Opening schools safely in San Francisco: Compassion rather than Contention.
To Mayor Breed, Dr Matthews, fellow parents, esteemed teaching colleagues & dear students.
Hi everyone, I’m Eleanor Scott. Ms. Elle in school. My pronouns are she/her/hers and I write to you from the Ohlone lands. I acknowledge my extreme privilege that I have the time, the space, the linguistic skills, the unearned safety of a white body, to write to you all today.
No one denies the importance of getting students back to schools. No one. As a parent of a teen, I see the stakes are high moment to moment. I hear friends calling out to take care of the children of essential workers, and children in general. It is absolutely certain that re-opening schools is the highest priority. In order to accomplish this monumental task, we need to pull together, not have a tug of war. Dealing with a law suit is going divide our energies when we need to combine them.
I’m a single parent, a student, an artist, and an educator. So, when I read in the SF Chronicle this morning that the city was planning on suing the school district because the districts have not yet opened schools, I was chagrined, aghast, incredulous and incensed. Why pick fights with people who are on the same team? What a waste of precious resources when we need everyone working together to serve the students instead of bickering in court.
And why aren’t some of the very prosperous SF community members stepping up to help with the reopening of schools? Major tech companies sit cheek by jowl with public schools in San Francisco and with very very little put forth-compared with the vast wealth in their coffers, they could expedite the process. Because what is needed to get students back into the classrooms is money. Plain and simple. It is expensive to put safety protocols into place, get a good testing system going and, ahem, vaccinate teachers. Last time I checked, SFUSD is not rolling in cash.
I was already starting an essay in my head on why it is a mistake to connect the renaming of some of SFUSD’s schools with the slowness of plans to return students to in-person classrooms.
Because it is.
It’s a mistake to think that the project of renaming schools somehow prevents the school district from working on a plan to reopen schools. The awareness-raising discussion of renaming schools came as a response to the 402 year pandemic of white supremacy and genocide in this country. Rather than continuing to name schools for white cis-gender men, it is laudable and appropriate to venerate other citizens for their contributions. Maya Angelou, for instance, attended George Washington High in the Richmond district. Wouldn’t it be wonderful for young black and BIPoC students to know that the city and their school honors someone who shares their lived experience? Having been a part of some of the renaming discussions in a classroom, there have been rich, important points made. And, frankly, these discussions are a way to critically discuss the racial trauma and harm that continues to happen in real time. (Witness a 9 year old girl being horribly treated by police officers in Rochester NY. But I digress.)
To say that a discussion about white privilege is an obstacle to putting together and implementing a massive, complex plan to congregate in public while new strains of a deadly virus emerge, is, to be honest, stupefying. The fact that the city has taken it to the next level of contention and is filing a suit against their school teaching brethren breaks my heart. I have been so proud to be a San Franciscan especially in how Mayor Breed has navigated the pandemics. But now seeing this in-fighting between agencies that serve the same population, my pride falters.
At the least, this dispute is short-sighted and ill-informed. At the worst, a court case that pits the city against the school district steals from and harms youth and families it is supposedly there to serve. Taking resources, energy and time from already exhausted and anxious school administrators and teachers in order to fight a legal battle is absolutely not OK. Again, a lawsuit between to city agencies will divide and conquer us all. Here one of the main oppressor is this formidable corona virus.
It is a multifaceted issue to be sure. As a parent of a teen who continues to be blue and bellicose, I want so badly for my child to get back to in person school. That said, I am anxious that my kid is doing all they can to practice spacious solidarity( a term I borrow from a esteemed colleague for ‘social distancing.) I know, as a parent, I am not alone in this. I see the anger and frustration from someone who wants independence. (This is a whole separate essay.) As a student myself, I yearn to be with my beloved and wise cohort at USF so we can be in the same room to share ideas and commiserate about hegemony and dehumanization and then chat comfortably in the halls after class. I’m frustrated, myself, that we can’t connect in real time. It is so much harder to listen and analyze and think when we are on zoom. In essence, it is hard to think straight when you stare at a screen all day.
