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This column comes right off a week where Miami Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS) online delivery was deemed a monumental failure. Even if there weren’t a 16-year-old hacker or masters of the dark web, no one would be happy because everyone just wants bodies in seats.
It was made clear from the beginning that the decision to return to the classroom would be based upon facts from Bill Nye the Science Guy types and NOT by political kiss ass types.
MDCPS did EVERYTHING they could to deliver an outstanding experience given the circumstances, so kudos for the Herculean well thought-out effort.
WE BADLY WANT IT
Pushing students back into school buildings right now simply telegraphs an even larger desire in this society to return to business as usual. We want our schools to open because we want a sense of normalcy in a time of the deepest uncertainty. We want to pretend that schools (like bars) will deliver us from the stresses created by a massive public health crisis.
We want to believe that if we simply put our children back in their classrooms, the economy will recover and life as we used to know it will resume. In reality, the corona virus is — or at least should be — teaching us that there can be no going back to that past.
So let’s just call the situation what it is: a misguided attempt to prop up an economy failing at near Great Depression levels because federal, state, and local governments have been remarkably unwilling to make public policy grounded in evidence-based science.
“We are living in a nation struggling to come to terms with the deadly repercussions of a social safety net gutted even before the virus reached our shores. And of course decisions are guided by the most self-interested kind of politics rather than the public good.” – said South Florida based Mental Health Counselor Lori Moldovan RMHCI.
IT AIN’T HAPPENING ON HIS WATCH
Elementary students know that without a concerted effort, the spread of the virus will continue to soar past six million cases and 188,000 deaths (as of this writing 9/6). Middle school students know that without masking mandates, widespread testing, effective contact tracing, enough funding to change the physical layout of classrooms and school buildings, a radical reduction in class sizes, and proper personal protective equipment for all school employees, returning to school becomes folly on a grand scale. Of course, an effort like that would require a kind of social cohesion, innovation, and focused allocation of resources that, by definition, is nonexistent in the current administration.
IF YOU WANT REALITY, JUST ASK A TEACHER
The experience of virtual schooling in the spring had resulted in many families suffering due to a lack of access to the social, emotional, and educational resources of school. No one understands that reality better than the teachers who have dedicated our waking hours to supporting those students and the parents who have watched them suffer.
Having never prioritized the needs of those very students, their families, and the communities they live in, those politicians have the audacity to demand that schools open now.
WHERE IS ATLAS WHEN YOU NEED HIM
Schools are unable to shoulder the burden of this crisis. Politicizing the return to school and pitting parents against teachers — as if many teachers weren’t themselves parents — is a devious way of once again scapegoating those very schools for perennial failures of funding, leadership, and policy. It’s surreal to think that, unlike in many of the wealthiest nations on this planet, public schools in the U.S. don’t have the necessary institutional support, infrastructure, or resources to envision and carry out a safe and effective return to school.
The only suckers and losers are those who believed him when he said – “My view is the schools should open. This thing is going away. It will go away like things go away and my view is that schools should be open.”
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder of The Student Success Project and Think Factory Consulting. He can be reached at 305-788-4105 or email at ritchie@thinkfactory.com and on Facebook and You Tube as The Student Success Project. NOTE: Guest contributor Lori Moldovan, Registered Mental Health Counselor Intern, was unavailable for this column due to her extremely heavy caseload related to the pandemic.
