Educators Can’t Teach in Person Until Politicians Do Their Job
If politicians won’t keep our communities safe, educators will.
In mid-March New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio closed schools when he was forced to do so by a mass refusal of parents to send their kids to school and an educator sick-out. Instead of putting school employee’s work online immediately, he ordered them to continue to come in for remote instruction training the following week. Some educators refused to go, others went in with reservations. Many people continued to get sick.
The NYCDOE suppressed evidence of the threat of COVID-19 in our schools and still has not released any information about the number of DOE employees impacted by these decisions. According to the UFT at least 73 school workers died. But this number is incomplete. It does not include those not represented by the UFT such as administrators, cafeteria workers, custodial staff, security guards, school bus drivers, many of whom are Black, Brown, underpaid and underappreciated.
Here we are more than 4 months into the pandemic, and more than 23,276 New Yorkers have died from COVID-19. We now know that up to 50–80% of those deaths could have been avoided had the mayor and New York Governor Cuomo put people over profits and shut down the city one or two weeks earlier. We still have seen no public officials take responsibility for this criminal negligence yet they expect us to trust them with our lives in September. De Blasio claims to care about a safe reopening of schools but this record and his cuts to the city’s education budget suggest otherwise.
As an early childhood educator, a parent, and a caregiver I know the reasons schools need to reopen. Many children and families are suffering and struggling, and people need their children to be taken care of and educated while they go to work.
We face a dilemma created by the politicians who are mismanaging this crisis: Reopening schools while the US continues to lead the world in COVID deaths is unsafe. Trump bullied the CDC to change their reopening guidelines to suit his economic goals, calling them “very tough” and “expensive.” Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos even threatened to withhold federal funding to schools that do not fully reopen for in-person instruction despite the fact that the CDC recognizes this as the highest risk scenario.
Reopening schools in this context will threaten to set off new chains of transmission and a second spike. Avoiding another spike in NYC is an issue of racial and economic justice. Black and Latino people in the United States are three times as likely to contract COVID-19 and twice as likely to die from it. White people make up about 24% of those who died in NYC even though they are about 45 percent of the population of NYC. Much of these disparities are linked to the fact that non-white workers are more likely to work in front line jobs and have less access to quality health care.
Other countries have been able to reopen their economies more successfully by taking a suppression approach to the virus. The United States has failed to do so, but it doesn’t have to be this way. We can’t go back to the death and destruction of this spring. We have to defend and improve on the progress in the state and insist that at least 14 days pass without new COVID-19 cases before school buildings can reopen. We need an investigation into how the DOE responded to the outbreak in the spring, with the purpose of identifying what went wrong and avoiding repeating the same mistakes.
The US needs a nationally and internationally coordinated public health effort that follows the lead of largely Asian countries who have more effectively defeated COVID-19, with robust testing, containment, and tracing. We have to make it possible for people to stay home by providing a guaranteed income regardless of immigration status, paying family caretakers, and providing safe respite care.
Front-line workers need a living wage and safe working conditions as well as a break when necessary. We need a freeze on rent and mortgage payments, and we must pour funds into health care, education, and services that people need to survive the pandemic. In the richest country in the world, we can afford this. We just need to tax the rich and defund the police and the Pentagon. Thanks to the movement for Black Lives, which has raised our expectations and horizons, we are in a position to have this conversation today.
The educator strike wave that crested two years ago and spread from West Virginia to Arizona, to Chicago and LA showed how educators can dream big, fight for and win economic, social, and political change. Educators went on strike, declaring that our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions. Today we have to admit that school buildings are unique sites of transmission and that in a pandemic, our health as educators is directly tied to the wellbeing of our students, their families, and the broader community. An injury to one is an injury to all.
Educators can’t teach in person until politicians do their job. Too many lives are at risk to keep getting it so wrong. If the politicians don’t do it, we will. And we’ll do whatever it takes for our kids.
