Dear Nashua Education Community, Our city is drowning. As we close out our Holiday Break, and all take a long deep breath, and invest every ounce of hope that this year will be infinitely different than last year … we are still drowning.
We want to thank A Drowning Parent, A.H. for this Op-Ed. If you have an Op-Ed or LTE
you want us to consider, please submit it to skip@ or steve@granitegrok.com.
Right now it appears that we are in the same boat; parents, teachers, administrators, Board Members, community members, we are all in the same boat, but we have all been rowing against one another for so long that we have just capsized. And now, inevitably, without any life-saving devices, we drown.
Imagine a world in which your only goal is to protect, guide, and encourage your child(ren) to become the very best version(s) of their self or selves. Now, imagine that you have lost your job, no money is coming in and you now have to work backward and reassess priorities; food versus rent/mortgage, utilities versus food, gas to job search, or food.
In addition to losing your job and BARELY making it with the essentials for your family, add in schools closing.
Any role you are applying for must now be remote or work at home because one (or more) of your children is not doing well with the remote learning. You have no resources at your disposal to help you ensure your child isn’t falling too far behind. And you are again made to choose; feed your children or feed your children’s minds.
What if the available options weren’t even known to you because you came to this country to escape something beyond comprehension; unspeakable things that would cause the latter to crumble, some to lose sleep or have recurrent nightmares – the things of monsters and darkness?
What if you had no options and you spent every day making the unyielding choice between impossible odds? Stacking increasingly more inflexible odds on top of those and trying to breathe.
We are currently in the throes of a worldwide Pandemic, but we are ALL A PART OF THIS PANDEMIC. Teachers, parents, administrators, first responders, all of us are experiencing the weight of this.
I am a parent who is spending every day fighting to just barely scrape through those desperate essentials; I am not trained to be a teacher.
If I have realized anything during this horrific time period, it is the true value of dedicated teachers.
The second thing that I’ve learned is that there IS a divide between effective teachers, and a parent who is trying to hug the hurt and get their children through his/her emotional struggles, and a teacher who’s purpose is to push these children’s intellectual visions outward.
You see, teachers shape and mold the minds of our future, Parents though? Parents are here to hug the hurt, fix the, “boo-boos,” embody good examples and promote the things that cannot be learned from textbooks, but rather through connection.
We have lost all of that, the connectivity between students and their teachers, the divide between being a parent and being a teacher, and while doing that – we have also isolated the MOST vulnerable of our population.
What about the students who have no one to hug them and showcase good decisions, kindness, compassion, respect, and more? Where do those children fit into this upside-down equation?
We are a city and it is only with the help of all individuals coming together that we function as a whole.
Last year though? Last year we all collectively messed it up. Instead of this being a pathway of unity and similar goals; we have turned against one another in the most ruthless of ways. We pit parents against teachers, teachers against parents, unions against boards, boards against unions.
But the most heartbreaking battle of all is the one we lost sight of, all of us, which was these children. We turned our community, against our children. It somehow became an “every man/woman for themself,” but we all forgot about the kids.
While we were all busy in our social media arguments, our back and forth public comments, our left versus right persuasive articles, blaming and the like, these children sat helplessly and watched their normalcy, compassion, kindness, and sense of community be stamped out and replaced by hard lines in the sand full of ugliness.
If this doesn’t break your heart, if this ideology doesn’t shake you to your core to think that an estimated total of 11,000 children were forced to live a trauma that will impact them for the duration of their lifetimes because of our community our city losing its focus, then I am not sure what the ethos of humanity is anymore.
What if we all began working together?
What if the contracts mattered less than the contact? Perhaps we focus on coming together instead of continuing to tear our incredible community apart? What if parents, teachers, administrators, everyone – came to the “table,” to fix this? If we can’t find a way to make a plan beneficial to every single child in our community, then what will we come together for?
I am writing as a plea to the Nashua Teachers Union, to the teachers, and to the Board of Education.
Are there children who are successful at remote learning, yes.
Are there families (teachers, students, administration, etc) who have legitimate COVID concerns due to immune-compromised issues and/or family members residing in their households? Absolutely.
However, there are also families who cannot continue to make these impossible choices. Families who need to be in classes teaching. Families who need to have us help alleviate the need to make the impossible decisions because they want what’s best for their child(ren). While simultaneously having to find a way to keep food on the table, the lights on, and the roof of home over their heads.
There are children who have been forced to be alone for the past 8 months, to live in what can only be described as unspeakable, under incredible stress, and no way to even show someone a helpless look, a bruise, a broken stare from a soul who doesn’t even know their, “normal,” isn’t okay. They have lost their voices, so we’re pleading, please don’t abandon those children anymore.
We have this amazing ability to come together regardless of a contract, regardless of left versus right. We have an OBLIGATION to these children to move mountains for them – to teach how they learn, learn how they need to be taught, and to embody the very essence of humanity – the Nashua Community and its children deserve a world of possibilities and support within one another that is infallible.
So we are asking, will you help us come together – or are we to remain that different that we are destined to drown? We intend to row in a forward path – can you row with us so we can flip this boat over, help one another back on board, and move forward?
Let’s be honest with one another – it is so hard for myself (and others) within the community to be losing it all, taking on water, swallowing it while there are contracts and negotiations happening on top of the sinking boat by those who remain topside dry & breathing. I know we are all at a difficult crossroad here – but we cannot all be collectively working as ONE UNIT when there are still secret meetings, hidden agendas, persuasive verbiage in memorandums and so much more.
As one person within a community of thousands more – I challenge you, the Nashua Teachers Union, Board of Education, Parents, Teachers, Administrators, EVERYONE to ALL come back into the water with your community members and help us right this boat.
NO MORE CONTRACTS, CEASE THE NEGOTIATIONS AND STOP SPENDING – until we have given every single family, every community member a life vest while we overturn this boat. Our community cannot afford to spend more on things that don’t result in getting our community back rowing in the same direction.
Until our schools can reopen, our lost voices are heard and our community & its members are no longer drowning underneath a capsized populace of people who have not stopped to flush out the greater good – we cannot be expected to spend more, we simply don’t have it anymore.
Will you agree? Will you agree to work together to get our community back to functioning? To focus on raising our voices to reopen our schools so that the muted voices of thousands of our children and families can be heard? Will you agree to stop spending money and cease the continuations of contract negotiations until such a time when our schools reopen, families aren’t drowning and we are back upright?
I come to you raw and vulnerable, as a parent, citizen, and supporter of our teachers … please cease further negotiations that involve spending money we simply don’t have until our kids are back in the classroom. We honestly don’t have the money, and even worse the longer this takes … it is inevitably taking the last shred of what we parents have to hold on to … hope.
