“We’re in the same storm, but we’re not in the same boat” is something I read somewhere that really resonates with how I’ve been thinking about this.
My school's response so far highlights the systemic issues of inequality in our school system. Many of the families we serve are rich and white; they believe that they deserve a better education for their kids regardless of whose lives are endangered or who gets left behind. I struggle to understand this perspective. Wealth should not be a determining factor for who gets to benefit from a quality education or to live a fulfilled life. Pushing to open in the face of a pandemic that has negatively affected Black and Brown communities disproportionately acts as a reverse vise grip that widens the equity gap along racial and socioeconomic lines. My school's motto calls on us to commit hearts to compassion and lives to the service of humanity, but instead, what I see is a selfish and greedy effort to forge ahead, leaving the less fortunate and underserved behind. What would it look like if the affluent community I work for sought to care for the health and well-being of those who continue to be left behind, rather than worrying about how we can best move forward without them?
In the school I teach at, we have students who are struggling during remote, but we also have staff members who are fearing for their health, their lives, and the well-being of their own families; our impatience to reopen schools only serves to exacerbate the suffering of both of these groups by enabling and advocating for an already unhealthy obsession with speed and advancement. Instead of only asking how we can move forward, why can’t we also define what community is; and if the words empathy, care, justice, healing, and love aren’t a part of the answer, then we have some serious soul searching to do. None of what we’ve done is in the service of anything that resembles social and emotional learning. What we’re demonstrating is that we need to ignore trauma and hurt so that we can prioritize academic content and industrial engagement- both of which are important, but what is the purpose of being educated and engrossed in production if we’re not directing it towards compassion and kindness? As an institution we’ve shown more concern for data and numbers instead of heart and self-care and that speaks volumes about who we are more than the words that we like to brag about.
I don’t really know what the answers are, but one thing is clear, we’re all struggling. We’re all caught in the pandemonium of school reopening plans and stay-at-home orders. If your gut doesn’t check or your heart doesn’t sink while reading about death rates and the breaking of the society that has been built by grit, sacrifice, and compassion, then this letter isn’t for you. It’s for those who still believe that we can still grow in a pandemic, just in a different way, and that the measure of our humanity isn’t in what colleges we’re accepted into or how high our test scores reach, but in how we looked to each other and cried for each of our losses, and held each other’s health and well-being as the priority of our efforts.