For the past several weeks there have been a number of debates over whether schools should open up this fall. As states and districts lay out plans, there are dramatic differences between communication from the federal government and the variety of adjustments being made around the country. On July 23rd, President Trump reiterated that schools must reopen this fall and that making students stay home would be detrimental to their development. Amidst rising case numbers in California, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco have all announced they will be starting the school year online.
On Monday July 20th, I had the opportunity to talk to one teacher, Clare Dreyfus, and hear her thoughts on school in the fall and the inequities in education this crisis will continue to exacerbate.
Meet Clare
Clare is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and received her Masters in Elementary Education from Stanford University. She has been teaching 5th grade at Guadalupe Elementary School in San Francisco for the past four years. Guadalupe Elementary is a part of the San Francisco Unified School District and serves primarily low-income minority students, with about three percent of the student body being white and 54 percent Latinx.
Lack of Teacher Feedback
San Francisco is starting online, hoping to move to a hybrid model when it is safe to do so. Clare discussed how there were not many opportunities to provide teacher feedback to the plans for the fall. Clare said “there was one town hall that was a chance for teachers to voice their thoughts, but that was it.” Teachers are routinely being left out of the conversation when for some of them, returning to work is a potentially life threatening decision.
Additionally, there has been no mention of how to tackle a lack of technology and internet available, especially since Clare teaches in a low income area. The irony is that San Francisco is the tech hub of the world, but Clare said they were the “the last district to get tech to students.” Some of that internet access came through companies like Comcast that gave out free internet for two months. That offer has since expired, and Clare hasn’t been involved in any conversations about how to prep for and accommodate this in the upcoming year.
Clare also discussed brainstorming with her coworkers novel ways to have classes when that’s a possibility — such as holding them outside. This is a concept that has been executed in Denmark and other countries around the world, but isn’t really being considered in the US. “No one wants to think outside of the box” and “move past the status quo” Clare said. “This is the country that claims to teach ‘21st century thinking’ for our students and encourages them to be innovators.” But, now is a better time than ever before for the schools and districts to be 21st century thinkers, and they’re falling short.
The Bigger Issue
“There are so many bigger issues that need to be covered before I can even start to cover content,” Clare said. “The three main things that need to be taken care of are food, childcare and safety.” How quickly schools can open depends on how they can tackle and address these three main themes.
These three issues inherently create a divide between wealthy white neighbourhoods and lower income communities. They don’t have the same barriers to access. Food and safety often aren’t a consideration by districts in these wealthier neighborhoods at all, and childcare has other options and is not inherently dependent on the public school system.
Clare posed the question — “How did society get to this point?” Put another way, when did we become so reliant on schools to do everything for us? This pandemic has shown the enormous weight we put on schools as a “catch all” to try and cover all of the shortcomings in the rest of society. Society is overly dependent on schools to be the space safe in students’ lives. At times, school is the only consistent access students have to food, and for parents it is their only option for childcare so they can work. This tells us that we have failed as a society to properly address the root of these systemic social issues. As a result, during online school the priority is not just making sure teachers’ can provide the best distance learning instruction they can. It’s making sure they have food, they are in a safe space, they have reliable internet access, and only after a number of these other barriers are tackled can teachers’ teach.
Students with Disabilities
Another significant issue with distance learning that Clare emphasized which has hardly been addressed is helping students with disabilities. As of the 2018-2019 school year, about nine percent of the students in her school were “Special Ed.”
“No one is talking about these students with IEPs and what we can do for them,” Clare said. An IEP is an “Individualized Education Program.” These are legal documents protected under law that give specific strategies and approaches that must be taken with these students. This can range drastically – from a student needing all of their worksheets formatted a specific way or with a certain font, to having a personal aide by their side in class helping them every step of the way.
Clare said that for her, and from her understanding for most places around the country, “these IEPs went out the window when school went remote,” as if the law to provide these interventions didn’t apply to these circumstances.
One of her big concerns moving forward is that conversations about how to help these students aren’t even happening. There’s been no talks on how to accommodate and best support these students from her school, her district or the state. This brings her back to the point on a lack of innovation in education, it’s not that these students can’t be helped or this needs to be disregarded, but the conversations about this issue aren’t even happening. Clare said “even just a wild brainstorm to throw out our craziest ideas” has not happened. No effort has been made to properly address and accommodate these students, and that will have consequential effects moving forward.
Next Steps
For Clare, she knows starting the school year means distance learning. But what comes next? She’s a healthy 27 year old, so she’s ready and eager to get back in the classroom as soon as she can. But that’s not the case for a lot of teachers. Over a quarter of public school teachers are over the age of 50, putting them at a higher risk for complications from COVID-19. What’s being done to protect them?
Clare normally teaches 33 students in her class, and if she needs to keep students 6 feet apart, that number drops to a generous 10. There is no air conditioning or air circulation metric for her school, and there have been no directions on masks and cleaning supplies and how that will work and those expectations for when they do return to the classroom.
Even beyond the coronavirus, Clare knows she will be dealing with the economic effects of this crisis with the families of her students for possibly years to come. Once again, this will highlight the inequity of families not being able to bounce back and support their students in ways wealthier neighborhoods around the country don’t need to worry about. Specifically in San Francisco, the city is notoriously ranked one of the most expensive cities to live in in the United States. As a result, every year her school is losing students whose families can no longer afford their rent and move to either stay with family or to cheaper areas of California. The coronavirus will only expedite this move. And when schools lose students, they lose funding, which is going to continue to make it increasingly difficult to support her students and give them the same quality of education students in wealthier communities benefit from.
Read more about inequity in schooling in some of my previous articles on school lunch and redlining! Let us know in the comments down below what your local school district is planning to do for the fall!
- Inside the Systems that Fuel the School-to-Prison Pipeline - August 20, 2020
- Is Teaching Political? - August 5, 2020
- The Battle Over Reopening Schools: A Teacher’s Perspective - July 29, 2020