If anyone knows me, they know that I miss being physically present at school. I miss my students. I miss my classroom. I miss the magic of the room, and I even miss all of the awkward and slow moments. I miss the community. Although I am SO ready to go back to school, I can wait. I can wait because I know that it is what is best for the health of the community that I serve and work with. This is not a statement against the reopening of schools. Schools offer community resources, mental health services, emotional supports, and food for students, and schools should continue to do so. This is a statement against school leaders not utilizing this time to recreate schools in the most equitable ways to eradicate inequality. This statement also asks the reader to understand a basic psychological theory that intellectual and higher-cognitive functions are much more difficult if one's physical and/or psychological safety is jeopardized or at risk.
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| Courtesy of Helen Gross's article for EdNews |
On June 24th, the Sequoia Union High School’s Board of Trustees approved a plan to reopen schools with students and teachers returning to campus for a blended model of on-campus and distance learning instruction. Although it attempts to protect teachers and students from exposure to the virus through smaller cohorts of students in the classroom, it is not enough. The plan ignores science and data, and the plan lacks any vision, showing the desire to take a quick, ineffective, fix instead of being intentional, strategic, and careful. It also caters towards a smaller population of the district’s demographics who selfishly demand a “return to normal.” For students who have been sheltering-in-place with parents who have remained gainfully employed who were also able to shelter-in-place with them, yes, this will be a return to normal. For the students whose parents were laid-off without unemployment benefits, for students who already had compromised housing with multiple family members cohabitating in one home or apartment, for students who had to get a job as an essential worker to help their family pay for rent and food, for students who have been taking care of their family members, this will not be a return to normal. It will, once again, alter their lives in a disruptive and harmful “return to normal” that ignores their circumstances and their health. It is important to remember that the word "return" implies falling back into what was already there. The school system as it was reinforced many of the forms of oppression that are currently being marched against, protested, and eradicated. Leaders should not take the path back to perpetuating and intensifying the inequality in our community. It is the district's job as our decision-makers and our job as educators to intentionally create a vision for schools that serves all students and honors the purpose of education as a great equalizer; a job that our district leaders do not want to accept.
48% of the population in San Mateo County are white and account for 14% of the reported COVID-19 cases. 25% of the population is Latinx and accounts for 48% of the reported COVID-19 cases. 11% of the cases reported were people under 20 years old. If our district were to serve as a microcosm of those statistics for the county, then the number of cases would increase. According to the State of California Dashboard, 41.3% of our students are Latinx, a significant increase from 25% of Latinx people in the county. These numbers alone should serve as a red flag for district leaders to not send us back to school at the beginning of the school year with such a large amount of our student population at risk. Further, there have been many studies that link race to elevated health risks, and those health risks are intensified even more when coupled with low socioeconomic status (not to imply or conflate that all Latinx students are low SES or that the low SES students are solely non-white). The California Dashboard reports that 38.1% of Sequoia’s students are “socio-economically disadvantaged.” A low-socioeconomic status is associated with chronic activation of the body’s stress response which increases one’s risk for illness. A significant number of our students are at risk and will continue to struggle with higher-level cognitive tasks coupled with this stress-response if we return to school. No one can argue that this time is not stressful, but that stress cycle not only affects students’ physical health, but it also affects their psychological health, too. Nancy Adler, a health psychologist at the University of San Francisco, has studied the relationship between one’s health risk and SES. In her study, she found that it was not just being poor, but feeling poor in the relationship to others that elevated levels of anxiety and stress, and in turn health risks, in those involved in the study. The current income inequality in our district’s communities has long been discussed, and if we believe Adler’s studies, then returning to school will also intensify the stress and health risk amongst our most vulnerable students. Parents and other community members have commented that this moment may be an opportunity for us to learn and overcome adversity, but they do not understand that growing strong from adversity is mostly a luxury for those who are better off.
The district has shown its cards by trusting teachers with online instruction during the spring semester while my principal voiced the importance of showing compassion and extending understanding to students to provide equity. Compassion and understanding are the foundation of good teaching, and schools should always promote these qualities, not just during the first stages of a pandemic. School leaders and educators must demand that reopening schools also includes reimagining them to eradicate inequality. We have quality educators who know our students' and our students' needs better than the Board of Trustees. When have any of the Board of Trustees talked a student through a bad day? Heard their immigration story? Listened to them talk about why they share a room with their mom? Planned and rehearsed dialogues with students to help them speak to other adults in their life? Had an "ah'-ha!" moment with them? These moments make a quality education, not what is documented and reported to the state. The way you implement programs matters. Who implements the programs matters. Who makes decisions about peoples' lives matters. The teachers in the classroom will be providing a service when school starts in the fall. How motivated are they to provide the service that the district is currently asking of them? All the answers to these questions matter in how we maintain fidelity to the original goals of the education as we achieve scale creating our new normal, not returning to it. Schools can be an equalizing force if we make them that way, but it also means that we need to pay attention to the ones who suffer the most. If we make them the basis of our educational plan, then we will be serving the humanity of all our students in the process.
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