San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Teachers feel stuck in no-win scenario
Pandemic’s challenges leave them overwhelmed
Adrian Reyna’s role in the San Antonio Independent School District hasn’t changed in 10 years, but since the start of the pandemic nearly 10 months ago, the nature of his job has become nearly unrecognizable.
A history teacher at Longfellow Middle School, Reyna, 33, wears a plastic pod that fits around his head and torso to work to shield him from airborne particles carrying the coronavirus.
He never imagined his job would put him at risk of becoming infected to the point that he would feel the need to wear a bubble every day. But given the pandemic and his proximity to students, it’s the only way he feels somewhat safe.
Reyna’s difficult new reality is one shared by thousands of schoolteachers in Bexar County.
Throughout the fall semester, they reported grave frustrations with the way school reopenings were being handled, as well as anguish about the draining high-risk, low-reward situation inwhich they and their students found themselves.
The severity of these concerns has varied from district to district and even campus to campus.
As a group, though, teachers have had to contend with shifting safety protocols, battles with administrators, overwhelming workloads and the expectation that their stu
dents keep pace with predetermined achievement standards — all amid the pandemic.
“It's another layer of stress and risk that wasn't there before,” Reyna said. “We're doing the best we can with what we have, but everybody I know who's working on a campus is just exhausted; they're just on fumes.”
Halfway through the semester, even as the coronavirus situation in San Antonio was worsening, most school administrators continued the push to bring students back to campuses.
They cited the greater efficacy of in-person learning while expressing concerns about the possibility of missing out on state funding as a result of lower attendance rates among remote learners.
In the process, teachers became essential front-line workers with little say in thematter, exposing themselves and their loved ones to the virus five days a week in order to try to teach students — who also were putting themselves and their families at risk — with a learning model that often felt halfbaked and difficult to maintain.
“It is the most difficult situation I've ever been in as a schoolteacher,” said Chris Contreras, 57, a Northside ISD special education teacher. “It's unprecedented, it's difficult and it's not sustainable.”
For some teachers, the adjustment has been so tough that they planned to resign. For many others, in-person instruction has left them dismayed, struggling with their newfound role and the effects this school year will have on them and their students.
Summer troubles
In March, the onset of the pandemic forced school districts to shut down and pivot students and teachers to online learning in a matter of days, thrusting educators, students and parents into a makeshift system that was riddled with deficiencies.
Districts struggled with a lack of equitable student access to technology, higher failure rates and chronic absenteeism.
For school administrators and many students, the safe return to in-person learning couldn't come soon enough.
But with the pandemic raging in the spring and peaking in the summer, school leaders had to work through June, July and August to devise reopening plans thatwould allow at least the neediest students and their teachers to return to classrooms.
Administrators consulted local health guidelines and met with teachers to discuss the plans and seek input.
Formany teachers, those meetings didn't play out as they hoped, and turned out to be the first signs the fall semester was going to be a struggle with administrators.
Teachers around San Antonio said they felt district leaders over the summer presented them with plans that effectively already had been decided or that they were shown mere skeletons of plans that didn't address all of their concerns.
Some said they felt they had been invited to the meetings so administrators could say they sought staffers' input, without
really taking their suggestions seriously.
And because these meetings were conducted on platforms like Zoom, with plans sometimes being presented via screen-sharing and discussions limited to timed breakout sessions, some teachers were left with little time to review the plans and ask questions.
When they posed questions, administrators often couldn't answer them to their satisfaction, they said.
“It felt like no one was standing up for us,” said Lizette Goodloe, 39, a high school teacher in NISD who taught from home the entire fall semester because family members have pre-existing conditions and she did not feel safe going into school with the plan that was in place.
“They're not taking care of the employees, the people that are in the trenches,” she added. “We're the ones who would be going through this process with our students.”
Back to school
By the first day of September, Luke Amphlett had been placed on administrative leave from Burbank High School in the San Antonio ISD.
Amphlett, 37, a history teacher, had spoken up at a faculty meeting on Aug. 27, asking administrators questions that he and other staff had regarding the school's reopening plan: Would all teachers have students in their classrooms after Labor Day? How many students will there be per room? Can we use outdoor spaces for teaching?
It was the second week of school and administrators had not yet answered the questions, said Amphlett, the campus representative for the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel, the staff union in SAISD.
In districts across San Antonio, teachers arrived at their schools for in-person instruction in August and September to find that reopening plans had changed or still were incomplete, and that the safety protocols that had been advertised — from physical distancing and protective gear to contact tracing and health screenings — weren't being implemented as expected.
“We came to a fall in which it really seemed like there wasn't a strong plan on a lot of campuses,” Amphlett said. “We saw that juxtaposed with the shiny, PR-friendly district plan, and then we were looking around for the manifestation of it at the campus level and wewere just not seeing that at all.”
SAISD spokeswoman Vanessa Barry said the volatility of the pandemic resulted in the need to make adjustments to the reopening plan before and during the semester.
