Back to School Opinions: We All Have Them and Here is Mine…. I’m Ready To Go Back.

July is typically one of my favorite months of the year. June is done, August isn’t here yet. It is usually a month of true relaxation for those of us who work in education. But this year is different. I can feel an impending cloud coming in the works. I don’t know if it’s for rain, snow or murder hornets. I do know we are in the middle of one of those weird dances where we don’t really know which foot to put forward and what partner makes the next move. It’s getting to be decision time.

Everyone has their opinions and they are certainly entitled to them. Opinions are all intertwined with political beliefs which make for a lot of meme sharing, article referencing and social media blocking. What I’m about to write, may make you want to follow me harder or never read another blog post again.

I want to go back to school and I write that as a teacher that lives in Maine and not Texas and not Florida. If I was in outer space right now with Bruce Willis asking which wire we should cut to save the world. I would cut the one that transports me back to school. This may sound selfish and it absolutely is. I write this decision as a personal one for my own happiness and the wellbeing of my family. I also write this knowing everything has not been worked out to make it occur and there are a ton of unknowns that complicate matters immensely. Here are my top eight reasons for wanting to return to school in September.

1. I give my best output to the world when I am allowed to observe, interact and receive feedback from the students that I have and from the adults and friends that I work with. I have never loved staying home, even when I was on maternity leave and my internal clock told me I was supposed to love being home. I love the push and pull of the teaching day. I love the voices, I love the back and forth, I love the big and small accomplishments. I love how I feel more when kids do more, and there is not a place on the earth I am more productive, creative or motivating than in a classroom.
2. My kids need to be with other kids. This may sound selfish. This may sound unreasonable, but I watched my social, happy-go-lucky son go from being a bubbly kiddo in early March to an anxiety ridden shell of himself in May. He began having nightmares, tantrums, acting out, refusing to do simple tasks, crying when asked to be away and independent from me. I watched a kid who would go up to his basketball coach and receive motivating feedback and laugh at a table full of kids, to one who stood behind me and could barely move due to overwhelming anxiety. When we first began increasing our people bubble, he was almost agoraphobic and couldn’t even catch his breath from fear of the unknown. As his mom, I am seeing glimpses of his old self as the summer continues. He looked underneath seaweed for crabs at the beach and I saw zero tension or worry. He went on hiking trails with other kids and not once did I say stop and wait, stop and look for danger, don’t talk, don’t seek, don’t people. He needs to people. It is in his DNA. I am an introvert to the core, unless you put me in a round table of other sarcastic, witty introverts, in which case I am an extrovert, but I recognize his need to people, throw balls and sing obnoxious songs at a table full of boys.
3. I work at a place where I feel supported and can support. I know not all educators feel this way and I absolutely understand the kickback here. I feel comfortable in my ten plus years of teaching to go up to my principal and say, this doesn’t jive with me, this doesn’t feel great for kids or for me. These conversations are not always comfortable, but I am not afraid to have them and there is a tremendous amount of trust when I do. I also work with custodians who literally sprinkled ice melt from the door to my vehicle when I was pregnant with both of my kids so that I wouldn’t fall. I know they will do anything and everything to clean, sanitize and make the school as safe as possible for kids. I work with administrative assistants who work in the very front line of our school and will uphold policies in the most professional and maternal ways so that families will feel safe upon entry. They will receive the brunt of a lot of comments for these policies, but they have put up with bluntness and brutish behavior before and it means nothing in the wake of keeping our bubble of Pre-K to 2nd grade kiddos safe. I push for schools re-opening so hard and fast because I work with people who are going to make the hard and fast happen.
4. I will follow whatever protocols are mandated, or suggested or offered. If I learn that it is safer to dress in snow suit, with a football helmet, spritzed in lemon water, then I’m going to be buying stock in lemons. I am fully on board with ridiculous protocols if it means that I can sit and do read aloud and not ask Joey to have his mom shut off the vacuum while I am reading on google meet. This may sound controversial, but when it comes to masks and schools, when it comes to kids and my livelihood, I am on board with whatever I need to wear to keep kids safe, as cumbersome as they may be. A lot of times it’s all about me, but when it comes to masks, it’s all about them too.
5. I anticipate a hybrid situation. My hope is that we can start in person and then if we experience upticks, we do remote for a bit and head back to school when feasible. I did three months of remote, I know I can do more. I would just like to do less.
6. Kids are getting together in daycare and social situations anyway. Let me repeat that. Should remote learning continue, kids will still continue to meet up in small or large bubbles. Teenagers will still continue to climb into the backseat of borrowed vehicles. Birthday parties are still gonna happen. Unless parents have the unique opportunity, benefit or prison sentence (depending on who you are) to work from home and teach their tribe in an effective and authentic way, kids are swimming right back into the unknown of this virus. In my mind it makes more sense, to have the same kids return to the same building, with the same other kids day in and day out. This would be more powerful for contact tracing, germ and crowd control. I know there will be naysayers on the flippity flip. I know you will say, but we don’t know, but we don’t know. Well then let’s work with what we know until we know better. Let’s do as much as we can until we need to pull back. Students can operate in little pods as boring and lackluster as that may be until we feel comfortable enough or safe enough for them to break out of that pod.
7. Literacy is not possible for all kids without some semblance of in-person learning, especially in the Pre-K to 2 population. I truly believe this in my heart of hearts, with my new degree or even without it. The most powerful learning I was able to do from March to June, was coaching kids to read one-on-one or in pairs, but not everyone did it and for a variety of reasons. I am not judging parents for not doing it, some couldn’t organize it, other kids were too nervous, some couldn’t get the technology part of it. Either way, it is imperative that we have SOME time with our students to coach them on their way through a book, as a beginning reader or as an advanced one. We can wade them through the process, we can stand alongside their raft later in the year and hand them a paddle, but in the beginning, we need to be together to establish how to get in the freakin water. I write this knowing some parents are making the decision to homeschool and they will coach their littles on this journey. This is different. You as a parent, are making the conscious decision to lead your child through this process. Other kids do not have an adult who is saying I will. They can’t say I will because they are at work all day, or have multiple children with special needs, or aren’t even literate themselves. See the distinction? I honor, celebrate and encourage families who don’t feel safe to make that decision for their families, but I also am flabbergasted when they want to shut down the whole operation for others who don’t have that luxury.
8. We are essential and deserve to be open. People have been buying groceries, getting their haircut, getting inked and going to water parks. We ought to be able to work out how to get kids to and from for some academic time so that we have contributors to society. I guess I don’t understand why schools are being shelved when every other buildings are saying we are open, but now we must operate this way. We care this much about the service you are about to be getting that we want it to be as safe as possible for you. As a teacher, I echo this sentiment. My classroom may operate a little differently now, but you can still go in and get a Dr. Seuss book. You can still have your meat and the potatoes, just like you do at Hannaford. We just need to do it a little differently.

I write this after reading 15 articles that discourage school re-openings. I understand those view points too, I am just still cautiously optimistic that it can and will happen. I don’t want to discount or discredit people feeling scared and vulnerable to return to their jobs or to send their babies to a building that doesn’t have it all the way figured out yet too. As an asthmatic and a blood clotting gal, I certainly get it. I just feel a certain way, I”m in my feelings as Drake tells me to do and so I had to push it out to the universe.