Questioning criticism of teachers

It has been years since I have written a letter to the editor, but the recent opinion piece you published by Red Jahncke, president of the Greenwich consulting firm Townsend Group, on teachers’ demands did raise my dander.

I do not know what credentials Mr. Red Jahnke has to deem himself an authority on this matter, but I at least was a Connecticut public school teacher for 37 years, and in all that time I have never found any position made by the Connecticut Education Association to the state to be unreasonable.

Yes, the CEA did ask Gov. Ned Lamont for schools to be remote until teachers are vaccinated. Already in his first paragraph, Mr. Jahncke assumed that remote equals teachers not working for their pay. Ask any teacher and they will share that eight hours of daily teaching and planning online is far more demanding than even in-class instruction, but this new, virulent, faster-spreading variant of COVID-19 has made the in-school environment a dangerous place.

In my limited daily world, nearly everywhere I go I hear, “Only three in the lobby please,” and “Only one customer at a time please.” CEOs such as Mr. Jahncke and their employees have surely been working remotely for nearly a year with this perhaps extended indefinitely, but teachers did return to classrooms in August without the same personal protective equipment that is available in a medical facility.

In some districts, PPE was merely a plastic bag with one pair of plastic gloves and one cloth mask. So Mr. Jahncke’s declaration that all school boards have excellent PPE protocols in place is not necessarily true. What Mr. Jahncke does not understand is that teachers have been selfless throughout this ordeal. Yet he goes on to state that “it is only logical to assume that contagiousness varies with seriousness of cases of an infection so schoolchildren who rarely suffer serious cases are minimal spreaders” and then he continues to assert “asymptomatic people do not cough or sneeze.” Oh boy, now it is my turn to say, “Really?” How many of you have gone through a single day without a single sneeze or cough? And why have grandparents been warned to stay away from grandchildren?

I have spent 64 years doubtful of individuals who begin arguments with “Research shows.”

As I kept reading, I began wondering why this was ever written until I reached the “aha” moment: “Children need to be in school so parents can work.”

He mentions only the essential workers here, many of whom have already selflessly been on the front lines throughout, but then he pulls at my heartstrings with the line, “their children will be hungry and homeless.” I suspect that Mr. Jahncke’s true concern is not the essential workers but an entirely different milieu: parents who want their children out of the house so that they can work from home without interruption.

Perhaps if children were not exposed to the virulent variant of COVID-19, grandparents could step up to the plate and be there for their families. However, so long as in-person school continues, this will not be possible. Remember the poem: “Mary had a little cold… ...and everywhere that Mary Went the cold was sure to roam ...the teacher tried to drive it off But kerchoo

The teacher got it too!”

I guess the only way Lamont could make everyone happy is to get the teachers vaccinated by the end of January as part of Phase 1.