VCU news

By Mary Kate Brogan
School of Pharmacy

For the past two generations, seeing someone from the Baugh family on the playground or in the classroom has been a common sight in Richmond Public Schools. But when Darryl Baugh Jr. graduated from high school, he wasn’t sure he was cut out to follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps.

A few years in community college, a break from his education and a global pandemic later, Baugh is about to earn his B.S. in special education and teaching from the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Education and become a third-generation educator.

“One quote I’ve always told myself is: Each day is a day to learn something new,” Baugh said. “Going through VCU, I’ve lived by that, and as a teacher, I’m living by that. When we’re in the classroom in college or in the classroom teaching, the kids teach you just as much as you’re teaching them.”

When he first went to community college, Baugh changed his major five times before deciding to take a break from his education. He started doing construction and carpentry work.

“While I wasn’t in school, I worked several different places,’” Baugh said. “And I was like, ‘This isn’t me. I’m not passionate about it. I’m not doing anything that gets me excited to wake up and go there every day.’”

He returned to Reynolds Community College to finish his associate degree and became a registered behavior technician, working with and tutoring students in special education courses at schools around Richmond.

“That’s where I found my passion,” Baugh said. “I was that person walking around playing a guitar [for the students]. I used to sing songs and stuff like that. And I really felt like this is something that I’m good at. From there, I was like, ‘I think I want to go to school for teaching.’”

He enrolled at VCU part time in fall 2017, transitioning to full time in fall 2019. Then, in 2020, classes went virtual as the pandemic arrived, and the social reckoning that followed the killing of George Floyd had Baugh rethinking his goals.

“Because of everything that was going on in 2020 … I began thinking about all the Black and Brown boys that I could impact as an educator,” he said. “That was my push. A lot of the work that I did within the program related to racial-ethnic minoritized people. I wrote research papers about Brown v. Board of Education and how we still have a long way to go. I did a lot of that because that’s where my passion was.”

Baugh’s passion for empowering students continued as he joined the inaugural Ruth Harris Scholars Program cohort last year. The VCU School of Education program offered him training to address the needs of students struggling with reading, spelling and writing, which supported his professional and personal interest in working with students on their emerging language skills.

“Most people associate it with students who have dyslexia or dysgraphia. But when I started attending the training, I started reflecting – I was a person in elementary school who received special education. I had a speech impediment, and I would not talk if called on to speak in front of the class. And to avoid talking, I would act out because I did not like the way I sounded,” Baugh said. “Knowing that, and knowing what I went through in elementary school when I was learning how to read and write, I could have learned so much more if I’d learned reading and writing like this. Because I knew how that experience made me feel, I ensure that, when I’m giving group instruction, I help guide the student to the right response.”

After completing the training, Baugh and his fellow scholars tutored elementary school students in Richmond Public Schools with the help of a reading specialist. He marveled as students who had difficulty reading as the semester started were reading whole books out loud by the end of the semester.

It was a learning experience for Baugh before student-teaching this semester at Blackwell Elementary School, where he really found his stride.

“My placement teacher at Blackwell, she said when I first started there, I was kind of in a box – I wanted to do everything perfect,” Baugh said. “And she was like, ‘You don’t have to do that.’ So I went out of that box. I started having fun.”

From there, he began using new techniques from his Ruth Harris Scholar training and some long-standing practices, such as incorporating music. He’d bring DJ equipment from home to encourage students’ learning.

“I had my microphone, and I had my turntables in there, and one of the kids who’s emerging in language, she started rapping on beat,” Baugh said. “Like she took the microphone from me, and she just started spitting. She wasn’t saying any words, but what she was saying was on beat. That in itself was impressive because that means she can listen, and she can understand what’s happening.

“Another one of the students was very soft-spoken. You always had to say, ‘All right, speak loud and proud.’ I gave him the microphone, and he read the whole page loud, confident. And the teacher came to me and said, ‘I’ve never heard him speak that loud before.’ I was able to use those different approaches, like me being a DJ and me being very hands-on with construction, that I was able to bring to the classroom that brought skills out of the students that we would have never known existed. And all I had was a microphone.”

Those moments helped Baugh realize the power he had to help his students find their voice.

“At the end of those eight weeks, my teacher told me, ‘Don't go back into your box,’ because she saw how I opened up, how I branched out, how I spread my wings and how I had fun doing it,” he said.

Student-teaching at Blackwell was also a full-circle experience for Baugh, whose dad taught graphic design and printing at Richmond Technical Center and whose granddad taught special education at Blackwell.

“It was a cool moment knowing that my granddad worked here, and he used music to make sure all the kids were included,” Baugh said. “And I did the same thing, but in a more modern way by DJing, singing and playing the guitar.”

Meera Mehtaji, Ph.D., an assistant professor of counseling and special education in the VCU School of Education, taught Baugh in her reading fundamentals course last fall. She said Baugh’s commitment to using the School of Education’s framework of being a reflective practitioner shows through in his teaching practice.

“I think Darryl really understands the nuances and the individual journeys that students with disabilities have in public education,” Mehtaji said. “I see him advocating and supporting students and what their needs are and their goals are as an educator when he is in classrooms.”

With graduation around the corner, Baugh is looking to the future, which may include further training to become a vision teacher for deaf-blind students. But in the meantime, he is ready to take what he’s learned at VCU into the classroom.

“I want to work at a Title I or inner-city school. I always said I want to work somewhere where I’m needed and appreciated. I don’t want to just work somewhere where I'm just filling a spot — I want to be somewhere where I can help make a difference,” Baugh said. “But the goal is definitely to become a special ed teacher. … I really want to teach because I’ve been in school and I'm like, ‘I’ve got all the knowledge, all of the content.’ Now I’ve got to go use it.”