This commentary is by Kayla Arena-Giron of East Montpelier, an education justice organizer at the Education Justice Coalition of Vermont.
Covid has deeply affected all of us. The current situation in schools is severely impacting student learning and teachers’ ability to teach. One educator said of the Omicron wave, “This is the closest to systems failure I’ve seen during this pandemic.”
Forcing all students and school staff to be in-person without proper protection does not allow them to thrive, let alone meet their basic needs for safety. Schooling as we are currently attempting to do it is creating an insurmountable level of exhaustion, stress and trauma for everyone in our school communities.
If we don’t make significant changes to sustain our school staff, we won’t have anyone to support our students in the future. Nearly one in four teachers were considering quitting their job at the end of the 2020-21 school year as compared to one in six teachers before the pandemic.
We have an opportunity to profoundly transform our schools and take our approach to equitable education deeper than ever before because it quite literally is life or death. We need to center the needs of different students and families.
Equity is not the same as equality. Equity is giving students exactly what they need in order to access a high-quality education. Students with disabilities or students who live in multigenerational households or with immunocompromised individuals may need to be learning from home in order to meet their educational needs. Students with working parents may need to be at school (even when it’s unsafe) because of a lack of paid medical or sick leave that would enable families to make a different choice. It’s no secret that economic concerns have routinely been placed above concerns for human health throughout the pandemic.
To achieve true equity, there needs to be an option for in-person learning and remote learning. For some, keeping schools open is essential. And when we ask teachers and students to be in school, we need to provide them with the testing, N95 masks, and proper ventilation to keep them safe.
There also needs to be a plan in place for students and teachers whose current educational and health needs are best met through online instruction. These changes must be supported at the state level. We cannot expect schools and teachers to magically make this happen on their own.
I strongly believe that there should be an ongoing option to access in-person and online learning, given the different needs of working families, students with disabilities, multilingual students, and more. At the same time, I recognize there may be cases where schools need to be temporarily closed for health and safety reasons.
It’s time to transform our schools to meet the needs of all individuals who make up our school communities before it’s too late.