As an educator, I just have so much love for all teachers out there. It is exhausting and heart-rending and ridiculous to try and teach ‘standard’ content to youth through a screen.( I have many more thoughts, a whole thesis, actually, on the conundrum of too many hours of school on zoom. Stay tuned.) All the educators I know ( me included) are wiped out, gnashing teeth, and at times, stumped on how to engage and inspire. And-AND- we don’t stop working; we sneak in well-being practices here and there but we don’t stop. We all are figuring out ways to support our students. It takes so much more time and headspace to construct lessons for full online instruction and then hybrid instruction breaks our brains. Moment to moment, we are reinventing how to keep curiosity alive and deal with the endless hours on zoom. And the thank you we get from the city is to wag their finger and say, why aren’t you taking your life in your hands and on top of reinventing the classroom, it is on you, without any money or extra staff, to re-open the schools. Oh, and don’t forget to feed all the children while you are at it. ( I’m sure pandemic school lunches is just as good as the panko encrusted salmon with braised haricots vert you get at Twitter.) I send so much love and light to all teachers and school administrators who are working every minute of every day to figure out this moving target of education during a pandemic. Layered on top of all the work and prep, there is the anxiety about returning to school and the danger of being infected. How awful and scary.
Teachers and school administrators don’t have a lot left at the end of their super long days. So the thought that the city officials are going to throw a law suit at them instead of walking a mile in their shoes feels like a betrayal.
I am not a party to the struggles city officials face; I am sure there are complexities to their job that I can not fathom. So I will simply ask everyone to choose compassion and patience rather than contention and blame. We are all working hard. It is an untenable situation in many ways. Please, please put down the poison pens, take a deep breath and see how you can help. I call for compassion not as a sentimental ploy, but as a tactical response to a group of viruses that are a mortal threat to our humanity.
I also call for the most wealthy corporate community members of San Francisco to also walk a mile in teachers’ and city administrators’ shoes (DSW instead of Prada) . Our SF based tech companies have so much compared to SFUSD. I notice at a private school that is back to in person instruction, one of the key ingredients to success is… money. There is enough money to hire more staff; to buy big screen TVs that help with hybrid school; for regular testing of the entire school population; for more sites for hand washing and sanitizing.
From my readings for my masters in Education at USF ( Paolo Freire, James Baldwin, Ibram X Kendi, bell hooks, Candice Valenzuela, Tiffani Marie, Kenjus Watson, Patrick Camangian, Rick Ayers, among others) it feels like we have fallen into an old, familiar, dehumanizing trap. The trap of turning teammates into enemies. The real enemies, the oppressors, have the resources to slip into the shadows and pull their cozy comforts around them. And some of the oppressors are mutating into vaccine-resistant strains. Rather than helping, the oppressors, human or viral, profit from the strife.
Compassion, listening and compromise are the only way to make our way through this. Do it for the kids, for goodness’ sake. Or, if you need another reason to change your mind and work together, become more compassionate and imaginative because it is logical, rather than foolhardy. Let’s not, as a municipality, fall prey to the habit of polarizing to the point of not listening to each other. We can leave that to others in other parts of the country. And, by the way, if you are rolling your eyes when you hear me talk about compassion, I get it. I have rolled my eyes when I am tired and anxious and sad about all the death and brutality and someone says all we need is compassion. But that doesn’t do me credit. It’s easier and simpler to blame someone or something so that I can absolve myself of responsibility to be the change I want to see.
That said, the reason I am writing now is because I have not been able to STOP rolling my eyes when I think about growing discord between two desperately needed parts of the city government. Please. Please work together.
And, (tapping the mic,) I call on our esteemed corporate interests to summon compassion and innovation to help the San Francisco community surmount this problem. The reason private schools are back in session and able to stay that way is because of financial resources. It takes money to open school campuses.( And activities for Black History Month will not cause safety protocols to grind to a halt.)
Please, hip tech fabulous companies with one word names, think about what you can do to end this strife and expedite getting students back to schools. Tech industries in San Francisco, you all have such an opportunity to not only be generous but to support future generations…who might well grow up to use lots of of your products.
Please, Dennis Herrera and team, please consider diplomacy and offering a helping hand rather than socking beleaguered school officials with more work. Maybe you could use your legal clout to help get teachers vaccinated? Just a thought.
My two cents: Right now with all that is bearing down on us, contention between two parts of a brilliant city community is fatal; compassion, on the other hand, is strategic.
And, hey, students, hopefully you are rolling your eyes at all these divisive shenanigans. I hope you are staying curious about what these harried adults are doing and not doing. Hopefully you are taking notes and seeing the better path. I trust you and know you will save us all with your brilliance. Stay well, stay connected. Practice spacious solidarity.
