"I'm a Chicago principal. Our schools are not OK. We need help and we need understanding."

[kpete]

...........

We knew this year would be hard. We did not know it would be like this: a kindergartener throwing chairs, a second-grader tearing up a classroom, a middle-schooler swearing in your face and then falling to the ground in tears. Every teacher I know feels like they are failing.

Children suffered in this pandemic. They experienced loss. They lost experiences. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared a mental health crisis in youth. In fifth grade, a day’s objective is: “I can identify signs of frustration in my body. I can use calming strategies to help me feel calm.”

Schools are supposed to have more, but we have less. Our district cannot find enough bus drivers. Our cafeteria does not have enough food. At breakfast I used the intercom to tell 670 children we had no milk. We are short-staffed every day.

We need more. The front line is not holding. Teachers. Substitute teachers. Fund them, find them, get them here. This summer, the federal government sent $1.9 trillion in emergency education funding. Use that money to put people in schools now. You cannot build an addition on a house that is on fire.

........

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/1/24/22899360/chicago-principal-our-schools-are-not-ok-mental-health-pandemic-seth-lavin-op-ed

This is what the right does. It declares that something is bad or wrong and it should stop, but it won't do the actual shit to help people. "We're anti-abortion, but fuck you getting prenatal care, child care, and funding to help raise the baby we're forcing you to have."

Link to tweet

?s=20

[GPV]

1. Yes, the students I see aren't where they ought to be by most

metrics.

[crickets]

2. Teachers do not get enough credit for all they do.

They needed more support, better pay, and more resources in general before the pandemic. I cannot imagine what they are going through now. I know teachers are among the many limping through these last couple of years and we can't just wave a wand to solve all of the problems, but not enough has been done to help them and their students.

[dutch777]

3. I applaud the teachers for trying and hope they understand there is only so much they can do.

This is bigger than just the teachers and the schools. I do wonder how societally we make up for the kids all they have missed. My niece and her husband are inner city high school teachers and they are trying hard, answering kids texts in the evenings and on the weekends to help with assignments, doing all their grading and paper reading also after hours, but it's not enough. The kids have lost focus, and that was a challenge before all of Covid, but now it's worse and many kids have little support at home with parents also stressed and stretched in more ways than before.

I keep asking, when are we going to admit we have lost years of kids' educational lives? Not to mention social and other aspects. I think it all needs a do over, go back two or three years and start again. The educators in the family are horrified when I say this although fully admitting that basically the schools are just passing kids from grade to grade because there is no mechanism when 80% of a high school class is, even by the already low bar of inner city public education, de facto failing. So, on they go. My niece mentioned that they keep extending deadlines over and over hoping more kids will do the work, turn in their papers and so on. She wondered out loud how these kids will make it in the real world when they have jobs and the boss expects a deadline actually be met. I said, as someone that hired and fired as a boss, do you really think they will ever be able to get hired? She admitted that was a good point, sad, but maybe not too inaccurate. And the colleges have already been facing declining enrollment, I think a million less kids a year since start of COVID alone but that was already a trend. And at the point that maybe 50% or more of their normal potential applicants are going to be taking two or three more years before they show up, many colleges would fail financially.

The truth we don't seem to be thinking about is while maybe we go restaurants and the gym with less hesitancy if we ever run out of the next variant, things won't just be normal. There will be many more serious long term affects we don't seem to be preparing for.