This last week I had a conversation with a teacher friend of mine to get firsthand what’s being said and planned. I asked her if I can write about it, basically handing over this platform to her, because I really wanted to know and share what is or isn’t being talked about relative to planning.
Here are some moments from our conversation:
What information are you getting from your school?
“Very little. It is all very piece-meal. It is mostly about schedules. They will change the high school schedule because the feeling is the risk of transmitting the virus will go up (with increased contact), the more people you see during the day.
The schedule consists of seven distinct classes each day, and now they have dropped it to four classes (longer classes each day). The other period, every teacher is contractual to have one hour of prep time per day, which is never enough time unless the teacher is completely streamlined and come in early and stay after; at least some of the time, not every day.
If I have students that want to stay home, then some number of the periods I teach will be remote learning.”
Will you be given a mask each day?
“We have been told by the superintendent that the staff will be provided with masks. Now, the problem is that kids really need to see your face, your mouth moving when you don’t speak the language, especially teaching ESL, but that is true for other kids, not just language-learners. If there were a clear mask or something –
The response, when asked about clear (transparent) masks, ‘Oh, yeah. I don’t know.’
My feeling is, here is the mask we are going to give you, and if you want something different, you need to buy it yourself. That is how it always is for teachers.”
Have they brought up face shields?
“Oh . . . yeah. ‘We are discussing that.’ Everything we bring up, they say, ‘We are discussing that.’ I can’t tell you how frustrating it makes you when all you are told is ‘We are discussing that.’
They don’t know how to do lunchtime. They don’t know how to do bathroom breaks, because kids just can’t go to the bathroom. And the bathrooms are disgusting. The other thing is the kids use the bathrooms to vape. So I don’t know if that means they are passing vapes back and forth? It is a big problem. It happens all the time. Every single day someone gets busted for vaping in the bathrooms.
Our custodial staff, I am not sure what is going with them. They are understaffed, underfunded. They just aren’t given enough tools to do a good job. Remember March 11th . . . that is when everything started cascading. On March 11, I remember really really well, there have been rumblings, and I thought no way, no way. But then we got an email that said the school is closed for two days for deep cleaning and then we never went back. They just kept extending it two weeks at a time, and then here we are.
I went back because all staff had stuff in their rooms because we didn’t expect this to happen. A time was set up for us to go back and get our things, and shit was not cleaned. Nothing was cleaned. I distinctly remember thinking, ‘The desks in my room are filthy.” The same drawings and the same pencil markings. Nothing was cleaned. So that’s a problem.
Maybe they were just like ‘It doesn’t matter we aren’t opening the schools anyway.’ But I was thinking, ‘Where is this deep cleaning that we were promised?’ I still haven’t seen it, and I have been in that school twice to empty, close down our classrooms as we do at the end of the year.”
Who is sanitizing these classrooms? Who is sanitizing these bathrooms? Who is making sure things are clean?”
So let me tell you what’s happening in and around in medical facilities: You come in and get your masks. You probably have seen the six feet stickers in and around places . . .
“Oh, it is still six feet for your guys. We get three feet.” Update: ‘My principal told us the district would stay with 6 feet, so they must have made that decision after the first meeting with the superintendent.’
Yeah. Huge issue. And something I have seen and maybe you seen as well is that this situation, with all the governing rules that are absolutely necessary, they are not leaving room for mistakes. Kids are going to make mistakes.
“I posted that, but I hardly doubt I am the only teacher that thinks this. I think all teachers know this. That is why we don’t feel better when people say, ‘Kids will have masks.’ Adults aren’t compliant with masks, not sure how kids will do.”
What PPE are you being provided?
How are the rooms actually going to be cleaned?
How will you and the kids be kept safe?
“And when they say PPE, they are just giving us a box of face masks.”
Are you going to be getting enough learning wipes and gloves?
“Nobody has talked about cleaning wipes or gloves. Nobody has talked about how we are going to keep the rooms clean. Nobody has talked about whose job that is.”
It’s going to be yours. And something to ask – how many hand sanitizer stations are there going to be? What is the procedure for bathrooms? How many people are going to be allowed in the bathroom at one time?
“Here are other problems, right, that nobody has talked about (yet). The superintendent has told us that parents will be expected to provide their children with a mask. I guarantee you, the first day of school with a rough, conservative estimate, I will have at least seven kids with no clue what you are talking about, or have no clue what is going on. Their families just weren’t aware that they were supposed to provide masks. They don’t have a mask. So . . . . what am I supposed to do?
