No group of people is a monolith. All people who identify as Black don't have the same political beliefs. All people who identify as Asian like Chinese food, and not all teachers in America, even in my school, felt the same way about school opening this fall.
Some teachers were vehemently against any in-person learning, some teachers committed to the idea of teaching in-person, and I found that most teachers were somewhere in the middle.
In the early summer, we left school, trying our best to recover and not over worry about the fall. It was not unreasonable to expect or even to hope that by the time august came around, we would have some clarity in how the best way to educate America's children in the next school year. As the summer wore on and the statistics did not drastically improve like so many of us hoped, schools stumbled at best, and many of them floundered, making unclear statements. Like I outlined in this earlier post, the path to the fall was complicated and ambiguous.
The summer set-up the faculty at our school for a rough start. It felt like everything was going to be different. The students were entering campus differently; most students had different classrooms, students were taught in small pods, the class size was different for many grades, and the schedule was different. There was very little that felt "normal" as we geared up for that first week back.
On top of all, most schools in Chicago, most notably the Chicago Public School (CPS), were not going back in-person. As a JK-12 school, we chose to bring our JK-8 students back to campus, and some other private schools had a similar approach, not because we had a consensus amongst the area private schools. Every school was making decisions with the knowledge they had and taking chances to do their best to mitigate risk.
It didn't feel right, just, or equitable that my students could have in-person learning while students in CPS did not. Were we putting our students and faculty in risky situations to help our tuition dollars?
Some parents felt like they wanted a refund from the distance learning last spring. Being in-person in a risky situation wasn't right. Shouldn't we be sensitive to the fact that by using our resources to open in-person, weren't we contributing to education equity issues?
We know the Black and brown children are affected by COVID-19 disproportionally, so were we being sensitive to this fact as most white schools opening in-person? Everyone in this crisis needs to give more, but how much is giving too much?
These questions were among valid questions that faculty had at our school about opening in-person. There were no easy answers to any of these questions. Some brilliant people I worked with at our school and Chicago decided that our school should not have an in-person school. Yes, there argued issues of equity, but I feel the major issue was the risk of spreading COVID-19.
After two and a half months of in-person teaching, it is clear that our mitigation strategies worked. Even though students who contracted COVID-19 exposed people at my school, not one faculty or student got COVID-19 from the school building. We didn't know that this is how things would pan out at the beginning of the school year. Even though this is proof of our success and the administration's correct decisions to bring in JK-8 students in-person, others feel the lack of a breakout is just luck. They may be right.
It felt like I was in the minority in union meetings in supporting our administration's decision to open in-person. I listened and did my best to process the arguments and thoughts of brilliant people who I respect. As the union had voted on actions and demanded more from the administration, my instinct was to work to help them directly. I second-guessed these feelings often and tried very hard to figure out if I was on the wrong side of this. I just kept coming back to this feeling, this idea that it had been done before. Daycares opened in New York that didn't lead to outbreaks. Doctors were working in hospitals and not getting COVID-19. The argument that daycares and hospitals are not schools is a valid one, but that wasn't even to dissuade me from jumping in to make in-person work.
I worried that the fact that there were members of the faculty who felt differently about the administrator's decision would cause a rift in our school. To my knowledge, it hasn't. When I returned from being quarantined after being exposed by an 8th grader, there was some awkwardness. People weren't sure if I was happy or sad to be back in-person.
Even though the faculty have varied opinions about the decisions that the demonstration made over the summer and how they came to these decisions, you would have never known watching the teachers with their students that first week of school.
More than caring who is right and who is wrong, I feel a deep level of respect for my colleagues for handling the start of the school year with professionalism and dignity.
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