“All districts, including SAISD, are doing the best we can with the information and resources we have and within the constraints of the authoritative bodies that oversee us,” she said ina statement, referring in part to the Texas Education Agency, which has required that the state's public school districts offer in-person instruction to all families that want it.
Amphlett was told he had been placed on paid leave for four days for refusing to comply with administrators' requests for meetings and for being uncooperative.
He and the union have disputed those claims and filed a grievance with SAISD, saying the administration's actions were “a violation of Mr. Amphlett's First Amendment rights to associate with the union and speak out on matters of public concern.”
“It was very clearly, from my perspective, an act of retaliation. The good news is it did the opposite and a lot of people around the district stood up,” Amphlett said. “There's been a huge shift on my campus since that moment.”
Burbank since has become one of the safer campuses in SAISD, he said, but many teachers have not seen those kinds of improvements at their schools.
Across the county, teachers experienced overcrowding in classrooms and hallways, inadequate disinfection and protective gear, faulty health screening systems, complacency from district leaders, a widespread fear of retaliation for speaking up and a lack of transparency with regard to changing protocols and coronavirus cases on individual campuses.
Some teachers reported having received enough protective gear for only a fewweeks and having to spend out of pocket to protect
themselves.
Communication about new cases sometimes has been so vague that teachers don't know whether theywere in contact with infected students, and educators have been left out of conversations about bringing more students back and amending protocols like classroom capacity caps.
“Information trickles down instead of actually being given to you freely,” said Haroon Monis, 44, a middle school teacher in NISD. “Leaders have said operating a school during the pandemic is like flying a plane while you're building it. I get that, but that analogy should work both ways. I should have adequate information to make the best decisions.”
In a statement, NISD spokesman Barry Perez said the district “remains committed to the safety of our students and staff. … As is our practice, specific concerns will be reviewed, with appropriate action, if warranted, taken.”
Amanda Hernandez, 51, a teacher at Winston Elementary in Edgewood ISD, said the way the fall semester was handled was so difficult to accept that she'll resign as soon as she finds another job.
Edgewood spokeswoman Keyhla Calderon-Lugo said safety has been a top priority and that the district “is very confident with the extensive safety protocols in place,” including weekly testing, physical distancing, daily sanitizing and limits on the number of people in buildings.
Still, Hernandez said there was “a lack of humanity” in how teachers were treated, making her feel like shewas “left to dangle in the wind,” she said.
“At this point, I think it's more important that I speak formy students than (worry about) retaliation toward me, because quite frankly, if (there's) anything COVID has shown me, it's that schools and public school systems are highly dysfunctional and abusive and it's time to find something else,” Hernandez said, fighting back tears.
‘Uncharted territory’
As winter break approached and the semester was coming to a close, Vanessa Garza, 39, a Judson ISD intervention teacher, still wasn't used to teaching students
in her classroom and on Zoom at the same time — as most teachers are doing.
“It is very trying on the teachers, and stressful, trying to juggle both halves,” she said. “Everything is different this year— everything.”
Because of the pandemic, teachers have had to drastically change the way they work.
The “synchronous instruction” model and the fact paper learning materials can't be distributed in class have forced teachers to find new ways to structure lessons, create assignments and respond to students who might be doing work or asking questions at any time of the day or night.
Teachers have had to get creative in order to retain students' attention and keep them interested in the material.
In NISD, Contreras and his wife, who also is a teacher, started doing a toast with their students every day, and implemented riddles and logic games into class time.
“Unfortunately, this is uncharted territory for us, so it's impossible for you to know how to act or what to do,” he said. “We had to find ways to draw them in and make them connect with us.”
But these adjustments have not been all fun and games. Several teachers reported they're doing almost triple the work this year, and some have advocated for additional planning time.
Many said they feel burned out, but will take time out of their winter break to prepare for the spring semester because they have no other choice.
At the end of the school year, students will take the STAAR, the state's annual standardized test, so the TEA and school districts can gauge the effects of the pandemic on student learning.
However, legislators and groups like the Texas State Teachers Association have questioned whether that added pressure for students and educators is reasonable, given the difficult circumstances and faulty instructional models.
“This isn't a normal year and I think the focus needs to be not so much on performance but on students' physical, mental and emotional health and teachers' physical, mental and emotional health,” said Kat Medendorp, 35, an NISD elementary school teacher and the secretary of the Northside chapter of the American Federation of Teachers union.
Some teachers doubt whether the extra effort and risk that comes with teaching synchronously in person during the pandemic is worth it, and have wondered why districts haven't instead focused energy and resources on making remote learning more effective.
“It's sad to be in a position where you have to weigh out your health and safety to go teach a classroom virtually in a building. … We just want the opportunity to maximize this platform (Zoom) in away that doesn't put us at greater risk for fatality,” said William Goodloe, 42, who teaches high school English from home because of pre-existing conditions.
He and his wife, Lizette, have considered resigning if NISD forces them to teach in person in January.
“I can't teach from the cemetery,” he said.