Jhakeem Haltom: Helping ‘new roots’ take hold and thrive 

Jhakeem Haltom, dean of students at New Roots Charter School, does not like to refer to his career as his purpose or passion. He said he found himself where he is today by simply leaning into his skill set and strengths. He continued to work hard over the years to improve his methods for the betterment of the school, to the great advantage of its students.

“It’s not about always enjoying it or coming to work with this feeling of like, ‘This is my life purpose,’” Haltom said. “It’s a professional skill that I’ve learned through experience and being on the front lines of teenage mental health.”

He said that his 15 years of being dean at New Roots has allowed him to slowly improve his abilities.

“Each year, I learn more. I use that experience to just get more and more detailed into the intricacies of it,” he added. “I imagine if someone was a cook or a chef, you can cook the same dish thousands of times, but the more that you do it, the more there’s a subtle temperature change, the amount of salt. There’s subtle things you can do to improve your recipe. Being dean of students has allowed me to improve my professional capacity.”

“Jhakeem was an employee in youth sports or child development at the Ithaca YMCA,” said Frank Towner, nominator of Haltom and a fellow Hometown Hero. This was how Towner met Haltom, working at the YMCA together.

“I was struck by his drive, positive attitude, self-motivation — and that smile,” Towner said.

Colleague Dave Streib, New Roots science teacher and coordinator for curriculum and instruction, said Haltom’s contributions to the school have been invaluable. 

“I think really, really highly of him,” Streib said. “It’s really obvious how much he cares – how hard he works to not give up on people or situations.”

Haltom said that although he has made mistakes, he has used them as opportunities to improve, a philosophy he has handed down to his students.

“Those mistakes are things that I’ve learned from, and grown from,” Haltom said. “I think because of that growth and ability to self-reflect and self-improve, the kids have benefited from that. … I like to help the kids learn how to self-assess.”

His strategy is to avoid dwelling on mistakes with emotional attachment, guilt or shame; instead, he encourages the teens to evaluate their actions with a more detached stance. “I like to build that skill set of looking in and saying, ‘Okay, here’s where I get stronger. Here’s where I can improve,’” he said.

He has a unique strategy for conflict resolution and discipline.

“We’ve created this atmosphere in disciplined schools that’s based upon punishment,” Haltom said. 

“I’m not saying there’s not conditions in which I have to lean on a suspension or something,” he said, but he added that if he can, he tries to take a different route by using mediation instead. This is a tactic he learned from the Traditional Cayuga People, who taught him how they have resolved conflict in the past.

“[They] began to teach me about how they resolved conflict when they were upset about being colonized, or how they resolve conflict in their internal communities,” Haltom said. “Those skill sets that they taught me from their own traditions gave me the insight that I needed to help run mediations more effectively. That has been a really, really effective part of me being a decent dean at this level.”

“I coach [students], and I work with them to have the desire to have that mediation,” he added. “That’s really important — to facilitate the desire for both people to be there. Once you facilitate the desire, you ask each of them to bring a gift.”

The gift is actually an admission from both people involved in the conflict that there were things they could have done better in the situation.

“Once they both offer each other that gift and they receive that gift, then you start to explore the intricacies of the conflict,” Haltom said. “But the intricacies of the conflict have been colored with the thing that they both acknowledge that they could have done better, which really ultimately leads to this path that’s natural and beautiful.”

Haltom said that New Roots enriches its students’ education and nurtures their personal growth with a wetlands project at Cass Park, where the school has been working to return the area back to its healthy, natural state.

“I would say for some students, it’s been life-changing in terms of helping them identify the path they want to take with their careers or with their work lives,” said Streib, who helped start up the wetlands project with Haltom in 2016.

“I think having the example has been powerful,” Streib said. “I’m recalling numerous times where I’m working with students in a class setting and we’re learning about the history of native people in this area, and some of the perspectives that they would have.”

As a teen growing up in Ithaca, Haltom had the life changing experience of moving to Mississippi to attend boarding school.

He said that attending the school gave him a very different perspective, especially as a person of color who was raised in upstate New York. He wanted to remain in Ithaca as an adult to lend that perspective to students who might be experiencing racism and/or marginalization, just as he did when he was a struggling high school student.

“In the past five years, we’ve graduated 90% of our Black males. That’s not a lot of students because we have a small population. But that speaks of the gap here in New York state,” he said, adding that, unlike Piney Woods, the school he attended in Mississippi, which graduated its predominately Black student population at a high rate, at most public schools in upstate New York the graduation rates for people of color are much lower. 

“In our particular terrain, it is a very marginalized group of people,” Haltom said. There is potential to view that as an opportunity to exceed expectations.

“I’m not injured by [that view],” he said. “I’ve chosen to allow that to make me stronger.”

He applies that philosophy to New Roots, as well.

“That marginalization is very similar to being a dean of students in New Roots Charter School,” he said. “New Roots is marginalized in people’s minds as an educational opportunity. … We could be a victim of the community’s judgment of us as an educational setting, or we could say, ‘What doesn’t kill me makes us stronger.’ And New Roots has been made very, very strong.”

Haltom’s passions outside of New Roots include playing in the popular local band Thousands of One, which he describes as a blend of hip hop, rock and roll and soul.

His other true passion is cooking homemade pizza using homegrown ingredients. He serves his 16-inch pies with sausage, peppers and mushrooms at Danby Food and Drink every first Saturday of the month.

“For years, when I’d be stressed out after work, especially in the winter, I would go home and just study like I was a Ph.D., recipes — pizza, pizza, pizza,” he said. “It became a way for me to heal from the stress of being a dean and working with teens for 12 hours a day … but it got to be such a passion where I was like, ‘Well, maybe I could make money at this. Maybe I could do this.’”

Regardless of whether he’s changing lives with his work at New Roots or with his perfect pizza recipe, Haltom said he enjoys watching a high number of New Roots graduates find their place in Ithaca, and he takes pride in his contributions to the community where he grew up.

“After Jhakeem left the Y, I would see him and follow his career path,” Towner said. “We would always embrace when we see each other, and his passion has touched the lives of many children and adults alike. A lot of people come and go in a person’s life … some you never forget.”

Tompkins Weekly’s Hometown Heroes Award is sponsored by Security Mutual Insurance and Canopy by Hilton Ithaca.