Randi Weingarten of the AFT and Lily Eskelsen Garcia of the NEA warned that teachers would take action if schools were opened before it was safe to do so.
The nation’s two biggest teachers unions say they would consider strikes or major protests if schools reopen without the proper safety measures in place or against the advice of medical experts — raising the possibility of yet more school disruptions.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, previewing a reopening plan first with POLITICO, said funding is needed for a host of public health measures for schools, including personal protective equipment. Collective bargaining, strong enforcement of safety standards and protections from retaliation will be important for teachers and staff so they feel safe to speak up as schools try new approaches, she said.
If schools are reopened without proper safety measures, “you scream bloody murder,” Weingarten said. “And you do everything you can to … use your public megaphones.”
Teachers are united after more than two years of strikes for more state funding and they have “tremendous power” as advocates for children’s safety, said Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association. She didn’t rule out strikes if state leaders move prematurely on a reopening of schools, and she said she believes parents would protest too.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The big issue is legal liability, and so far this matter is only being framed to protect big businesses, not workers, and least of all workers organized in unions.
See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/business/businesses-coronavirus-liability.html
I hope that both unions work to ensure that teachers, staff, students, and visitors are not required to be in schools without
–proper screening of all as they enter public transportation to school and again upon entering school
–proper personal protection equipment
–classrooms with clean and functioning heating and air conditioning systems
–clean and functioning restrooms and food service areas.
–legal liability coverage for any claims connected to Covid-19.
and so on.
🙂
If you can test all kids, teachers, administrators, and staff and ensure that they are not asymptomatic carriers, then have at it. Otherwise, open schools and you are ensuring that some number of these folks will die. There is no getting around this fact.
Teachers should remain out unless class sizes get dramatically reduced. This is a safety issue as well as an education issue. They must be 6 feet apart!
Exactly. I think that having spacing between us is one of the biggest factors. Plus, in our school, up to five different students per day might use the same Chromebook. These are germ-infested, and cleaning these all day would be a lot of work and a lot of chemicals. We might have to have 15 students in one classroom all day in the high school setting and not switch classrooms. I’m not sure how to switch subjects effectively.
You couldn’t in my local high school or in any one in the surrounding area. No one has the same schedule of courses. The only way to do it would be to require everyone to take the same courses as their entire class cohort and either have electives or more specialized classes designated for another block of time and/or held online. Meeting IEPs would be extremely difficult, but no one would be getting exactly what they wanted.
Politicians sure are ignorant. They simply cannot open schools until it’s safe. Try to picture seventh grade in the city.
There is no way to put numbers of young people together and expect them to all stay apart, keep their hands and faces clean, cover their mouths when they sneeze, not dip their fingers into shared bags of Hot Cheetos they bought on their way to school, keep from holding hands and smooching, keep from fighting, keep from throwing food and spit balls and paper airplanes at each other, not share pencils or paper or glue or computers or cell phones or combs or picks or brushes or nail polish or makeup or chairs or desks or school buses or trains or soda bottles or gum…
We’re not Eva Moskowitz. We don’t suspend and expel students for sharing Hot Cheetos. Politicians need to stop dancing around immutable facts. Schools cannot open until confirmed cases of the virus are rare enough for it to be safe for people to be in close contact.
Exactly
Kids. Paw. Everything.
If politicians were not ignorant and/or stupid, they would not be politicians
four exact words 🙂 Politicians sure are ignorant
Good Lord, I wish we had FDR right now. How would that be! Imagine: This is not the end of the shutdown. It is not even the beginning of the end of the shutdown. It is perhaps, however, the end of the beginning of the shutdown.
The only thing we have to fear is politicians themselves.
We need Eleanor, too.
I so heart this comment!
LeftCoastTeacher has it exactly right! It is the same here in the South for high school. These kids will not keep a social distance. They will continue to cluster by the door before the bell rings despite being told to stay seated. Do you think they will walk down the hall 6 feet apart? There is not even 3 feet between the 35 desks in my classroom! Will students maintain a 6 foot distance away from my desk? I doubt it. Don’t even get me started on the number of times kids go in and out of my classroom during the course of one period! Have I mentioned that no one, ever, “deep cleans” my room. I am lucky to have the trash removed and the floor (maybe) swept. Where are the disinfecting wipes and hand sanitizer that I need for close to 200 students? Eva Moskowitz may be able to have some discipline. We aren’t allowed to have discipline in my urban school district.