I will feel compelled to just give them masks out the box they are going to give me. That’s what is going to happen because, of course, I will. I have seen all the memes on how both people need to wear a mask to be effective. That’s one thing. So there are at least seven masks I don’t have on how much of a supply they are giving me. That’s problem one. (According to a later conversation with my principal, the kids will be provided masks if they don’t bring them from home, so that was another good development).
There are too many children and too many families in our community that is entirely disconnected from what’s going on. Their parents just know they have to send them to school. And sometimes, they don’t even figure that out until we have been pretty underway with the school year. Then they come in and go ‘What?’
Connecting with immigrant families is just very different than with native-English speaking American-born families. Often the families of the students I teach don’t use email, which is the primary way schools communicate with families. The students I teach, their parents usually communicate by text. If you really want to communicate with these families in a way that works for them, you need to call or text, and it needs to be in the home language, in this case, Portuguese or Spanish.
It’s absolutely unfair to send out a district-wide email, even if it is translated, and expect it to reach all families. Calling and texting each parent almost always means a much longer conversation (in the native language), so this is a huge effort from staff.
Where do you think the money and time come from, especially when many school budgets are frozen this year? And that’s not even talking about kids who come after the school year starts. Probably about 25% of my classroom in June is made up of kids who weren’t there in September.
So, you will have a lot of kids who don’t know they are supposed to bring a mask to school, who don’t know about the new rules for social distancing. We need to get them to follow these new rules, which are pretty uncomfortable and unnatural for humans really really quickly. And they will be with teachers that don’t speak their native language, so that will be an added barrier to understanding.
There will be some kids who will be sent with a mask, but these kids struggle with rules for their own reasons. Maybe they don’t want to be here (and that makes perfect sense since they didn’t choose it, their parents did. Kids have to follow their parents). They don’t want to be in high school. They didn’t come to America to be in school. They came to America to work, and they don’t understand why they just can’t go get a job. That is all they want to do.
And the way they express their frustration is they just don’t want to follow the rules. And that’s just teenagers in general. They want to test the boundaries. Teenagers test the boundaries of everything. It’s really frustrating – but to teach high school, you have to expect it. You can’t get mad about it, and you can’t take it personally. It is where they are at in their development. It’s where their brains are at.”
You are in a school that is 9-12?
“Yes, 9-12. I will have kids just for shits and giggles to see how much power they have, to see what they can get away with, just to make the day more fun for them, are going to fight me on the masks. When I brought this up to the superintendent, he said, ‘Well, I agree with you. There is a big contingent (in our district.).’
The superintendent said, ‘Yes, I have seen on social media and how lots of parents don’t agree with wearing masks. I think we need just to have a conversation.’
No – no conversation. It needs to be mandated.
“That’s what I am saying. But here is the problem. Administrators serve largely at the whim of parents. It is very, very easy to get a principal or superintendent fired if parents don’t like them. I saw it happened in a previous district I worked at. They decided to oust her, and they got rid of her.
I am guessing a sizeable minority of parents said, ‘I am not masking my kids.’ Education is one of those things; if you keep a kid from accessing it, that’s a whole thing. We have kept dangerous kids in the schools that needed a lot more help than what the school was capable of giving because booting a kid out of school is really, really hard. The only time I have seen it happen quickly was when kids brought weapons. We have to treat not wearing a mask-like walking around with a loaded gun. Wear it or get out.”
In The New York Times – let me read this:
“In the heated debate over re-opening schools, one burning question has been whether and how efficiently children can spread the virus to others.
A large new study (nearly 65,000) from South Korea offers an answer: Children younger than 10 transmit to others much less often than adults do, but the risk is not zero. And those between the ages 10-19 can spread the virus at least as well as adults do. More an adult figure, adult systems, you are contracting and spreading as much as adults.”
“Exactly. Yes. What are we doing?”
So let me ask, have they even discussed testing? How are they going to test people?
“No. No discussion of COVID testing. No discussion of the buses. The list of things they haven’t talked about yet. People: August is short as hell as a teacher. It’s right there. We go back on August 26. And they still haven’t figured out shit. They already have to do this huge, HUGE configuration of the schedule, completely overhaul the high school schedule. I don’t understand why the high schoolers aren’t fully remote. They can all be home.” (Wish to be home, parents have a schedule that can accommodate their child, and learning isn’t compromised).
