The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Realities of city schools make reopening a question
Any reopening of our schools would necessarily require the full and unmitigated cooperation of parents and caretakers in following to the letter all rules regarding health and safety. But the many health problems affecting schoolchildren combined with the lack of consistent health care for many creates an untenable situation for public schools, especially in the middle of a pandemic. There are multiple factors complicating the situation — factors that go hand in hand with poverty, lack of education and parental ability or inability to participate effectively in the public schooling of their children.
For example, there is a common practice among parents with low-wage jobs and no paid sick or family leave: when their child shows symptoms of the onset of illness, they give them a dose of Tylenol and drop them off at school, remaining unreachable the rest of the day. Such children then spend hours asleep in the nurse’s office waiting for someone to locate their parent. Complicating this scenario is the fact that many parents fill out emergency contact forms with phone numbers of people who either don’t know their number was given, or have no more minutes on their phone or refuse to pick up the child because they themselves can’t leave work or have no car. After 40 years in public education, I’m listing, without prejudice, this limited variety of scenarios that take place when kids get sick at school.
I will add that many schools do not even have full-time nurses. Where do sick children go? To the principal’s office, where they languish or fall asleep on a bench waiting until the end of the day for someone to arrive. In short, the office becomes the holding room for sick children.
What sort of parent education has been planned for entire communities regarding these health and safety issues? In my city there are 21,000 children. Normally, when the district arranges training or educational programs for parents, attendance of 100 would be considered good. That leaves 20,900 parents out of the loop. How will all parents be guided?
Are any programs planned for transmitting protocols for safety to the public at large? What provisions are being made for parents who are less easily reached, those who have no internet, no working phones, no permanent address? What about the 30 percent turnover of children in most schools throughout the year, those who come from shelters, other states, other countries? Will their screening and training fall on individual schools? Moreover, in how many languages and from how many cultural perspectives will information be provided?
If people violate protocol, what happens? Will whatever happens come too late to have protected schoolchildren and staff from contamination?
Finally, what difference do hybrid schedules make in our effort to mitigate the pandemic — schedules where certain children do one thing one day and other children do something different on a different day? How does this impact families with five or six children? Or do such revisions offer only the pretense of safer schools as if somehow confusing schedules would be safer than regular schedules? And if schedules are hybrid, how will parents work? Wasn’t work the major reason to rush the reopening?
I offer these valid questions in the spirit of bettering education for all children while maintaining a safe environment for their teachers, their friends, their parents and grandparents. As Connecticut and its many school districts rush to “disinfect” buildings, “educate” the public and make “provisions” for safe reopening I wonder if those making the decisions, most especially at the state level. have ever spent a full day in a city school with its joys, its sorrows and, most of all, its realities.