Aaron Maybin Helps Shine Spotlight on Cold Schools | Baltimore Magazine Former NFL player turned Baltimore City teacher shines powerful spotlight on school infrastructure.
What’s the day been like for you guys today?” Aaron Maybin asked the kids in his class at Henson Elementary School in West Baltimore. “Cold!” more than a few replied with uninhibited childhood screams.
“Very, very, very, very cold,” said one in particular.
Maybin, a former defensive lineman for the Buffalo Bills and New York Jets and the No. 11 overall NFL draft pick out of Penn State in 2009, is now a teacher in his hometown of Baltimore. Since his four-year professional football career ended, he’s lived and worked here, pursuing art and activism.
He has a pseudo-celebrity platform with more than 24,000 Twitter and 22,000 Instagram followers, for example, and a new book out. So when Maybin posted a series of social media messages and a video from his classroom on Wednesday, himself wearing a jacket and his kindergarten and pre-K students proclaiming their frigid feelings, it shined a powerful (and eventually viral) spotlight on the hot-button issue of widespread decrepit city school infrastructure that’s come to the fore as fast as the arrival of the cold temperatures that have drafted through windows, filled decades-old buildings and busted outdated boilers and pipes over the last two weeks.
Barbara Haddock Taylor/Baltimore Sun/TNS via Getty Images | Co.
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