Stop Blaming Teachers’ Unions for Pointing out that Schools aren’t Safe
From March of 2020 to August of 2021 our nation debated. Should we reopen schools? When should we reopen schools? Should we reopen schools fully or partially, all day or part of the day, for all students or only some? Which schools should we reopen first? This debate was shoehorned into a sensationalized narrative, in which reckless parents demanded that schools reopen while greedy teachers’ unions demanded the right to continue working from their dining room tables. There was shouting at school board meetings and there were tragic articles about teachers who died of COVID. The debate even found its way into the Presidential race, which is never a good sign.
With Omicromageddon upon us and cases surging past previous records, it is inevitable that this debate will resurface. Should we close schools? When should we close schools? Should we close schools fully or partially? Which schools should we close first?
And, once again, we’ll be having completely the wrong debate.
The debate we should be having is under what conditions is it safe for schools to be open, and how do we achieve those conditions?
Imagine, for a moment, that your local schools faced a different threat. Say the water main broke, and repair was expected to take months. This obviously isn’t a perfect analogy. First and foremost, students can’t bring a broken water main home to their families. They can’t bring it to their jobs or to sleepovers with their friends. A broken water main affects those connected to the water main and no one else, while a communicable disease affects those it infects, those they infect, and so on in an exponential cycle. But the water main is useful as an analogy because a broken water main isn’t emotional. It isn’t politicized, it isn’t terrifying, it doesn’t prey on the vulnerable. It’s simply an issue of health and safety that must be addressed, urgently but professionally and apolitically, as COVID should have been, and was in much of the rest of the world.
In our first hypothetical district facing a broken water main, teachers and their unions are demanding that schools close because there is no water to drink, no proper sanitation, and no functioning fire suppression system. Parents are demanding schools remain open because they can’t care for their children at home and are concerned about learning loss. The school board is considering a hybrid plan, where students attend the school only half the day and zoom in the other half. Teachers have resorted to spending their own money to buy bottled water and rent port-o-potties for students. The local newspaper, in an attempt to be helpful, did a full spread on how to build a greywater recycling system out of plumbing parts. The shop teacher has constructed a pit toilet in the quad, and has gone viral on tik-tok and instagram for her ingenuity, with thousands of comments like, “This is why we love teachers!” while her union is blasted in op-eds for fighting to close schools.
In our second hypothetical district, schools are closed immediately, and parents, teachers, and district administrators meet to answer the question, under what conditions is it safe for schools to reopen? They debate whether to offer free bottled water or to require students to bring water bottles from home. They discuss the minimum number of port-o-potties and where to place them. They compare the efficacy of hand-washing stations to hand sanitizer. They consult with the fire department about how to get water to fire sprinklers. The debate is robust, respectful, and productive. The students learn by zoom until port-o-potties are set up, bottled water is brought in, hand sanitizer is distributed, and a water tank is filled and connected to the fire sprinklers, then they resume learning in-person while the water main is fixed.
The debate taking place in the first district may seem like an absurd caricature, but it’s analogous to the debate we’ve been having about how to open schools during the pandemic. While public health officials tell us that universal masking in schools is essential, governors ban mask mandates and pundits vilify teachers for refusing to enter a school of unmasked students. When we learned ventilation was key to reducing transmission, we lamented the lack of modern HVAC systems in our schools while teachers resorted to spending their own money HEPA filters and reputable news outlets published instructions for how to make one out of a box fan and heater filters. When vaccines became available, parents who had already given their children mandatory vaccinations against measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, chicken pox, polio, and hepatitis B suddenly decided they were against mandatory vaccinations, while demanding that their children’s peers and teachers accept the risk of sitting next to unvaccianted classmates.
Vanishingly rare in the public sphere was a debate structured like our second hypothetical school district. Stakeholders coming together, listening to experts, and agreeing on minimum standards for their school to be considered safe enough to operate. Masking everywhere, or just indoors? What are the consequences for students or staff who refuse to mask up? How are meals handled? Is the HVAC system up to code, or do we need to supplement with HEPA filters? How do staff and students prove their vaccination status? In short, how do we achieve the minimum standards we all agree are necessary so we can reopen schools?
But the biggest distinction between our two hypothetical districts, and the two not-at-all hypothetical approaches to handling unsafe conditions in a school, is where the blame is placed.
In our first school district, the blame for closing schools falls entirely on the people advocating to close them, largely teachers and their unions — even though that advocacy is grounded in concern for safety. We wouldn’t want our kids going to schools that had no drinking water, sanitation, or fire suppression, and we shouldn’t want our kids going to schools where a deadly virus circulates freely between unmasked, unvaccinated students and staff, but the teachers and other front-line staff pointing out the unsafe conditions are just too easy of a target for lazy pundits and opportunistic politicians.
In the second school district, if there are any delays in reopening schools, the blame is properly placed on the people creating those delays, not the messengers pointing them out. When the bottled water fails to arrive, teachers aren’t blamed for complaining that it’s missing, the district is blamed for failing to provide it. When the district can’t find the money for port-o-potties, parents go to the state and demand the needed funds. When a school district can’t enforce masking or vaccination, when the state hasn’t provided sufficient funds for adequate air filtration or sufficient hand sanitizer, when the local community won’t take basic precautions to slow the spread of the virus and help keep it out of schools in the first place, the blame should fall on the district and state leadership who actually have the power to solve those problems, not on the teachers refusing to put their students at risk until the problem is solved.
We need to accept our collective responsibility to create the conditions for our schools to operate safely. Get vaccinated. Get boosted. Wear your masks. Control the spread of the virus in the surrounding community so it doesn’t get into the schools in the first place. When teachers and other school employees raise concerns about unsafe conditions, address the concerns rather than blaming the messenger. We spent last year in the coal mine blaming the canary and lamenting the lost coal production, and we let the mine owners off the hook. Let’s do better with Omicron. Let’s keep our schools open by keeping them safe.
