There is a time for everything under heaven, Ecclesiastes says. This is my time to speak, and speak clearly.
Two months ago I wrote a long, passionate post about the desperate need to push back the start of physical in-person school for several weeks. Enough time to allow several things to happen: the summer peak in Covid to start safely trending downward again, our schools…and the experts in education that are in every school in the state to draw up a plan for every subject, grade, and room in every building. And for people to start inventing things that literally did not exist two or three or four weeks ago, and start producing them in enough quantities for our schools to have them on hand to safely open.
But I never published. When I was writing, there was still a chance of doing things differently, of getting this right. Not the way we wanted it ultimately, but what was best for this moment in time. Then our governor slammed that door shut and yanked control away from local school districts across the state. And our local school district all alone as far as I know, decided to go back with no changes at all. 8-period days, same start date. Just allow some students and parents to opt for the online only version. All the mitigation things the teachers are doing in their classrooms are hard to control when all the students are in every hallway multiple times every day. To be fair, they have tried to create one-way lanes in the hallways but they refused to stagger passing periods.
So for us the time for for thinking of “what could be” was finished. We were left facing a locomotive coming at us at top speed, and needed to both plan for it, try our best to stay positive and be as excited as we could be for the kids that were coming back. I needed to create a safe, calm place for Marty to work and plan in to enable him to do his job which is creating a fun, safe, calm, stimulating area for his students to thrive. He was, and is, under a tremendous amount of stress at the thought of the probability of bringing the virus home to me.
The utter inadequacy of the “mitigation measures” talked about by our Governor and listed on the district website, especially when it comes to band, I won’t delve into here. Suffice it to say words can be very misleading until you are actually there. Desperately needed sanitation supplies to keep students AND teachers safer were not adequately planned for and simply not there in time. Student computers did not arrive on time, and teacher training on them has been extremely rushed and piecemeal. It did not have to be this way. Someone could have listened.
Here’s some of what I had previously written:
“The purpose of an education is to replace an empty mind with an open one. Malcolm S. Forbes
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. Albert Einstein
I want to open by saying that “School” is not the only place where “Education” happens.
With that said, I love schools. I’ve dedicated my entire life them. After my accident in 2014, when I could finally get back to volunteering to listen to first graders read, in our school, it felt incredibly like I had come home. But I also see that when we get those two concepts confused, our thinking gets muddled. The concept of “education” is much larger than our modern schools. As one columnist said recently, “Socrates never stood at a white board and lectured, and some of his students turned out rather well.”
I deeply love the entire process of education, seeing young minds grow and expand. Sometimes “school” and “education” are synonymous; sometimes, sadly, what happens in a school interferes with an education. Theoretically, in these modern times, highly trained professionals gather together during the day to work with young people, teaching them academic subjects, and in general, opening the world to them. This, when it works well, can be a very beautiful thing.
Most of our family, for two generations, has been deeply involved in schools and education, in different subjects, at all levels. When we get together, often that is how we “geek out.” When Covid-19 started rapidly reconfiguring things around the world, as every day was different, in different regions, we were hard-pressed to keep up with what was happening in our particular communities; what was wise, what was recommended, and to rapidly consider all the implications for our own particular situations. Given that the information being collected was also changing daily, it was, and is still a monumental task.
For better or worse, our schools are now responsible for not only the academic success of young people, but also for day care, social work, special education, health care, and food service on a very grand scale. Our schools are held responsible for alleviating all sorts of social ills, and frequently there are societal disputes about how those should be handled. “In loco parentis is defined as “when minor children are entrusted by parents to a school, the parents delegate to the school certain responsibilities for their children, and the school has certain liabilities.” This doctrine has for years been broadening. Now, it seems, more people see the school as responsible for the things that may have started out as merely secondary. “School” shutting down, for many people, means no day care and no meals, which is the first effect they feel.
The academic component of schools is increasingly further and further down the ladder now of why they “need to be physically open. At Governor Reynold’s press conference yesterday, a reporter asked the question “what happens now that teachers have been classed as ‘necessary” workers’? Will they be forced to continue working if they test positive, but are asymptomatic?”
