“They know something about their education is being politicized.”
Schools, teaching, school boards and what our kids truly need
When Christina Clark drives to work in the mornings, she sees students walking to school. It’s a normal enough sight: Kids with heavy backpacks, bundled up for the winter, walking in groups, teasing each other and chatting. But she also notices that there is no sidewalk here, so the kids coming from The Timbers Mobile Home Court and other nearby neighborhoods are walking on the shoulder of the road. They even cross the interstate on a bridge made for cars.
These are the things she thinks about as she starts her day as a teacher.
Christina has been teaching high school English for nine years. “I thought about being a journalist or a lawyer, but I wanted to talk to people for a living, not down to them despite their age. Knowing kids need that, it drove me to teach,” she says.
“I had an amazing English teacher at my high school. She was super inspiring,” Christina remembers. “The first day I walked in her room I saw it was painted with quotes from books and she had all this student work on the walls. There wasn’t an inch of her walls that wasn’t covered. Sitting in that room and the feeling it gave me showed me the impact a teacher can have.”
The consummate English teacher herself, Christina teaches Hurston, Miller, Angelou, and Poe to her students. She loves it when her students finally tell her that they enjoyed reading a novel or poem. But beyond the academics, she says that there are so many other things going on at her school and for her students.
“There is a lot of responsibility and trust involved in teaching.”
The impact of the pandemic
Schools across North Carolina, and the nation, have been hit hard by the pandemic. Teachers like Christina had to recreate their lessons and curriculum to work in a virtual setting with barely a day’s notice. Most students and teachers in North Carolina went home on a Friday not knowing yet that they wouldn’t be returning to in-person school on Monday… or for the rest of the year.
Schools, teachers, and parents scrambled. The pandemic quickly exposed the grave disparities in how North Carolinian families were living. In Orange County, the county where Christina teachers, 6.1% of households in the school district had no computers or devices for their children to learn on, and 21.1% of households had no high-speed internet. Currently 24% of households across North Carolina still don’t have access to a reliable high-speed internet connection that allows for video streaming.
North Carolina’s school systems had to quickly become innovative. Guilford County Schools deployed school buses equipped with WiFi to areas with low connectivity and Lincoln County Schools provided WiFi in school parking lots. But even buying and distributing digital devices and mobile hotspots to families wasn’t foolproof: Too many households in rural counties lay outside reliable cellular service lines. One of Christina’s students was given a hotspot by the school, but he let his 2nd grade brother use it to attend his classes, so her student could only use it for his school work late at night.
There were other pre-existing complications beyond connectivity. Even before the pandemic’s economic fallout, 15.5% of local Orange County children were food insecure, with 3,216 children receiving free/reduced school meals every day. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, an estimated one in every five children in North Carolina already struggled with hunger, and almost 60% of students enrolled in North Carolina’s public schools income-qualified for free or reduced-price school meals. Almost overnight, these dismal numbers skyrocketed as parents lost jobs or were furloughed due to the pandemic. The schools scrambled to figure out how to feed them. Some districts, such as Christina’s, sent school buses to deliver meals door-to-door, or set up curbside drive-thru lines where parents could pick up a week’s worth of food. “Our social service folks are amazing,” she says, underscoring how our schools not only educate our children, but also provide significant social supports.
But even with all these efforts, by the end of December 2020, after nearly a full year of scrambling to make do, teachers were worrying. Between 10,000 to 15,000 public school students in North Carolina were unaccounted for amid the pandemic. Had their families lost their jobs or housing and moved? Had the families decided to educate their children differently?
Teachers have always worried about their curriculum, materials, and their student’s grades, but now they were worried about their students and schools well-being in a very serious way. A deep and desperate inequality was being exposed and the systems in place were being significantly stretched thin.
Frustrations — and more — show up at local school board meetings
Of course, teachers and administrators weren’t alone in their concerns. Parents and students were feeling the stress as well. On top of the claustrophobia and fear of the pandemic, families struggled to work and oversee school work from home. Children struggled learning online. Everyone wanted the schools to reopen, to get that semblance of normalcy back to the days.
By the summer of 2021, some parents were taking those frustrations to their local school boards insisting that the schools reopen in the fall and the school board meetings in Christina’s county were no exception. Christina had long attended school board meetings to stay on top of the district’s decisions and to advocate for her students and fellow teachers and was at first surprised by the renewed interest in the often boring bureaucratic meetings.
“It started with the pandemic and people perceiving a lot of government overreach instead of perceiving the pandemic as a public health issue,” Christina says about the new wave of people showing up at her local school board meetings.
On one level, it made sense. “Schools are really public places with lots of people in one place moving around. They are filled with young people. It’s a vulnerable place with vulnerable people,” she explains. “We should absolutely be concerned about our schools in this pandemic and always — I am.”
