Parent coalition wants some input
A coalition of parents, teachers and community organizers demonstrated outside the State House on Saturday, calling for a seat at the table every time a policy decision is made that impacts their children.
About 50 members of the Black, Indigenous and People of Color Parent Coalition said Gov. Charlie Baker and his education commissioner, Jeff Riley, want to fully open schools on April 5 without proper safety measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. And the decision was made, they said, without the voices of the people who will be impacted the most.
“We were all settling into the idea that the option of hybrid and remote would stay on the table for the remainder of the school year,” said Latoya Gayle, a Dorchester mother of three children, ages 5 to 17. “But our governor and education commissioner unilaterally decided our kids were going back to school.”
The coalition called on the state to give schools the autonomy to continue with hybrid learning — a combination of in-school and remote education — and a remote option for the next school year. It also called for coronavirus vaccines to be available to all students and their families — not just teachers.
“We’re picking and choosing who needs to be vaccinated, when it should be a priority for all our children 12 and older should be vaccinated before they return to school because it’s not safe,” said Shellina Semexant, a Boston Public Schools teacher and a mother of three children, ages 10 to 14.
The coalition also wants this year’s MCAS exams to be canceled.
“Our children are not ready,” Semexant said. “They have not received enough instruction to be ready.”
Mary Dibinga, a 10th grade Boston Latin Academy teacher and mother of two children at the Boston Renaissance Charter School, said the studies upon which state officials based their decision to send students back to school were based on suburban schools “that have nothing to do with the reality of most Boston Public Schools students.”
Many BPS high school students who return to school will have to take the MBTA, where they will be exposed to more people, said Dibinga, who had six confirmed COVID-19 cases in her classes since last year while students were learning remotely.
“If we had been in school, those students would have been transmissions,” she said.
Dibinga said she also has students in her classes who are essential workers and have become the primary breadwinners in their families because some of their parents were laid off. So taking away the option of learning remotely would leave them with no other option than to drop out, she said.
A state Department of Education spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.