“Public schools were facing staffing shortages prior to covid, and the pandemic has only made those shortages more acute,” wrote Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in an email.
Health was also the leading factor in Katy Ward-Crossan’s decision to leave the District of Columbia Public Schools and the profession she had long dreamed of entering. As a kid she had difficulty learning and credits her academic success to her own dedicated teachers who worked with her one-on-one. She wanted to pay that forward as a teacher who got children “to understand that they can learn, no matter how they are struggling.
In the meantime, Ward-Crossan is at home with her daughter, who was born in June. “I wanted to do anything I could to protect this pregnancy,”her dream of being a teacher, that is not currently possible. “I miss the classroom dearly,” she says.Life outside the classroom is also important to Calvert County, Md., band teacher Stephen Lane, and remote teaching made him recognize that he didn’t really have one.
Lexington Park’s Peggy McAloon says that she had long realized something was missing, not in her life but in the lives of her students, who were facing obstacles not of their own making. And she, like other teachers, tried to bridge those gaps. “I always struggled with taking care of the whole child, of kids that were hungry, that didn’t bring in school supplies, [that had] dirty clothes,” she says.
Like McAloon, Aeriale N. Johnson, 45, thinks right now the best way for her to help students in the classroom is outside of it. Through her 23-year career teaching in schools from Florida to rural Alaska to San Jose, she says she observed a maze of inequities in the public education system, which the pandemic laid bare.
Because school boards have been coopted by dark money PACs and treat educators like crap, for crap salaries.
Probably the shit pay and astroturfed anti-vax/anti-mask movements.
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