We Can’t Let Parents and Teachers Be Pitted Against Each Other In Debate Over School Reopenings
We have been presented with unacceptable choices by a society that doesn’t value children or working families
Plans for “reopening the economy” are plowing ahead even as new cases of the coronavirus — and our national death toll — continue their steady climb upwards. More bars, restaurants, bookstores, hair salons and all kinds of undeniably non-essential businesses are opening each day. But the discussion of if and how to open in-person schools this fall remains one of the most fraught.
Working — and non-working — parents who have been home alone with their children for months, or struggled to patch together informal childcare arrangements, are becoming increasingly desperate. As the food writer Deb Perelman pointed out in a NY Times piece, this isn’t just about the emotional challenges of being home with the kids — real though those are. Instead, as she notes: “We are not burned out because life is hard this year. We are burned out because we are being rolled over by the wheels of an economy that has bafflingly declared working parents inessential.”
The economic toll of the pandemic is immense and it has fallen most heavily on women and Black and Latinx people…
