In the past few years, as one tragedy after another has befallen schools by nature or at the hands of the malevolent, our school personnel have time and again risen to the occasion.
In the recent wintry blast that shut down transportation across large sections of the South, Atlanta was hit hard.
School officials made the unwise decision to keep schools open despite the gathering storm, and it was left to staff to get them home or protect them when they couldn’t get them home.
This article portrays the selflessness of bus drivers, teachers, cafeteria workers, all of whom did whatever they could to protect the children stranded with them by the storm.
In Alabama, more than 10,000 students spent the night in their school, unable to get home because of the weather.
When thousands of students were stranded in their schools, their teachers took care of them.
A columnist called the teachers of Birmingham “the heroes of #snowmageddon.”
He wrote:
Loving, kind, and dedicated people rose to the challenge.
They didn’t need merit pay or bonuses.
There is no measure for their dedication.
It won’t show up on a test.
They were just doing their job: caring for children.
They truly put students first.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
the world in one old-school front page,
today’s Atlanta Consitution:
http://on.fb.me/1cJIvM4
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TAGO! on that front page, thanks for sharing!
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yeah, the AJC story about the cafeteria guy walking back to school to cook all night really got me. Measure that, eh!? And the bus driver who at daybreak was still dropping off his kids in a police cruiser to safely get them home. One of my favorite lines is “If it’s all about the kids, shouldn’t we be doing all we can as a society to be sure there are great adults, and enough of them, at each school every day . . ?” Well, we are heading in the wrong direction . . . on ice!
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Bertis – well, yeah, but did their test scores improve?
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chuckle, chuckle
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Dienne: you cut to the heart of the matter.
And it’s not just how do you quantify the courage, compassion, self-sacrifice, empathy of school staff—
Imagine the incredibly important life lesson those young people learned. Their teachers and other school staff stayed with them, refusing to abandon OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN even as they worried about their own family members.
Mother Teresa was talking about just such people when she said—
“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
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Dienne– I sure hope so, otherwise . . . that’s the way of the world these days. Surely not for much longer. People are waking up–
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“. . . De-facto parents.”
And perhaps what most folks don’t recognize is “in loco parentis”. Per wiki:
“The term in loco parentis, Latin for “in the place of a parent””[1] refers to the legal responsibility of a person or organization to take on some of the functions and responsibilities of a parent. Originally derived from English common law, it is applied in two separate areas of the law.
First, it allows institutions such as colleges and schools to act in the best interests of the students as they see fit, although not allowing what would be considered violations of the students’ civil liberties”
In loco parentis is a legal mandate for all educators to do what the great folks in Atlanta, and I’m sure elsewhere in this storm, did and would do NATURALLY because the vast majority of educators are empathetic humans for whom not helping someone in trouble would be anathema. As Diane said:
“In their eyes, they were just doing their job.
Loving, kind, and dedicated people rose to the challenge.
They didn’t need merit pay or bonuses.
There is no measure for their dedication.
It won’t show up on a test.
They were just doing their job: caring for children.
They truly put students first.”
Chew on that edudeformers-no need to name names we know who they are, ALEC, and all the others who bad mouth our public servants-the teachers and staff of our community public schools.
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Edudeformer (MS?) response:
“The only reason those union thug teachers did what they did was because of ‘in loco parentis’ not from the ‘kiiiiindness’ of their bleeding hearts. I bet those thugs are demanding overtime pay as I write this.”
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Please tell me that I’m missing something, here. Teachers spend “countless” hours beyond the clock, from the time they are given placement in a classroom, and countless “dollars,” out of their own pockets for the benefit of their students. No one cares, notices, offers a payback… No teacher asks for remuneration. Every teacher knows that’ll never happen. So why do it? Because it is the nature of the job to strive for “excellence.” There was, at one time, and probably still is, a joy in the classroom that no money can buy. But to call a teacher (because of union affiliation) a thug. I think “you” had better go back to school. If you’re lucky, you might end up with one of those “thugs” who teaches you regardless of, and because of, your ignorance.
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Mary,
Okay, you’re missing something.
Please reread the post with your sarcasmometer turned on this time, okay.
Duane
By the welcome to the “site to discuss better education for all”, don’t remember seeing too many posts from you. Please post more.
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I can’t get over how insane that response is. Do what then, exactly? Leave the kids alone, they’ll survive on their own? Wait for non-union people to take over – wherever they are?
I hope they do demand overtime pay, if their employment contract doesn’t have it. The handling of that emergency was total crap. I also hope that those who are union demonstrate in solidarity with those who aren’t in demanding overtime pay, whatever job with the state they may be.
