Teachers Are Essential Workers—But We Shouldn’t Open Schools
I've been a teacher for five years, and on the night of March 13, 2020, I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Murmurings about COVID-19 had grown into loud warnings on the news. Students had asked if school might close. “No, of course not,” I replied, reassuring them and myself. “It won’t get that serious.” But that unbelievable possibility soon became our reality. My principal sent a late-night email confirming what I had dreaded: In-person classes would be canceled.
The following morning I tried to reassure my ninth graders: This was temporary. At the end of the school day, one student ran up to me and hastily gave me a hug before I could stop them. “I’ll miss you, Ms. Ferreira,” they said. I smiled as I told them, “Oh, I’ll see you after spring break.”
But once my students were gone, I sat alone at my desk and cried. I was moving back to the East Coast when school ended, so to lose even a few weeks of classes was to lose precious time. I did not know then that I had just taught my final classes in the classroom I had taught in for the past four years.
Months later, when I went back to collect my things, I saw the coffee mug I had left on my desk, the March date on the whiteboard, the completed student projects I hadn't returned. In that empty classroom, my heart filled with loss.
Teachers are essential workers, and the job involves making sacrifices—working long hours, dealing with classroom supply shortages, and trying to divide our time and energy between each of our students. The pivot to online teaching calls for a tremendous amount of additional and often unpaid work, and we have to sacrifice time with our students for the sake of the greater good. But that’s our responsibility. Potentially dying isn’t.
During discussions at the new high school where I will be teaching this fall, my principal asked each of my colleagues and me to share our hopes for the fall. “What I want is to be back in the classroom with students," I said. "But what we need as a community is to stay home. I do not want this school to become a petri dish that infects the rest of the city.” We talked about the educational inequities of distance learning; we talked about missing our students and our day-to-day lives at school. We talked about these losses, and also we talked about our responsibilities.
Some people argue that teachers are not doing our jobs. In an article for the Atlantic, nurse Kristen McConnell makes a number of claims about teachers’ responsibilities to their students. She shares that her husband, a teacher, “adamantly” disagrees with the idea of a national teacher strike to protest unsafe classroom conditions. She frames his decision to teach in school regardless of the risk as “his duty to serve his country in the classroom.” She implies that teachers are soldiers, who've signed up to fight in a war. She implies we are martyrs. But if we refer to workers as “soldiers” and our jobs as “battles,” then our deaths could seem like inevitable risks of the job (when, to be clear, they are not). And since the battle we're waging here is against COVID-19, our duty is to help eliminate it, not help it spread.
We are not babysitters. We are not foot soldiers. We are not, no matter how many inspirational teacher movies you’ve watched, saviors. We are human beings, and we have every right to fight for our lives and for the well-being of our communities, which calls to reopen schools so blatantly ignore.
In an ideal world, we would be able to safely reopen our schools this fall—all teachers know the benefits of in-person learning, not to mention the other school programs our students and their families rely on. But if they can't open safely, I don't believe they shouldn't open at all. The U.S. has lost more than 160,000 people to this pandemic already. There’s no vaccine to prevent transmission. How could reopening schools be safe?
I'm not shocked that people who have never taught in a K–12 classroom are telling teachers how to do our jobs. To be a teacher in the United States is to constantly be subjected to the expert opinions of those who have never been teachers. It also doesn’t shock me that many Americans consider dying for their jobs a civic duty. A capitalist society easily persuades a person who refuses to be critical of it to believe that their life is only as valuable as the goods and services they provide.
What does shock me is that even people with scientific training, who understand how diseases spread, would advocate for policies that would cause a huge and preventable spread of COVID-19. And the communities hardest hit will likely be those whose schools are underfunded because, while viruses do not discriminate, the distribution of resources in the U.S. does. This means that populations in school districts with fewer resources will be more vulnerable to coronavirus. Across the U.S., underfunded schools largely serve Black and Brown populations, largely due to the infrastructure through which we fund our public schools, via property taxes. Thus these hasty school reopenings could cause Black and Brown people to die at disproportionately higher rates than their white counterparts.
As teachers we have a responsibility to care for our students’ well-being. I am fulfilling mine by listening to scientific data and real-world evidence, which indicate that reopening schools at this time will be one of the most effective ways to create a rapid rise in COVID-19, nowhere near abated as of now.
I want to keep my students and their families safe. I can do so by teaching remotely and thus teaching them in the most responsible way I currently can. To my students who are reading this, you are, as always, my most important audience. I, like so many other teachers, will never stop fighting for a more compassionate and equitable world for you to live in.
Carla Sofia Ferreira is a teacher and writer in Newark, New Jersey.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