To me, it seems people who can be home, should stay home. And the students who have special needs, special learning needs, (and anything that negates the above) should be in school. Reduce, reduce, and reduce.
“It becomes a union issue. ’Why do those teachers have to go in?’ A lot of teachers have pre-existing conditions that make them vulnerable. So that’s a question. I saw a post from a nurse that said, ‘Teachers don’t worry. We got this.’ It was like wearing a set of clothes to school and change, and it was like a whole list of things that make sense in a healthcare setting.
Are you serious? Are you serious right now? This is what we should be comfortable doing without adequate facilities? That’s been the argument. If nurses have to go to work, why shouldn’t teachers? Grocery store workers have to back to work, why shouldn’t teachers?
First, the grocery store workers, the government should have solved that (testing, contract tracing, etc.). We have had 100 years since the last pandemic. Have a government food collection pick up site or something. We should not have had to have the grocery store workers go in and then pay them jack.
I am very sensitive to the fact that nurses are putting their lives on the line for this. Teachers are not trained or compensated for that, or are our facilities funded for that. They were not designed to be healthcare facilities.
So many things in the schools are just jerry-rigged. So many things are solved with duct tape because of the budget. I wasn’t kidding when I said I have colleagues that teach in janitor closets. They don’t teach next to a mop and broom, they cleaned out the janitor’s closet and put a blackboard in it. But, nothing that was designed for handwashing protocol.”
Just air quality . . . .
“Right. We don’t have A/C, and plenty of people don’t have windows. I have windows, but they are often broken.”
When you say broken, you can’t open them?
“Either like the latch is broken. You could probably be open, but then everyone gets upset and wants them closed during the weekend. Sometimes there are holes in the window, and the hole is taped over. The latches to open or close the windows are broken. There is duct tape. The blinds are broken. They are often falling apart. It is just how it is because I teach in a district where the property taxes aren’t enough to fund a better school. Many do not have an A/C system.”
And then what happens in November? Heat piled with people with a mask, and they are supposed to breathe? Are they talking about holding classes outside, bigger spaces, gymnasiums?
“They mentioned certain classes would be moved. So we are all supposed to keep ii in our heads that this class is going to be held in the library, but then we have to be socially distant? So – that’s all I have been told. Am I assuming the gym will be used to maybe? Except I don’t know what the gym teachers are supposed to do then. They are going to be in the janitor’s closet.
First, that means there is a lot of technology we can’t use.
Second, a lot of wasted time. Generally, this year is a crap-shoot anyway? I don’t know why anybody thinks learning is going to happen under these conditions. The bandwidth that it is going to take to remember all the rules and monitor the kids to follow all the rules means you won’t have much leftover for teaching or learning.
We should have been pouring resources into making distant learning better and reaching out to more kids more often. A big problem is the families are just disconnected from the school, but if we made a concerted effort from our homes, and don’t get me wrong, it’s a ton of work and headache. We are going to break this list down: you are going to call so-and-so, and you will check on so-and-so and attack all these other questions because the second you get in touch with parents, they tend to have ten million other questions that are pretty serious.
They are just so disconnected from school. Our whole school system is set up for white suburban kids. Kids who have stable residences; kids who speak English; kids’ parents use email, which families don’t. It is all set for them. And if we honestly wanted to do the work and connect to the families, we have to fund that. It is a massive amount of work outside the normal workweek.
This is systemic racism right here. The system is set up to help middle-class white people do well.”
And to mention – I spoke to a friend of mine who is a teacher in Michigan, in their school district, they only have one school nurse between four schools. The nurse has to rotate between schools. The admin staff is trained to administer some meds. The ones they are not allowed per law the parents have to be available to come to school and give their child their medication, which lowers the probability of employment opportunities and wages for that family.
“We have two nurses in our school, but that shit happens all over.”
Who is going to do the COVID testing in those schools?
“Yes, exactly. And how long will it take for the test results to come back?
I had a COVID test, and it took 15-minutes to come back. But, I have a friend in Wisconsin who is due to have her baby, and it took an hour and a half for the COVID test to come back. My friend in Maryland was exposed and had to go to a CVS, and I don’t think she has had her test back, and it has been almost a week and a half. I am presuming we are not doing testing with two school nurses.”
Are you able to send the kids home if they have a symptom?
“We can but trying to think about how this is going play out in the grade school level. They are already saying Kindergarten and first grade don’t have to wear masks.”
And some of the kids can actually wear them, but some can’t. Super hard to monitor.