I agree with you all! No one deep cleans my room. I have to hire someone to sweep and mop. And by the way, the last time an epidemic swept through my school, I got it (whooping cough). (Even though I had received all required vaccinations.)
And also, our bathroom faucets don’t run full streams of water–just these little blasts of sprinkles for short, timed intervals. Try to wash germs off with that.
I could go on and on with school bathroom stories that would turn your stomach . . .
Yeah, those spritzes of water lead me to keep a container of hand sanitizer on a shelf by the door. Kids used to dash in from the hall and grab a dab. I kept my own cleaning supplies in a cabinet. My custodian was responsible for an ungodly number of rooms. He did more for me because I made an effort to keep it clean for him.
Every once in awhile I gave the kids fruit chews as a treat. One day I caught one of them just tossing the wrappers on the floor. When I called him on it, he said it was the custodian’s job to clean it up. After the steam from my ears dissipated and a brief lecture (Do you just throw your garbage on the floor at home?), I allowed as how it wasn’t my job to provide them snacks either. That was the end of littering.
Was that little boy named Stephen Miller?
It was widely reported that as a student in a ritzy public school in California, he would litter the floor, and when called on for it, he would say, that’s the custodian’s job, to clean up after me.
Apparently, that sentiment is not reserved for the entitled. This was from a boy who lives in a community where being a custodian is not at all unusual. He got the message that its nobody’s job to clean up his own messes but himself. It goes along with a little discussion we had about respect. The kids felt that someone had to earn their respect. I suggested the opposite. They deserved my respect until they lost it, but they could always earn it back.
The “Wall Street Journal” of all places hit the nail on the head yesterday, in a roundabout way.
The article, “Miscalculation at Every Level Left U.S. Unequipped to Fight Coronavirus” focuses on dire shortages in the medical supply chain. But read the following paragraph from the piece, and substitute the word “SCHOOL” in there instead of all the medical stuff and, well, you’ll get the point. In fact, I’ll do it for you. (With apologies to the WSJ reporters)
“The problem is a SCHOOL system that we have built to be economically efficient…in exchange for resiliency,” said Tara O’Toole, a Department of Homeland Security undersecretary of science and technology in the Obama years. “We have allowed ourselves to completely lose control over SCHOOLS.”
[For the original version, see https://www.wsj.com/articles/miscalculation-at-every-level-left-u-s-unequipped-to-fight-coronavirus-11588170921 ]
You can substitute the word “school” or “town” or sometimes even “family” in that WSJ paragraph and it makes complete sense -viewed from where we were back in January 2020, the turn of a new and hopeful decade.
We were totally, extremely OVEREXTENDED as a society. And, turns out it wasn’t all that efficient, too.
Schools, for example, kept stretching and stretching and stretching…How many new programs could we add in, how many fads? New, new, NEW!!
Never mind that the basic functions of a school were not being taken care of.
One definition of resiliency in Merriam-Webster is, “… an ability to recover from or adjust easily to adversity or change.” What’s your Plan B? Do you have enough personnel to fill in when there’s an emergency? What will everyone do when things really go sideways?
For so many years, schools have been evaluated on how much NEW STUFF they can pile on and cram into the same school day. Meanwhile, faculty, staff, administrators and, worst of all, our kids are so often stretched to their breaking points. It’s been a huge LIE.
I call it the “McDonald’s Happy Meal Plan” of running a school.
I remember when I’d take my own children to McDonald’s and they’d get their burger or chicken nuggets and fries or whatever in that colorful, cardboard box. But what was the PRIZE, the TREAT, the FUN THING in there, too? Forget about the sustenance, the actual food.
The same thing happens in schools. Teachers out there, tell me this isn’t true?
Administrators feel compelled to show up at a monthly school board meeting and show the bosses what’s NEW. What’s the “toy”. You don’t get points for saying, hey, we’re doing the same basic, important tasks and doing them well. Nope!