She then proceeded to give the most astounding performance I’ve personally ever witnessed. I always assumed the best of people, and early on we felt she was avoiding the civil unrest we were seeing in other states and making decisions we didn’t always agree with personally, but we tried to believe she had good intentions. But this: she turned, bent a little, changed her tone of voice, and made a speech that belonged on a Hallmark card. It was all about how everyone knows that teachers were always essential to the wellbeing of children, as a safe place for them to be, to get fed, to have abuse reported, to be protected. I listened in increasing horror as she not only did not answer his question, which told me the answer must be “yes”, but she never ever listed what the #1 goals of schools were; to educate children. It’s blatant in Republican politics now: schools must open to get daycare for parents so parents can get back to work.
I am a Republican. Rather, I was a Republican. This blog is not political. I don’t believe the Democrat Party has the entire hold on truth either. But my Republican Party was all for fiscal responsibility and local control . Now it has radically forsaken those two precepts. It is now the most virulently pro-gun, anti-immigration, anti local control if it doesn’t agree with those things, that we have ever seen. And my dear GOP has become anti-teacher and anti-education and anti-public school. Gradually public schools and teachers have become the enemy. We see it in the rhetoric and writings. It seems far more interested in waging a culture war than it is in actually governing, or in building any semblance of unity. This makes me unbearably sad and weary.
So when the Wall Street Journal trumpets “online learning did not work at all” there are so many things wrong with such a blanket statement it’s hard to know where to start to dispute it.
Given the tremendous, overwhelming tasks our schools were faced with, in such a crisis timeline, with ever-shrinking tax revenue (continually posed as tax “increases”) I feel it was a rousing success and one worthy of praise, not screaming headlines of criticism. What do we want from our school? We need to make some tough decisions. Perhaps some things need to be separated in this country. Marty and I went to school as musicians, and decided to be teachers. Daycare was never our first aim. That’s not to say that it’s not direly important and necessary, it just was not our call nor any other music teacher we know. The majority of teachers in Waukee now have their Master’s Degrees. I feel that priority has gotten buried in all the other tasks schools are responsible for now. Nor really most teacher that we know: the vast majority of them are experts in their subject field, and passionate about leading young people toward that passion.
Distance learning wasn’t given a fair chance in 3 months. We were learning every day what worked and what didn’t; parents were learning; students were learning; it is undeniable that it did not work very well for most students. But some students excelled that hadn’t in the physical classroom. Our district was not even a 1-to-1 district with technology last spring: now it is. There were huge inequities in internet accessibility, device availability, and student/teacher mastery of software, just for starters. We have made huge strides in these months.
In recent years, there were increasing disruptions in classrooms. Entire classrooms where I volunteer would have to file out, leaving a screaming student inside, occasionally throwing desks, alone with their teacher, until help could come. Every few weeks this would happen, just in my wing. My own daughter, who taught fourth grade, let her contract lapse after this spring. When school went online, she loved teaching again.
What we had was not all that great. It was good, but we could always do better. We are preparing our students for a future we cannot even imagine, after all, with just the tools we have right now. It’s quite a challenge. Our world changes faster all the time. Our students are in school for an average of 13 years. Who can picture the world they will inherit?
I’m just asking here for a breath of time. The world seems filled with realists that will say “that’s not how it works. We have deadlines.” Well, the coronavirus stopped some of those “deadlines” for a while. Some of us are not OK. Terrible things have happened, here in our country and all around the world. But make no mistake: the educational system in America did not crumble. Let’s don’t waste this opportunity, because that’s exactly what it is. An opportunity that we hopefully will not get again.
A good friend of ours, Patrick Kearney, is a band director in the near-by school district of Johnston, Iowa. He has held numerous prestigious positions, but is back now where his heart has always been apparently: middle school band. He blogs eloquently as a great advocate for the arts and, especially, instrumental music. This is his latest article in its entirety:
Dear Governor R…nope, I can’t do it.
Many of my posts take the form of an open letter to elected officials. Over the course of the last couple of weeks I’ve started and quit on several letters to Iowa governor Kim Reynolds. Usually my letters are an attempt pass on my perspective as a veteran (old) teacher to government officials who aren’t particularly connected with what is happening in our public schools. I would describe the tone of most of my letters as “snarky”.