“Right. But it only takes one kid.
Children are just like adults, and they all run the spectrum with skills, abilities, and attitudes, and there are absolutely Kindergartens that can wear a mask. They will do it because they like to make adults happy. But there are plenty that cannot. That is why they don’t require it. But what happens to those teachers? If I were a Kindergarten or first-grade teacher . . . . I don’t know. “
What do you think the principle is going to say?
“He will probably say, ‘I understand. I understand. I understand, but.’ My thing is the mask thing and the social distancing thing.’
I think you should stick to one or two points and go with that. Masks, social distancing, but wipes should be in there someplace.
“It’s not just the masks. Its kids refusing to socially distant. I don’t know how much you spend around teenagers as a group?
Teenagers like to be all over each other. You have friends who share food and friends that share earbuds, supplies, arms around each other. I have not a small number of students that kiss and hug each other at the beginning of every class, and they will fight you about it.
Often, when you are not in the class before you get there, they just kind of huddle in the hallway. What are we doing about that? If I am in the bathroom when the kids come, they will cluster around the door? Who is supposed to be monitoring the social distancing?
They are talking about masks breaks. How many whatever times of the day, they will either go outside or if the weather is terrible, we can go to a designated space, and everyone can take their masks off and stretch their legs. Who is monitoring that? If we are fully back in school that could be twenty-nine kids, I am trying to monitor that they keep their space entirely.
A lot of it is cellphones too. They want to look at their cellphones. Look at this video, look at this Tik-Tok. Am I supposed to go around and yell at them? It is enough to have a whole set of classroom rules, and now we have a whole other set of rules that need to be enforced, that the kids are going to buck. They already buck the rules we have.
Human beings are tactile. Kindergarteners are way worse than that. I don’t know what they think is going to happen. They are practically eating each other’s boogers. It’s just where they are at (that age).
I chose to work with kids. I enjoy working with kids. There is a lot of fun working with kids, but there is a lot of work too. There is a reason not everybody does it, because of all the other things that kids do that you do have to deal with daily. “
Absolutely. Something to think about as far as masks, masks are a life-saving device (that and you need to treat them like a treasure. How to keep them, preserve them all day?
“Right. And I just want to mention that when people say they don’t want their kids to fall behind, fall behind whom? There is a global pandemic. Who do you think they will be behind? Who do you think will be ahead of us, or taking advantage of us? It will be the same as it always is – the kids who work super fucking hard and are self-motivated will be ahead of everybody else. It is like that all the time.
You know, I don’t blame the kids, and I don’t blame the schools. They are in a terrible position. And I don’t blame kids for where they are at developmentally- you can’t expect kids to behave like adults, that’s why we send them to school.
It’s the government that has failed all of us. Now having a clear and consistent message and allowing politics to intrude on a public health crisis.
Kids are kids; kids are great. The school is working really hard to serve the kids. The government at the state and nation level are fucking us all.”
Upon ending and rereading our conversation, I want to note an ending point in The New York Times:
‘We can speculate all day about this, but we just don’t know,’ Dr. Osterholm said, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, ‘The bottom line message is: There’s going to be transmission.’
He and other experts said schools will need to prepare for infections to pop up. Apart from implementing physical distancing, hand hygiene and masks, schools should also decide when and how to test students and staff – including, for example, bus drivers – when and how long to require people to quarantine, and when to decide to close and reopen schools.’
To note, I think we may have forgotten in the “re-opening” conversation, teachers and students are already plagued with the possibility of daily violence walking into their classrooms and school buildings. The active-shooter drills are traumatizing enough besides the expectations and performative roles that must be met. And then this –
Teachers do don’t want to fall ill or die. They do not want their students to fall ill or die.
And in the on-going, decades-long argument that COVID has revealed candidly, without apology – schools lack the support, lack of funding, lack of adequate facilities, and lack of equality.
Give teachers, give the students, and give the schools all the equipment, the tools, the facilities, and the millions owed for generational under-funding to allow teachers to teach and learners to learn.
Fund all schools independent from property taxes.
Fund fully and fund equally.
Fund EQUALITY.
If you want education to perform at its necessary best, hold your school, your district, your city mayor, your representatives, state, and federal governments accountable.
Demand that your child matters; your child’s’ friends matter, your teachers’ matter, and your community.
Once transmission occurs inside the school, it walks its way into your home and into your arms.
Work cited:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-children-schools.html
Article to share:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-schools-reopening-outdoors.html