Who wants to devote a lot of time, for example, to finding good, reliable substitute teachers (yeah, the stuff of your own 7th grade past) when some new, high tech gimmick can be rolled out?
So what is Plan B when we go back to school…what happens when teachers and staff start being out for long stretches of time? Who will be those substitute teachers? We didn’t have enough of those important people back before the pandemic, let alone now.
To be fair, this sort of thing has permeated much of the culture. (One worker now doing the work of two then, blink!, it’s the work of three.) It’s yet another “market failure” in capitalism, but this time around on a really huge scale.
And, it just happens to be our TRAGIC misfortune to have one of the worst presidents in our nation’s history at the helm amidst this global disaster.
I could get all “wishy” and “hope-y” and full of “I can only change the things I can control” self-help, corporate blah, blah, blah crapola. But I won’t. I am NOT going to ‘be in this moment, now’. Screw that.
Not much will change.
Not until children and parents tell their schools, NO. Teachers tell their principals, NO. Administrators and school boards tell State Ed. NO. Not until that idiot Betsy DeVos gets her walking papers. It’s got to go all the way up the “food chain”, as a longtime colleague of mine and well-known union “troublemaker” always put it.
Until millions of essential but too often low paid workers march on the White House and Congress and demand fair pay, universal health insurance, family-friendly work rules and basic human decency, what is really going to change in this country?
I can only hope teachers are ready to join in that march.
Thanks for a provocative essay, John. I agree that running schools for efficiency has been the focus of schools for too long. I also agree that the latest program, technological bell, or financial whistle has taken precedence over the best way to teach children.
The paragraph on the new programs struck a chord (a cord?) in me as well. How often I find myself filling out some form to give to an administrator to show that I have read and understood the standards?
The problem is that I do not see a light at the end of the tunnel. Or maybe I do. Is that a train coming my way?
Hope you are hanging in there, Roy. I just came back from a trip to the transfer station (translated in 20th century speak: the dump) Big time out! I did get coffee and chocolate. Essentials, well, to me.
John:
On the necessity of doughnuts, chocolate, and coffee:
Where would we be?
Those thoughtless dreamers
Who look back fondly
And recall the idea of freedom
Cooked up in the Salons
So many years ago
Fired to dream by too much coffee
as Paris evenings stretched
Into midnight
And into the dawn of our future.
My son’s never seen “Citizen Kane” before so I think we might watch that this afternoon when he gets home. It’s a good, cold, rainy day to do that. (Assuming the power stays on…it’s blustery out there.) Warm couch, worthwhile movie.
I wouldn’t be doing this sort of thing on a Thursday afternoon if school was in session, that’s for sure.
BTW I posted a list of films about government and politics for my 12th graders to check out. I still have to do the same for my economics classes if anyone has some suggestions. (Whatever works, including documentaries.) I have a few already in mind.
Thanks!
“I call it the “McDonald’s Happy Meal Plan” of running a school.”
You really hit the nail on the head, John, so many times no one had sufficient time to internalize the most recent new, trendy ideas before we were on to the next one. Tech has really taken advantage of the attraction to new shiny things with a continued roll out of new glitz to try.
How about when teachers get laid off in all of this?? Class sizes will skyrocket. Online or in person, this can’t be sustained. Teachers will break with work and students will end up learning little.
It’s time to prioritize. Strip it down.
We were on the way to town, and my wife and I were talking about that scene from a WW II movie and the B-17 is going down slowly. The engines have been shot away. Everything that is not essential gets tossed out the window to keep altitude.
Reading stays on. Consideration of our most vulnerable students gets protected. Involving kids in helping come up with new ideas to make this thing work, check. Call Diane Ravitch on the radio for help, check!
The alleged “reformers” talked years ago about “building the plane while flying it”. Well, here we really are. And, their ideas should be the first to go, right out the hatch!
Take care!
Hmmm. What things/people/classes are non-essential? Gym teachers? Aides? Pre-calculus? Cafeteria workers?
I would like to disagree respectfully. When hard times come, education is cheaper than ever one could imagine. I teach in a school that was just built. If it had been built ten years ago, in the midst of the Great Recession, it might have been built for thousands less. While the economy is down, that is the time to invest in the infrastructure of the future. Education is a part of that.