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Okay, Duane,
Mea culpa! I failed to note that the post above was yours as well. As a former chapter leader, and I can tell you that most people have ignorant understanding of all “that” position embodies, but… I can tell you that last year I attempted to delineate and expose the voluminous hours teachers were spending beyond the work day attempting to get the job done. I pointed out that many teachers went home to other responsibilities… You see where I am going with this? At a policy consultation meeting, I suggested that we voluntarily stay back at school and clock those extra hours in so we could demonstrate our honesty and the system’s unfairness. Need I say, “that went over like a ton of bricks.” Last year was my “last” year. The administration did everything in their power to break me, to discredit me, largely because I was strong, smart, liked by all the staff. Perhaps they managed. I like to think I made the final decision. I was sick of not going home to “be” with my grown family, tired of missing out on outings with our friends, tired, tired, tired. With a mere 4 years to go, I retired at only half pension. It was the best decision of my life other than to marry my wonderful husband. Now I am happy, peaceful, and have all the time in the world to do the research I never had time to do. I’ve taken on the state of NY before, in grassroots work, and I’m ready to show the next generation how it’s done. I FEEL GOOD! 🙂
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There are one million ways teachers show care about their students each and every day. It is part of being human THAT DATA CANNOT EVER MEASURE! And it sets an important example of ways that we should behave with one another THAT DATA CANNOT EVER DO! There are way too many examples to give but I will add some that are either mine as well as other teachers or examples I have witnessed:
Teachers who keep nutritious snacks on hand for those children who do not get enough to eat and come to school hungry. And they think of creative ways not to single out the student when providing the extra food.
On a trip that required children to pack a lunch or to bring money to buy a lunch… one child has neither money nor food, felt ashamed and tried to hide this so a teacher buys two slices of pizza and complains that there is too much food.. and asks the student in question to please have some…
A teacher who buys winter hats every year for each of her students and plays a fun learning game in the “hat giving out process” so that each child will have a hat for winter.
Just a few examples… OF MANY!
DATA or HUMANITY? I would choose HUMANITY any day!
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Tears…so true artseagal!
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Measure that!
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I wonder what rubric was used to evaluate the teachers who stayed with the kids in these snowed in schools? “Mr. Smith, we are rating you developing due to the fact that you fell asleep at midnight in the school gym while some of your 6th grade students were seen texting their parents”. Tenure-DENIED
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Gallows humor along those lines abiut how VAMmie it all was. Danielson points galore. It might just get us up to emerging once our test scores are calculated in.
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While this was happening, every teacher all over the country was seeing this vividly in their own mind’s eye, imagining it happening at their school and knowing that they would, and their coworkers would, do the same thing.
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Absolutely- caught myself daydreaming about which games I’d be playing with which students to keep their minds off of everything.
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From the same website, here’s an article about how Georgia has decided to continue to NOT pay its national board certified teachers their promised differential:
http://www.myajc.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/top-flight-teachers-feel-betrayed-by-cuts/nc7cd/
“The state broke faith with thousands of its best teachers in 2009 and 2010, cutting their pay by 10 percent and ensuring that many of Georgia’s most accomplished educators were also the hardest-hit by the Great Recession.
Now, even as the state plans to spend a half-billion dollars more on education in 2014, this special cadre of teachers will still finish out of the money…Some lawmakers had promised the extra pay would come back when times were better. But now they say times aren’t yet good enough.”
At least it seems that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution hasn’t been infiltrated by edurheeformists’ journalism!
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When I was recently visiting Birmingham, I saw something I had never seen before: a day care center for mildly ill children called “Hugs and Kisses”. To me that spoke volumes about the community in that city.
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Who was the brainiac responsible for not closing the schools in the first place so that the children could be home — where they belonged — BEFORE the storm hit? Or… am I being too critical?
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No Union down in Atlanta area, right to work state. Yeah, greedy only out for themselves teachers. Teachers get long vacations, short work days and extravagant benefits and a generous professional evaluation system that is state of the art and data driven. Why they even got to stay in a warm building durjng a bad storm and a day off when the governor finally declared a state of emergency. It is too bad that whole snow day was spent still at school, still with their student, still in their same clothes, still not sure when they would get home to their own unattended children. Heck, state troopers were with them so how bad was it really? Calling frantic parents into the early hours, finding sanitary supplies for bashful teenagers, holding out hope that the nurse has enough insulin on hand and that the adhd meds and mood stabilizing meds dont wear off in a giant collective group of rightfully cranky and tired teenagers. Yeah, teachers have such glorious jobs why would they even want a union.
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Where’s Arne? Oh PONTIFICATING and while destroying our public schools. He is the WORST EVER. Give him the DUMBO Prize.
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Nice to see these folks recognized for their fine work.
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of course they did and I seriously doubt if they recieved extra pay for taking care of them all night. The word bonus is not in teacher’s vocabulary., the words love, caring , unselfish, nurture,and kindness are..
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Ah, but some teachers do know what bonus means. The teachers at NCS* in Delaware are very familiar with the concept, and how it can be used to woo and reward moles, pit teacher against teacher, and punish.
*The “C” stands for Charter.
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It was pretty rough down here.
My school had a bit of luck in that we were able to get our students on buses pretty promptly. No one had to spend the night, but many teachers were so late leaving that they were unable to get home themselves.
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It’s sad that it takes emergencies like the snow in the south, or shootings like Newtown for the public to recognize the dedication of teachers.
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