An open letter to everyone who wants to “reopen the schools”

A note on some terms:

IA stands for “instructional assistant”

VMT stands for “vehicle miles traveled” meaning how long a motor vehicle has to be on the road

While I am an employee of a fairly well-off public school district, it is not in that capacity that I am writing right now. Instead, it is as a taxpayer. I have often observed people express a sentiment along the lines of “Why should my taxpayer dollars go to teachers who don’t want to go to work?”. Let us pass over the fact that teachers have been working, and that calling this process “return to school” is problematic because it erases the fact that teachers have been working this whole time. I too am a taxpayer in my county. I too care about where my tax dollars go. And I am not happy that they are being squandered on the plan to return to buildings.

It has been established that COVID-19 is airborne. Plans to resume IN-PERSON instruction involve far too much emphasis on surface cleaning. I am a taxpayer and I do not appreciate my tax dollars going toward hygiene theatre. On the other hand, I would appreciate my tax dollars going toward hazard pay for those employees who have had to be in the building, and that hazard pay would be proportional to how many days the employee in question has had to be in the building. I would also appreciate more of my tax dollars going toward upgrading the VENTILATION systems. I would appreciate my tax dollars going towards hiring more teachers, IAs, and other staff so that there can be a better student to staff ratio. I would appreciate my tax dollars going toward better cycling and walking routes so that students can safely get to school without extra COVID exposure, and do so in a way that doesn’t increase VMT. I would appreciate my tax dollars going toward making sure every student and employee in the system gets flu vaccines every autumn. (How many instructional days could have been saved pre-pandemic if everyone had gotten their flu shot?)

Now I mentioned that I am an employee of a major school system. Specifically, I teach homebound and home-based students. (Pre-pandemic, some students couldn’t be in a standard in-person classroom setting for weeks or months at a time due to illness, injury, or some other reason, so teachers in each subject would come to their home to teach them what they needed to know to avoid falling behind in classes. I am one of those teachers. Usually I would teach Spanish, French, algebra 1, geometry, or algebra 2.) I am lucky that I get the freedom to choose not to take on an assignment if I feel unsafe doing so. Recently I was asked if I would feel comfortable returning to students’ homes if certain risk mitigation measures were taken. I said yes, but I suspect I have a very different idea of what risk mitigation looks like than does my county. I suspect this because the very next question in the survey I took centered around sanitizing surfaces. Once again, I do not appreciate my tax dollars being squandered on hygiene theatre. On the other hand, what would make me comfortable is everyone having a mask on. (I concede that most systems are specifying that masks are required.) I am much more interested in airflow — can we conduct the session on the patio, or at least sit close to a window that we can open? What I also care about is the integrity of the quarantine bubble of the student I would work with. Do I have the word of every member of the student’s quarantine unit that they have stayed out of gyms and refrained from indoor restaurant dining? Do I have the word of all quarantine bubble members that they refrained from in-person gatherings with anyone outside the quarantine bubble? That they have NOT flown to Cancun? From my end, I can promise that I have not had any in-person interactions except for people in my quarantine bubble, and I can vouch for each member of my quarantine bubble as well, and that will be the case for as long as I am working with the student, and I plan to have only one student at a time.

While I am not school-based, I still saw the training video on curbing the spread of COVID-19 after returning to the building. I got a look at how in-person class would look. The main benefit of in-person learning over virtual learning is supposed to be that students get to do hands-on activities. But what I saw in that training video made it clear that that particular benefit of in-person over virtual was completely off the table. Students are still to be far apart from their classmates and there does not seem to be much in the way of socioemotional engagement, at least not more than the current virtual setup already allows. I described my observations and showed some screenshots to my mother, who remarked, with no prompting from me, “That doesn’t sound like school, that sounds like prison. And this is why all the parents in this neighborhood are opting for virtual.”

The return to the building carries extremely high costs in terms of logistics with very little in the way of academic benefit. In fact, instructional time is LESS than what it was under virtual. All this when there is a pandemic going on. Once again, I do not appreciate my tax dollars going toward hygiene theatre and what will in practice be antithetical to the structure and consistency that children need. I do not believe for a second that in-person children will receive a better quality education from teachers who are expected to teach concurrently. I believe the children of parents who prudently chose to stay virtual will be shortchanged as well. I believe proponents of the return to building plans are not being completely honest about why they want to implement those plans.

I do not appreciate the fact that my tax dollars are not going to compensate those employees who have risked their lives to help the most vulnerable students. I do not appreciate that my tax dollars are not being used to hire more teachers, IAs, nurses, and counselors so that we can have better student to adult ratios. I do not appreciate that the employees of my county’s school system (and I don’t care about getting a raise personally, and I would happily sacrifice a little more for my colleagues who are currently working with children) are not getting adequately compensated for all the hard work they have put in. I do not appreciate the level of odium that my colleagues have received from the “OPEN THE SCHOOLS NOW!!!111” crowd.

I have also not forgotten the press conference of the evening of March 12, 2020, a full day after the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was a pandemic, almost a day after a neighboring county rightfully closed its buildings in order to be safe, when my own county’s superintendent insisted on keeping the buildings open until the eleventh hour after the community gave backlash. I promise I will remember this in 2023, when the school board members of my county are up for re-election.