As I attempted to write a letter to Ms. Reynolds regarding her decision to take away local control from Iowa’s schools in order to force students and teachers back into their classrooms full time in the midst of a pandemic, I couldn’t get the tone right. My letters take on serious topics, but come from the place of a teacher speaking to power with a little humor thrown in. You might say my letters are an attempt to figuratively punch upwards. My problem with a letter to Ms. Reynolds right now is that it feels like taking shots at someone who is simply not up to her job in this moment. To address her personally and point out all of the things that she is doing wrong just felt like piling on a person who is being overwhelmed by her job and the challenges facing our state. And so, instead of a letter to Ms. Reynolds, I’ll just share my thoughts as a sweaty middle-aged band director looking at going back to school very soon.
First, no one wants to return to “normal” school more than teachers. More than anything we want to be learning with our students face to face. With that being said, we want our students to be safe. Much has been said in recent weeks about the critical role that schools play in keeping our students safe, well fed, and emotionally healthy. That is because when students start their school day, they are surrounded by bus drivers, secretaries, associates, nurses, custodians, cafeteria workers, and teachers who care about them and serve as their advocates. In this moment, our students need advocates. When we have a billionaire Amway salesperson (I’m talking to you Betsy) trying to tell us that children are “stoppers” of Covid-19 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/23/devoss-claim-that-children-are-stoppers-covid-19/), someone has to stand up to advocate for the truth. Young people are getting sick and they are spreading the virus. Teachers aren’t willing to stand by and pretend, as some have suggested, that this pandemic is going to magically disappear. There is no doubt that putting kids back into schools, where social distancing is essentially impossible, will result in an increase in the spread of the virus.
As we think about advocates for our young people, it seems to me that those who know what is best for our students and our schools are those who live in our communities. The parents, school boards, administrators, and teachers in each community know the specifics of their school district’s buildings, schedules, and risk-tolerance. Kim Reynolds asked every district in the state to develop three distinct plans so that schools could be ready with multiple options this fall. Educators spent hundreds of hours developing plans to be ready for a variety of contingencies, only to have her announce on July 17th that, in many cases, two thirds of the plans that she asked districts to formulate were suddenly “illegal”.
Iowa teachers have lived in a world where we have had our bargaining rights stripped away by legislative Republicans, we have seen public school budgets fail to keep up with rising costs, and we have suffered the indignity of having a U.S. Department of Education Secretary who has no qualifications worthy of that role. We are used to not being heard by elected leaders in our state, but we must be heard now. As we watch schools across the country opening and then immediately shutting down again (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/us/georgia-school-coronavirus.html), it will be school employees who will be taking the risks associated with school return and it will be teachers who have to raise their voices in order to insure the safety of our students.
My colleague Andrea Ward wrote an excellent article that explains the bad conversations that are happening around the return to schools (https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2020/07/28/reopening-schools-covid-19-wrong-conversation-coronavius-column/5520523002/). To me, Andrea’s most important point is that people on both sides are pretending like this is an easy decision. It’s an incredibly complex decision that is best made by decision makers at the local level. Having a governor (and a president…and secretary of education) who pretend as though this is easy and without massive risk makes our return to schools much more difficult.
Governor Reynolds approval rating on her response to Covid 19 is the lowest in the country (https://www.kcrg.com/2020/08/02/approval-of-gov-reynolds-handling-of-coronavirus-worst-in-nation-survey-finds/). No one should be surprised by that. It’s difficult to approve of a leader who basically does nothing. It’s difficult to approve of a leader whose response to this pandemic is that she hopes people “do the right things” and seems to believe the virus will magically disappear.
Teachers don’t want to be martyrs. Teachers want nothing more than to see our students and learn along side of them as soon as possible. There are those who are promoting a narrative that teachers don’t want to go back for a variety of reasons that are all wrong (and too ridiculous for me to name). To my teacher friends, we need to keep raising our voices. This isn’t the time to be silent (I’m frankly embarrassed at how silent I’ve been). We look out for our students each and every day, and they need us now more than ever. It is too late to hope our governor will act in the interests of a safe return to schools, so we have to take care of our students and take care of each other. We should trust teachers. It’s that simple, trust teachers.
Our school superintendents and principals worked endless hours this spring, summer, and this fall. A huge amount of responsibility and worry is on them for everyone’s safety. They have been expected to be selfless in not thinking of themselves or their families through this, yet some of them have children themselves and are facing tremendous concerns. They greatly deserve our thanks and prayers, not continued criticism and scorn.
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