Dear Legislator,
I am angry. Are you listening? I am a public school teacher (now in Massachusetts) and parent of two children. My family lives in Nashua. Some of you may recall that I have sent a few emails to the legislature in the past and have written an Op-Ed or two.
We’d like to thank Diane Sekula for this Op-Ed. If you have an Op-Ed or LTE
you would like us to consider please submit it to Skip@GraniteGrok or Steve@GraniteGrok.com.
Since previously writing I have gone on to have a fellowship and receive my Master’s Degree in Teachers Leadership through Brandeis University. Really, what this means is that I am a very committed educator with a great deal of experience and education under my belt.
A little known fact about me is that though I now teach English and History at the high school level, I started out teaching Health. In fact, my bachelor’s degree is in Public Health and Health Education.
In addition to working with the former Assistant Director of Public Health for the State of California and Save the Children on a few health related projects while teaching abroad with the Peace Corps, I received a very solid background in public health and took epidemiology with Dr. John Nwangwu, professor at SCSU and Yale as well as a consultant to the World Health Organization. His class was, by far, the toughest.
At the time, I didn’t know anyone, myself included, who appreciated his class. However, now as an adult and teacher, I do. In fact, I retained much of what I learned in his class.
This much I know, THE NUMBERS DON’T ADD UP TO A LOCKDOWN AND LOCKOUT OF OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
And I’d add, even if they did, why was a traditional quarantine, something that has a long-standing record of success considered? It certainly should have been.
Do you have ANY idea whatsoever what it is like to field questions from teenagers that say, “When is this going to be over, Miss? We miss school, we miss our friends.” (I received this particular message in the spring.)
Do you know what it’s like to log in online and look into a child’s eyes and hope that they are OK and feel very helpless? Do you care?
About two weeks before school started, my school district brought in doctors, mental health providers, and public health professionals from the Boston area to provide Covid 19 related professional development for teachers. This is where we learned that over the past six months, there was a twenty-five percent increase in the number of teenagers who had contemplated suicide. Read that again, a twenty-five percent increase in the number of children who had contemplated suicide. The isolation is devastating to many of our young people. Many desperately need to be back in school with their friends, teachers, guidance counselors, coaches, and librarians.
Are you listening now?
With the way things are going in this country and in New Hampshire, you leave me wondering. Do you represent me and the other, “run of the mill, ordinary” citizens of New Hampshire anymore? Do you care about the kids or are you bought and sold, like so many politicians; beholden to a lobbyist or special interest group? (Are YOU like the heads of the NEA and AFT and Ed Tech companies who threw our public schools, children, families, and teachers under the bus by signing the linked document?)
The way things are, children don’t have much of a voice. It’s up to us to speak for them. Now it is up to YOU. Open our schools. Open them fully. Those who are at risk can stay home (this is a quarantine), but the schools need to open and when I say open, I mean FULLY open. Not hybrid (which trust me is HALF of an education), not remote, and not like a prison. (Children move, as they should, and though contact tracing is big business for some, it has questionable efficacy in schools and comes with inherent privacy violation concerns.) School is not a prison.
Open the schools. Don’t hide behind someone else and say it isn’t your job, because it is. Make it happen.
Sincerely,
Diane Sekula
Education, “Reimagined”
