You want to talk about opening up schools again, sure. You go first.

School principals and administrators, school boards, stop meeting remotely to talk about opening schools.

Local, state, and national authorities, stop meeting remotely to talk about opening schools.

Elected officials, stop meeting remotely to talk about opening schools.

The CDC and other official health agencies at all levels, stop meeting remotely to talk about opening schools.

News broadcasters, judging teachers for wanting health and safety measures in place, stop talking about how teachers don’t want to go back to school, remotely.

All these people are doing this from the safety of their own homes. If you think it is safe to open schools, there is no risk to students, teachers or school staff, then you go first. You go back to your offices, meeting rooms, broadcast desks. You expose yourself daily. You risk your health and the health of your families, first.

Then tell teachers it is safe to be enclosed in a classroom with 10, 20, 30+ students all day. With no recess. No breaks. Inside lunch because we can’t open the cafeterias. It’s not yet safe to open the school playgrounds. Or to mingle with other classes on campus.

The answer is easy. You want us back in the classroom, You go first. Until then, we’re going to keep fighting for basic human decency. Basic human safety. We’re going to keep fighting for safe, clean schools, with enforceable sick student policies.

You go first!! Until then, we’ll keep answering the call that was thrust upon us last spring, and connect with each of our students, remotely; providing high quality education, meeting the individual needs of our students, remotely; being the awesome teachers we always we’re, remotely.

Until you go first.

Well that didn’t seem to take long! I think our 15 minutes of fame are over, already. Gone are the kudos for how hard teachers work and how dedicated they are to their students. And now bring on the criticism, the budget cuts, the layoffs…. And the community blaming us for schools not reopening!

I had a hard time adjusting to the fully remote instruction model. I truly missed being face to face and interacting with my students daily. I teach preschoolers who have special needs and it was not a natural progression for them or me to start interacting over a computer screen. Most of my students never adjusted to seeing me on a computer screen and as the weeks went on during the shelter in place, I became less a teacher and more a parent coach.

Don’t get me wrong, I still wrote individualized weekly lesson plans chopped full of activities that parents could do with simple household items, catered to each one of my students and their IEP goals every week. There was no one-size-fits-all lesson plan for my students! I did whole group live lessons via Zoom; I recorded myself reading extra stories and posted them for my students to watch; I even brought in (virtual) guest readers, and posted How-To videos for my families on how to implement the lessons that I was giving them each week. All the while, demands got higher from the district and my students were attending the zoom meetings less and less, and more of their parents were logging in needing help. It’s exhausting work trying to teach parents to do for their children what comes naturally for you to do with them in the natural setting of a classroom. But the parents were grateful, at least the ones that actually tried to implement the strategies we discussed. They realized how hard that I worked with their students in the classroom, how much I cared, the benefit it was to have them in the classroom working with me. Parents could finally see what progress their child actually made, where before they may have complained that their child wasn’t making progress fast enough.

Now that school is finally out for summer, they all want their children back in school on the first day of fall just like it was before the Rona. They don’t want them to have to wear masks; they don’t want to have to do temperature checks in the morning; they want to just say that every runny nose is allergies even though we all know they had a fever and were tylenolled up just before they came to school in the morning! In my area the cases are skyrocketing! It isn’t getting better and there is a real risk that we won’t open up in the fall. But all parents hear is that teachers don’t want to open up in the fall because they are concerned for their own health! Well, first of all, isn’t that a realistic concern? We all get the flu, strep throat, rashes, lice, and colds every year because parents send their kids to school sick. Why would we expect parents to be different sending their kids to school even if the family’s been exposed to COVID?!?! But also, why do parents think we have that much control?! We had no control over closing the schools in the first place. And we have no control over when they open again! Every week the state superintendent, the CDC, and our local health authorities are all putting out new recommendations/requirements for how we need to open up schools all the while they’re cutting our budgets, talking about laying us off, and we have to do all of this new with a whole lot less. How can we have class sizes of 12 or fewer with less teachers? How can we space our students 6 ft apart and have multiple separate groups of kids come to school each day and meet their minimum educational minutes live in person and still have time to clean all our classrooms, prep curriculum, assess and progress monitor?!?!

We’ve gone from being heroes to being the villains! And we really have no power driving this train!!! We’ve gone from getting accolades claiming that we are way underpaid and need to be more appreciated, to we’re overpaid and we need to lay teachers off.

I’d love to have the feeling of empowerment that I have any say over how I can open my classroom safely next to school year, but the truth is I don’t have that power! I do feel safe in knowing that I will reopen my classroom next year, when someone of higher rank and grade tells me to, and that I will not have the protective equipment that I need and deserve, unless I buy it myself, and I will not have the cleaning supplies necessary to keep my classroom sanitized and germ-free, unless I buy it myself!!

That’s enough crying for now, it’s wine time! 🍷