The teacher has provided a very thoughtful analysis of issues that must be addressed BEFORE we can SAFELY reopen PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
…proactive.
I’m just going to jump on here because this is my families reality at the moment. My mother is a high school theatre teacher and has been teaching for the last ~30 years.
One of the big things my state has been championing for going back to school is using larger rooms such as theaters, gyms, etc.
My mother’s Theater seats 120 people, which is on the bigger side for a public high school. Here is what that 6 feet apart looks like in the seats.Each white X marks a seat that cannot be used. The blue post-its are where they can.
16 seats. Out of 120. We measured the stage as well, to try and find room for kids to sit on-stage. 15 seats.
This is one of the biggest rooms on the campus, not including the gym. 30 students, not including the teacher.
Average class size in her school before the pandemic started is 35 at the lowest. I’ve been in high school classes that range closer to 45.
There is an extremely confusing schedule still being hammered out that would involve class sizes being shrunk and finagled around, the semesters changed to quarters etc. etc. The expectation is that the teachers will sanitize their classrooms between the classes. Which is a pain, but teachers will absolutely do that. Good teachers go way above and beyond for their students.
And then the district told them that they have to provide their own PPE.
I live in a big city. You still can’t find good masks around here, gloves are in short supply. Hand sanitizer has finally been swooping back in, lysol wipes or anything like that are not. As of 7/8/2020, their union is still fighting tooth and nail for PPE to be provided. All while our Covid-19 cases continue to explode up.
I’m in California. She’s in a really good district, with decent funding and a great facility. We’re literally in one of the best-case scenario areas. I can’t imagine how the fuck these negotiations are going elsewhere, places with less funding in states run by fucking idiots.
Physically coming back to school is not feasible. There is no way without a lot of funding, that is not going to just magically appear, to keep students and teachers safe. Trying to do so with what we know now, with the preventative measures we have, with the funding the district has available, is going to end up killing people.
My mom was telling me just the other day that on the message board where she and other teachers from her state discuss these issues, one had just blown the whistle on another district’s administration’s plan for online instruction. They planned to offer online IF:
- a parent or childcare professional (like a nanny) could be available throughout the day to supervise the kid and provide assistance
- parents would have to supply the computer and Internet needed
- the kid has to have had good enough grades prior to going online that they aren’t considered a risk for falling behind
The obvious problem with these guidelines is that they favor rich, well-off parents who can afford to cover these conditions. My mother lives in a poor state, so a large swath of kids aren’t going to fall into that category. That’s why the teacher was reporting on it, because it’s unfair and quite possibly illegal.
But on the other hand, I can understand why the school is considering these guidelines. In rural areas where it’s “too expensive” for companies to provide high speed Internet, online instruction has been impossible. Even my mother, the teacher, doesn’t have internet at her house fast enough to stream video, and it has a tight data cap. She would have to go into school anyway just to record her lessons, and then only half the class or so would be able to watch them without going into the public library or somewhere else with public wifi, which is something we’re trying to avoid.
The fact is that systemic issues have brought us to this point. Public schools are underfunded. Teachers are not being paid overtime for the extra work they’re having to put in to change to online instruction (for example, in case they move online my mother’s school made her move to a new software program, and unlike the last one this one doesn’t allow you to import lessons plans so she has to retype them all by hand, not just this year but EVERY year, and that takes hours, which she usually has to spend during her own unpaid time because elementary teachers do not get adequate breaks to do everything they have to during paid school day time). Internet, despite being at this point indispensable to modern life, is not provided to all people in our country because it’s still considered a product and not a utility. And all these problems have collided and they’re coming down on teachers’ heads.
My point here is please be kind to teachers during this time, they’re doing their best and they have little help.
^ OK if this was a teen dystopia novel the reader would roll their eyes at how ridiculous and over the top that was
