Schools can’t afford to lose teachers of color. And with public schools struggling to fill teacher vacancies with qualified educators, district and school leaders can’t afford to lose any more teachers, period.

Today, less than one in five teachers identify as Black, Hispanic or Asian American amidst an increasingly diverse student population. It is time to take a hard look at the policies that keep our diverse students from learning from teachers who look like them.

At the start of my teaching career, I was the only full-time, Black, male classroom teacher for a predominately Black student population in a southwest Philadelphia middle school. I knew that my students connected with my lessons and learned more by being able to see themselves in both the content taught and the teacher delivering it.

Yet, despite the gains I made with my students, despite research that shows the substantial positive impact of teachers of color on all students, despite the fact that having just one Black teacher in elementary school makes a Black child 13 percent more likely to go to college, my career nearly ended shortly after it began.

My district’s seniority-based layoff policy resulted in my being given a termination notice two years into my teaching career. My principal had poured time and resources into my development and career through coaching and mentoring opportunities. I had built strong relationships with my students and community. But our student enrollment had fallen, layoffs needed to happen and I didn’t have seniority.

Had I not had agency and voice, had my lived experiences as a Black man from west Philadelphia teaching in a Philadelphia school not been respected and valued, had my principal and community not fought to keep me, I am sure I would be elsewhere.

Read the full article about supporting teachers of color by Sharif El-Mekki at The Hechinger Report.