Meanwhile, if we jettison all the reformer’s testing and intellectual offal, nothing is lost. Let’s load up on the good stuff and throw out the bad.
One district I heard of is considering cutting ALL its reading teachers. I guess they’re thinking reading isn’t important and stripping it down.
Great comment, John O!
Something has got to give. Honestly, if someone said to me, hey, it’s time to help in the elementary school, that’s the priority for the last four weeks of the school year, for June…well, that’s where I’d be.
I’d be way, way, way over my head, that’s for sure. And, of course, I’d be totally outside my certification area etc….etc… But if that’s what made sense, and the union was on board, and it was SAFE somehow for all involved… well, here I come.
I sure hope those great elementary teachers in my district would be patient with me.
I don’t think schools can lose a single teacher, custodian, aide or PTA member, no, not now. But we are going to have to be very creative.
I know it’s time to pare down what I do in 12th grade. I’ve been trying to do that all along. I’ve had no choice, but now…
Now, I just want to see my students again. In person. Period. Even if for one, last 40 minute class.
No ‘distance learning’…no “Zoom”…no remote this or that. If just to say good bye to the seniors. And, that might not happen.
I went into my classroom Tuesday and it was like a little Pompeii…the calendars turned to March 2020….a bulletin board with fliers for a prom and our school musical…;postponed, cancelled (?) stuck in time. A dead plant on the shelf with the beautiful, spring trees that are always outside my window this time of year. Eerie.
When I left it was still winter. I’ve been trying to listen to the former students I have who are nurses, doctors and EMTs. They say just stay home but there was stuff I just had to retrieve in school, things to get done…
The custodians have been cleaning furiously, God bless them. I could see myself in the mirror of the floor. But there was this crazy silence. Then the bells would ring every 42 minutes, still on that relentless schedule that kept all of us running, before Covid upended the world.
We’re still waiting on Gov. Cuomo to see if he’s pulling the plug on the rest of the school year in New York State. I watched him live this morning. I guess tomorrow is the day…
Take care.
P.S. Thanks Diane.
No matter how you slice and dice it, we are still going to have hundreds of people in a school building per day. Ok, if people can’t even go to a beach and social distance, how are we going to do that in school? It’s not going to happen.
I remember when, years ago, “inclusion” was new. Teachers were shown videos of classes with lots of aides and other resources that would enable this to work smoothly. I agree philosophically with including special needs students in the regular classroom. But of course when it actually happened there were few aides or other resources.
I fear the same will happen now. We will see videos of small class sizes with social distancing to keep children, teachers, and other staff, and the community safe. But when school actually opens, little of this will happen.
What will happen, however, is that instead of allowing teachers to use the time (before surges in Covid-19 force schools to close again) to help their students catch up academically and to attend to their social/emotional needs, the time will be spent administering tests to supposedly determine the students deficits, but actually to make money for test publishers and technology corporations and to pave the way for privatization.
For those of us who are or who have taught in schools, how would you keep social distancing in place with children? One news show showed a classroom with desks somewhat apart form each other. but overcrowded class rooms, class sizes? On the playground, plus coming in and out of school? Hallways? Just some of the problems.
Too, yes children seem less susceptible to becoming really sick with this virus bur there seems to be a minority, as of now, who suffer heart and other serious problems caused by the virus.
How many problems of ALL kinds would have been solved had we had something rather than an incompetent charlatan at the helm?
Evidently Australia and New Zealand are back in business by having an intelligent plan in place and following it. Taiwan and other countries had minimal problems because they likewise had intelligent, competent leadership.to forestall its spread.
An ounce of prevention….
Opening schools would present a huge problem. Kids will congregate. Desks are never far from each other. [ My kids at ISKL sat in rows on the floor. I guess they could be scattered all over the room. They still would be using rhythm equipment, xylophones and books. How is all of that supposed to be sanitized after each class? How are band kids supposed to sit 6 feet apart when there are 45 to 85 kids? I can see them filing into the storage room one at a time to get his/her instrument. HA!] If the kids don’t get sick, and some will, they still are in danger of passing it on to grandparents or their parents.
We have an ignorant oaf in charge. How many lives would have been saved and how many workers would be decently surviving if someone intelligent ruled the roost?