Back in late October when our school board was deliberating whether or not to switch from all-remote learning to a hybrid model, we were just beginning to get the hang of remote. The rough bumps in the road early in our journey were beginning to smooth out, and students and teachers alike were settling in. Not everyone had jumped aboard the remote learning platform, but most families had embraced it, and we teachers were doing everything we could to support them and help them be successful with their education, as well as encourage the ones who hadn’t tried it yet to climb aboard.
Then everything changed. Despite the numbers of COVID-19 continuing to rise in our community, despite the reports from Dr. Fauci, all of a sudden the rhetoric from our school district superintendent changed. I’m not sure why. I’ll probably never know what was really behind it, but for some reason, our superintendent became hell-bent on us returning to the classroom. His school board members were dubious, despite the threats they’d been receiving from a minority of less-civilized parents. His staff was overwhelmingly against it and made very compelling, well-supported arguments against it. Even a vast percentage of his parents had elected, through his many surveys, to keep their children remote, even if the district opened up a hybrid option. He chose to ignore all of us and campaign for us to return. Every sentence out of his mouth was slanted in that direction. He produced the district’s HVAC engineer to testify endlessly at the board meeting that the air quality in our classrooms would continue to be healthy upon the students’ and teachers’ return. The board meetings lasted for hours, far past midnight, arguing the prudence of their decision.
I knew any hope was lost when, during one of his follow-up videos in which our superintendent tried to explain himself to the public, he said with a shrug of his shoulders, “Can I guarantee that none of our teachers will get COVID? Of course not.” It was the nonchalant shrug of the shoulders that got me. I knew in that moment I did not matter. I was expendable. My life and my well-being were of so little consequence to this man that he was willing to gamble with them to get what he wanted. He faced the possibility of harming me and my family as disinterestedly as a general analyzing the collateral damage of his latest offensive.
After that, no matter how many times he says that the health and safety of his staff and his students are of utmost importance, it falls on my deaf ears. Actions speak louder than words, Mr. Superintendent, and your actions speak volumes (both in quantity and decibel-level).
He was right about one thing, he couldn’t guarantee that his staff wouldn’t get it. Within just a couple of weeks of each other, our Title I teacher (after spending 30-minute sessions with several of my students), our Parent Involvement Facilitator (after overseeing lunch duty in my room for 30 minutes the day before), and our Media Center Specialist (after teaching for 45 minutes in my room the day before), have all tested positive.
Please pray for their full recovery and for protection for the rest of us. Our superintendent’s latest rhetoric states that children ages 0 -9 are unlikely to get COVID or to be carriers, contrary to what the CDC has published on its website. Our state school board and our local school board have just adopted measures that have completely changed the “gating” criteria, which govern how the community health is rated by color zones. Using our former criteria, the county would now be back in red, but they’ve redefined the zoning so that we’re only in yellow. Additionally, they’ve altered how our school district reacts to a change in zone color. Now, it doesn’t matter how bad the pandemic becomes, all elementary schools have been ordered to stay in hybrid mode, even if the health code turns red.