It’s Amazing How Well Prepared Schools Aren’t

I’ve been seeing this photo being shared by friends who aren’t teachers but who mean well, and by friends who are teachers and whose reactions range from polite no, thank yous to pretty firm Ah, hell naws.

No one has asked for my take on it, of course, but no one asked you to click on whatever link you took to find this post either, but here we are. Might as well get it over with.

First of all, nope.

Second, third, and fourth of all: on the great, big list of all the bullshit teachers have to put up with, hastily constructing makeshift PPE out of cheap plastic pipe and dollar store shower curtains ranks somewhere near the not even on it. They shouldn’t have to buy their own materials, either. They shouldn’t have to be doing any of this because we should not be opening schools yet.

I get that teachers are scared – and they should be. I know a lot of teachers. My entire family is made up of teachers, and I worked in education for years. The few friends I have left in this world who somehow manage to endure me are, by and large, teachers. So, when I tell you most teachers are very much in the at-risk group for COVID-19 due to underlying conditions, please don’t take it as hyperbole. That’s a damn fact, jack.

Sure, there are a lot of young, fresh-faced teachers out there ready for dangerous minds to lean on them so they can stand and deliver, but there are a whole lot more older teachers who’ve spent years being disillusioned by being overworked, underpaid, over-evaluated, and underappreciated. It takes a toll, both mentally and physically.

My mom battled through cancer and chemo and diabetes and hypertension as a lifelong teacher, and if she were alive today and still teaching, she wouldn’t be by the end of this school year. I firmly believe that, and it terrifies me on behalf of every single teacher I know.

We’re asking teachers and all school staff to, quite literally, risk their lives so we can all get the kids out of the house and either go back to work or spend the day doing whatever it is people who apparently don’t like their kids very much do when they’re at school. Oh, sure. There’s a whole lot of talk about how important it is for kids to get back to school, but for all the flowery rhetoric I’m hearing about how vital and important and essential public education is now, there’s a great, gaping funding hole in the nobody gives a shit of the not-too-distant then.

(*There’s one of those If You Don’t Like Me At My Defunding Our Liberal Arts Programs, You Don’t Deserve Me At My Free Daycare meme in here somewhere…)

But let’s get back to the piecemeal PPE the photo is suggesting teachers build for themselves. I really don’t think it’s a good idea.

First, it’s bound to violate some kind of fire or safety code since there’s roughly twenty bazillion of the things when it comes to public school buildings, but more importantly, who’s gonna clean the damn things?

We’re all hearing plenty of assurances from school districts about their constant cleaning and sanitizing guidelines, but not much in the way of explaining where all the money they didn’t have yesterday is coming from today to even afford the additional cleaning supplies, much less hire enough custodial staff to handle the job. I guarantee teachers will be responsible for sanitizing their own classrooms. I guarantee it.

If these things aren’t wiped down and cleaned regularly, they’re going to become clear plastic Petri dishes with who knows what growing on them, not to mention how quickly kids will figure out how much fun it is to stab holes in the things and generally destroy them in much the same way as they metaphorically chip away at their teacher’s will to go on.

Also, those desks aren’t six feet apart at all. Yeah, there’s a sheet of dollar store plastic between them, but I’m not entirely certain it’ll offer a lot of protection. I mean, I’m sure it’s been rated for sterile medical use and is not at all filled with lead and whatever else made it into whichever sweatshop hellhole it was manufactured in and all, but I buy a lot of stuff from Dollar General. There’s a reason everything there costs a dollar.

I totally get wanting to do something, though. Anything is better than nothing when the country just passed four million cumulative cases and we’re getting ready to bring the nation’s children bouncing back into overcrowded, under-funded, and under-maintained school buildings. I just don’t think this something is the right anything, and could end up doing more harm than good.

The right thing to do is delay the start of school until districts receive the funding and time necessary to make their campuses safe for everyone, teachers and staff included. (I’m not even gonna go into how bad of an idea it is to start colleges and universities back up except to point out how the “college experience” in America can be broken down into three distinct parts: Learning, Partying, and Getting Laid. When students can’t really do two-thirds of what they’re paying tens of thousands of dollars for while social distancing, most just won’t bother worrying about it. Well, there’s that, and then there’s the pathogenic wonderland that is your average college dorm…)

To slow the spread, we’ve canceled concerts, closed theme parks, and shut down every local festival imaginable across the nation. But packing dozens of kids into small, confined spaces for hours at a time five days a week in a building full of hundreds of other kids doing the same thing? No problem!

What, do schools have magical covid-nullifying force fields or something? If it spreads in a church, it’ll spread in a school. If it spreads at a concert, it’ll spread in a school. If it spreads in a prison, it for damn sure will spread in a school, which is basically just prison misspelled.

School days, school days
Hope you don’t get covid days
Reading and writing and ‘rithmetic
Coughing and sneezing and getting sick
Build us a plastic barrier
Our teacher got sick, we buried her
And you wrote on my slate, “I’ve got covid toe.”
When we were a couple of kids

TL;DR – If teachers have to build their own PPE out of scavenged dollar store supplies like a Great Value MacGyver, we should not be reopening schools.

READ MORE:

• No, Online-Only Education Will NOT Be Available to EVERY Student. That’s a Lie. Here’s Why.
• Parents, Please Keep an Eye on Your Kid’s Virtual Classroom
• Worse Things Happen At Sea, You Know

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