Reply to WTU/DCPS reach agreement

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Reply to "WTU/DCPS reach agreement"

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[quote=Anonymous]

So NOW you all care about the achievement gap. I've been on DCUM for years and have rarely if ever seen any of you worried about students of color in this city, or the inequities that exist in DCPS. You bring it up now to somehow support your case that schools need to reopen.

Here is how out of touch you are. While Ward 3 and other non-title 1 schools have up to 80% of parents basically kicking down the doors for schools to reopen, the reality is completely different in Wards 7 & 8. Most parents here do not want their children to return to in-person learning. I know of a school where under 10% were interested. Why? Because they have directly seen the impact of this virus on their communities. While you all fret and think of strategies to secretly travel to Florida to see grandma for Christmas, my students are thinking of the loved ones they have lost due to the virus.

You are living in a completely different world and a completely differently reality. Teachers (WTU), the vast majority of whom are Black in this city, see the virus for what it is.

We should be focused on making virtual learning better for students. We should be focused on keeping everyone healthy and safe until a vaccine is available for all of us. This is far from ideal but it is the reality we are living in. If you are being negative around your children they will feed off of you! We are all in the struggle together. [/quote]

I work in DC Medicaid and call and visit families in wards 7 and 8 all day long.  
The tragedy is that although the families in these wards do not want to return to school, most of their kids are currently not receiving ANY education.  I have hundreds of patients (and it would be thousands if I had thousands of patients) who are not logging in at all.  It's a completely lost year.  
I will say the thinking behind not wanting to return is two fold:
1)many of these families have seen people die from the virus. 
2)many of these families do not value education to the degree that people in ward 3 do.  This is not racist or classist to say.  It's reality.  Under the best of circumstances (pre-Covid) I spent dozens of hours per week convincing people to send their kids to schools.  A common call is "oh, why isn't XX in school?"  Answer "Well, she didn't feel like going so I kept her home"  "For two weeks?"  "Well, she's 10.  I wanted to give her a break".  Or similar.  Obviously this wouldn't happen in most ward 3 households.  It just wouldn't.   And yet it happens every day in other wards.  I spent a TON of time educating parents on the importance of consistent school.  It's very, very difficult for parents because they never had this modeled to them.  Do you know how many parents in DC have less than a high school education?  A TON!  The majority of the ones I call.  It's very difficult for people to value what their parents didn't value to them.  [/quote]

Thank you fir sharing your experience. I’d like to offer a counterpoint that maybe it isn’t that these families don’t value education. Maybe they don’t value the education they are getting at their particular school because they are not getting the same experience as a ward 3 school (- reflection of systems, not the excellent people that work in schools east of the river) as well as the very real deficit of opportunity upon completion of that schooling. And likely other additional and very reasonable reasons they are not hung ho about getting back to school. My point is that their lack of enthusiasm doesn’t sound like a personal deficit to me. [/quote]

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