Teachers Exhausted After 37 Days Of School
Let’s review: Thanks to Gov. Ralph Northam, Virginia was the first state to close schools through the end of the 2020 school year, leaving children and parents scrambling to figure out how “remote learning” would work.
It didn’t.
Instead of throwing open school doors in the fall of 2020, Northam set rules so onerous that most could not reopen and some schools stayed virtual almost until the end of the 2021 school year.
Unsurprisingly, standardized test scores plummeted. At the Beach, the pass rate dropped by 19 percent from pre-pandemic SOLs.
Kids are finally back in school, wearing masks all day, distanced from their classmates and friends, eating silent lunches, being quarantined if they were anywhere near another student who tested positive for Covid.
Insanity. All of it.
More insanity.
Kids don’t need LESS time in class. They need MORE. It’s almost as if students don’t matter anymore.
And parents? Those people trying to earn a living who don’t get to claim burnout to score halfdays? The heck with them.
They’ll just have to scramble for childcare on Wednesday afternoons now that the school board has thrown a monkey wrench into the school schedule.
“Many have told me they’re exhausted and burned out and it’s only October,” said the sad, scruffy superintendent.
He said teachers were “overwhelmed” in these “trying times” and that he needs his employees to “take care of themselves.”
Here’s an idea, Spence: Take care of the kids.
If teachers are overworked, find a way to reduce the paperwork you require from them. They didn’t go into teaching to push papers, they wanted to be with students.
During last year’s virtual school teachers didn’t teach on Mondays. That was set aside for “planning” time. It was an open secret that some teachers used the day for personal errands.
The losers? Kids.
Now they’ll be free on Wednesday afternoons.
The losers? Kids.
Then again, who cares about the students? The governor doesn’t care about them. He closed their schools and at the behest of teachers unions made it nearly impossible to reopen them. The General Assembly certainly doesn’t care about kids, they passed HB257, which allows principals to keep secret sex crimes committed in schools.
School boards? LOL. They forced kids into soggy cloth masks despite ample evidence that they do nothing to prevent the spread of the virus. Teachers unions? Hilarious.
Parents still care. But they feel helpless. When they want to protect girls from boys in bathrooms and locker rooms they’re called transphobic. When they object to pornography in school libraries they’re accused of book burning. When they protest at school board meetings they’re called domestic terrorists.
If parents come out and vote next week, they can begin to reverse this Virginia trend of “Kids Last” that is ruining our public schools.
