"Plain and simple: it is wrong to reopen schools at this time" -Michael Flanagan

“There has been a growing push by the Trump administration and the Coronavirus deniers to reopen schools, and it is about to get ugly. Politicians are trying to convince parents that the reason they will not be able to return to work is because of lazy, selfish teachers…

“Politicians want the pressure on. They want to force schools to open before it is safe in order to get the economy moving. They want this, despite the fact that scientific data does not support the notion that reopening schools is safe. If we were to open schools now, we would literally be sacrificing children, teachers, and the health of families, to the wishes of these politicians who clearly have no regard for our lives.

“To accomplish this, they are seeking to create discord among us—it is a divide-and-conquer strategy at its most obvious. Scapegoat teachers and their unions as lazy and greedy, as unconcerned about the stress parents are under. Portray parents as having no concern for the professionals who educate their children.

“Plain and simple: it is wrong to reopen schools at this time. If schools are open now, there will be no safety. Social distancing in a school, even in a blended hybrid model, will never work. Air conditioning re-circulates the infected air. Schools cannot fund the constant cleaning, testing, and infrastructure maintenance necessary to make things sanitary. And it would be virtually impossible to enforce the mask mandates, especially among the children of COVID-19 hoax-mongers.

“It is wrong to force people back to work so they won’t have to risk eviction, food insecurity, and poverty—those who cannot afford to stay home. This will disproportionately affect communities of color, as COVID-19 has throughout the crisis. This… is by design, a fringe benefit for the white nationalist base of far too many of these politicians.

“The government is seeking to penalize workers who do not return to jobs to work under dangerous conditions by taking their unemployment benefits. The government threatens to penalize schools that do not fully reopen by eliminating funding.

“The real tragedy here is that none of this is actually about students, parents, or teachers. Trump does not care about education, nor does he care about the social and emotional needs of children. It’s all about money for the wealthy. The wealthy: the elites who can afford to keep their own children home, while the rest of us risk our lives and the lives of our children, for their own benefit.

“Teachers are essential workers, on that we can all agree. And we will continue to teach our best throughout the crisis. But we must be essential while continuing to work remotely. To place children and teachers in the same building simply because it forwards the agenda of Trump and some politicians is foolhardy at best, mass murder at worst.

“Children will recover from the difficulties of remote learning. They will recover from not being face-to-face with their teachers as they learn the Pythagorean Theorem, cell meiosis, or how to write a business letter. What they won’t be able to recover from is death. Death, or the fact that they have carried home a disease that killed their family members. They will never get over the emotional burden of losing a classmate, of losing a teacher.

Teachers want to help families struggling during remote learning. We love our students and our profession, and we want to support parents during this once-in-a- lifetime crisis. We need to work together, and not against each other” (Badass Teachers’Association).

-Michael Flanagan