngsters understood the importance of their photographed presence in their school’s yearbook; Kevin in particular, with his plea to not let them take pictures of the bars, suggested an understanding of the risks involved: Risk to his identity, his classmates’ identity, his school building’s identity, and how he will be seen in perpetuity.
Carl’s comment that photographing him and his classmates would be “a ... way of getting it out there” suggests that the JRC students want recognized and connected to other schools and to the community. At the same time, the students feel conflicted about the JRC’s identity as a former jail. Despite this conflict – or perhaps because of it -- the students are willing to partner with the school and try to “get it out there.” School photography is emblematic of that connection between school, home, self, and the community:
It seems that the school photograph and in particular the embodiment of school in the annual portrait that finds its place in the home is neither public nor private but straddles the two domains acting as a border crosser encouraging emotional investment in the notion of school. Crucial here is the inexorable order, regularity and persistence of form and style generating assurance and belief and indeed hope in the effects of education on generations of children (Burke & de Castro, 2007, p. 216).

Conclusion
The JRC’s absence from the high school yearbooks is seen by the district staff as a fault of geographics, lack of access to students, and time constraints; the JRC students see it as the fault of continued stigmatization. Although these views are different, everyone interviewed for this project agreed that the JRC should be a presence in the yearbooks of the city’s two high schools.
Taking the next step – a visit from the yearbook staff for candid and group pictures – has yet to happen. This project, like many partnerships, has no clear end in sight. Anne’s busy schedule has prevented her from visiting the JRC and taking pictures, but she recently made this remark, via email, to the researcher: “Why don’t you take your own photographs and send them to me. Just about any [electronic] format will work. There’s still time.”
The suggestion that we (the JRC population) take responsibility for our own images is a new and welcome development in this study and will make it much easier for the JRC to become part of the yearbook – on the JRC students’ own terms. However, presence in the yearbook is only the beginning of the process of helping the students forge a positive connection to the JRC and their community.

References and Notes
Burke, C. & de Castro, H. (2007). The School Photograph: Portraiture and the Art of
Assembling the Body of the Schoolchild. History of Education, 36 (2), 213-226.
Canter, et al. (2011). School librarians: The forgotten partners. Teaching Exceptional
Children 43 (5), 14-20.
Pfeiffer, M.A., & Pfeiffer, K.T. (2011). School Picture Day and Self-Concept. Teaching
Exceptional Children 43 (3), 50-54.
All in-person interviews took place on February 29th, 2012 and March 6th, 2012.


(1) At this point in the conversation, I asked Anne if she thought that the increasing popularity of social media Web sites (like Facebook) has decreased the yearbook’s significance among modern high schoolers. Are students more apathetic about the yearbook now? “A little bit. I think so,” Anne replied. “And I think it’s because we have so much more access to images now. I mean if you were in a yearbook years ago … that’s what you got. It’s kind of an old fashioned thing in a way. I mean, kids want them, but as far as the excitement of it …” The possible connection between the increased use of social media and the decrease in the popularity of the yearbook warrants further study.