She worries, however, that people attending the school boards are using the space to fight out national politics instead of trying to solve local school issues.
“School boards are very accessible and public facing, which is good,” Christina observes. “But I wonder if people are using them for their own purposes or for the greater community’s good?”
“If you think about the road to politics in NC, a lot of people start at a school board. That’s not an uncommon path historically — you get a taste of electoral politics and see if you like it and dip your toe in the water.”
“Right now, some people seem to be losing perspective in this and think they can get power here instead of remembering why our schools exist — — they exist for kids.”
The school board meetings in Orange County, like many places, have become contentious and heated. Parents have attended to voice concerns over mask mandates and some have become confrontational. “Some people showing up at the meetings were parents and students who were worried sports would be cancelled this year because of the pandemic. They were worried and had good faith arguments because they want good things,” says Christina. “But others seemed to be there for more sinister reasons.”
Proud Boys and other extremist groups have come in to disrupt the Orange County school board meetings and have held protests outside the school where they have held megaphones shouting slurs and disparaging children. The school board has since passed a resolution condemning hate groups on school property.
Christina recalls sitting in one school board meeting with a man behind her. He sat behind her with “a face covering that covered his whole face and hat drawn down over his eyes, sitting silently,” she explains. “It was spooky. It was reminiscent of the intimidation that has happened in this county throughout its history.”
Not only does this intimidation and polarization at school board meetings feel unwarranted, it misses the mark of what kids are dealing with in their daily lives.
“They know something about their education is being politicized.”
Christina says most of her students have busy lives and go off to work at Wal-Mart, McDonald’s or mechanic shops after school. “I want to create a place where they can stop and explore their own ideas,” she says about her classroom because she knows they can’t always get that openness and freedom elsewhere. Her students often talk to her about local and national issues; they are eager to debate and talk about ways they can make change. “But I don’t know what my students think when they see extremist groups speaking and showing up at our schools. They haven’t said. It’s hard to tell what they think about that but I know they see it. They know something about their education is being politicized.”
And it all makes Christina nervous herself. She has chosen a career as an educator because she loves her students and she loves the promise of public schools and education. But at this moment, she says: “We are very vulnerable. We don’t like confrontation. We are public servants. We don’t like violence and they are tapping into that to make us uncomfortable. It’s easy to bully public servants. We aren’t packing at these meetings. We came here to educate children.”
Schools are facing real issues that we can and should address.
School boards are important and can be powerful. They can make a huge difference in schools and in students’ lives. And, as Christina points out, there are a LOT of issues that need to be addressed. “People, parents, teachers are not wrong to turn to the school board,” she says. “But we need to focus on the immediate needs of our students and schools.”
There are many things that teachers, administrators, parents, and students all agree on, including that things have been very, very hard. Recent polling in North Carolina indicates that 74% of people believe that the pandemic has had a negative effect on school children and their learning, and a similar amount of people believe that pandemic has had a negative impact on children’s mental health.
Recently, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association declared that the pandemic-related decline in child and adolescent mental health has become a national emergency. Christina says she sees this in her school. “Kids are dealing with so much. Kids are in abusive relationships they can’t get out of — sometimes it’s with a parent or a step parent or a romantic relationship. Kids are dealing with grief and loss because of the pandemic. Kids are dealing with issues like homelessness and not knowing where they are going after school. As the adults, we need to start to address these things.”
She also says parents also aren’t wrong to worry about student learning. “The truth is, our students are experiencing a lot of learning loss and teachers are trying to make up for it now. Teachers need support in doing this because there is only so far you can push teachers and public school staff without paying us well or addressing what we as educators are going through.”
These are issues can be addressed on the school board level. The American Rescue Plan is bringing $3.6 billion into North Carolina to help our counties and schools — and local school boards will be helping to determine how this money should be used in our schools.
“What should be discussed? We need to discuss things like: Are we giving too much money to testing? Are our students happy and healthy? Why are we short staffed and why are class sizes so big?”
North Carolina’s schools have been defunded for decades; teachers trying to make a career in teaching haven’t gotten raises, school facilities haven’t been maintained, buildings are aging, and all of this, combined with the hardships of the pandemic, is all coming to a head right now. But the good news for our schools, our teachers, our parents, and, most importantly, our children is that for the first time in most of our lives there is funding to fix our schools.
Christina is focused on finding these solutions and solving these problems. She will continue to show up at her school board meetings for this reason. “What should be discussed? We need to discuss things like: Are we giving too much money to testing? Are our students happy and healthy? Why are we short staffed and why are class sizes so big? Recently someone came to talk about the health of our school meals. Someone raised a concern about the buses getting to school on time.”
“I still want to talk about those sidewalks,” she adds.
