One of our Millennial daughters lives near us but her older sister lives about 1,000 miles away where she teaches middle school math at a private, non-charter, secular school. The week just past was her Spring Break, but the school suspended on-campus instruction on the preceding Friday. Earlier that week, on Monday, Donald John Trump told America —
“So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” — Trump in a tweet.
The following day, March 10, Trump said —
“And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
The World Health Organization didn’t name COVID-19 a pandemic until the following day.
Nevertheless, the experienced, resourceful and innovative Headmistress at my daughter’s school, in a state where the Governor still had yet another nine days before he would order public school closures, assessed the news reports and the underlying science, to make the risky but forward thinking decision to work with her staff and faculty to determine the feasibility of converting the school to a distance learning facility, offering the full curriculum to every grade, every student. As the feasibility of doing so became increasingly apparent the school readied itself to teach in this brave new world, in less than two weeks. Soon, the Headmistress informed parents, faculty and staff that the entire school would reopen on the Monday after the Spring Break, as a distance learning campus, with the entire faculty teaching remotely.
When I learned of all of this last Monday, I surmised that my daughter could just as well distance teach from our roomy townhouse in one of our city’s historic neighborhoods, as from her isolated, small, one bedroom apartment, so far away from her mother and me. So I rented her a one-way car hire with a hotel halfway down the road, from there to here, and she arrived on Thursday to hunker down with her septuagenarian parents and wait out the COVID apocalypse while social distancing with family.
Her school’s transition to distance learning is no simple thing and throughout what should have been their Spring vacation, the school’s faculty and Administration have been struggling with and working to solve the problems involved. At this time last month, most of these hard working educators had never even heard of the online, distance teaching platform they will be using to create virtual classrooms where they can teach an entire class of students, with remote, real time audio and video.
Students doing written work at home, say in math workbooks, can photograph pages with their phones to turn the work in for grading. Teachers are coordinating their schedules so that students can proceed, from the socially distanced safety of their own homes, from class to class in an orderly fashion that helps students and parents understand and appreciate that their school is still totally there for them. Hence, starting Monday morning, my dining room officially becomes a middle school math classroom for students who live 1,000 miles away.
But, notwithstanding the challenges and obstacles to pulling off this kind of transition, this isn’t rocket surgery or brain science. Getting it done has simply required foresight, flexibility, openness to innovation and resources. Yet it’s worth noting that problems of this crisis, that my daughter and her colleagues are working to find solutions for in two weeks, ought to and could have been foreseeable and addressed far in advance by a President and Administration that has “governed” us since 2017. But, sorry, no such luck, America.
So, I’m not writing this because of how much I admire my daughter’s professionalism and resourcefulness, or because of my appreciation for her Headmistress and the quality of the institution she administers. A better reason to write this is to illustrate the horrific preparedness gap in public education that exists, alongside other systemic failures in nearly every sector, resulting from an overall failure of national leadership. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Don and Betsy and the rest of your useless cabinet pukes. What one school is doing, in the case of my daughter’s classroom, with proper attention to preparedness and commitment of resources, every American school could have been prepared, in advance, to do. Though distance learning offers an imperfect response to the pandemic, it is far superior to all of the alternatives.
Actually, national pandemic planning had been going on for more than a decade before Trump and his gang invaded the White House and West Wing, and tossed the pandemic briefing books from their predecessors into dumpsters. Planning? We don’t need no stinkin’ planning!
For years, Trump’s Department of Education could have been listening to doctors, scientists and experienced professionals and public servants, and formulating plans to keep public education alive and functioning, even in the face of a pandemic, promulgating access to the tech and tools required to carry it out. But Trump’s Education Secretary, Betsy Devos, cares a great deal more about creating opportunities for the private sector to profit from education, than she cares about helping insure the continuity of education for this country’s primary and secondary school students, when a disaster strikes.
So, while schools all over the USA, without national leadership or support, face this pandemic almost entirely on their own, without any guidance or ability, for the most part, to restore continuity of education to America’s young students, at least one school, and hopefully others as well, searches for and implements strategies to keep the school’s doors open, at least to student’s minds, if not their socially distanced bodies. As of now, my daughter’s school does not plan to miss a single day of instruction due to the pandemic. How many American schools can say that at this point?
Government planning, of course, has long been anathema to Republicans of all stripes. In our rapidly evolving modern world, with all the emerging threats to humanity’s safety, that sort of indifference and lack of common sense was bound to catch up to us, sooner or later, and now, in education, along with every other sector, it has.
When I was in school, education, through the secondary level, was a right, for nearly all American students. Thanks to decades of conservative leadership, it has become a privilege, and subject to being snuffed out altogether, in the event of perfectly foreseeable catastrophes.
We have to do better, as a nation, or there won’t be a we anymore..
P.S.
From the Woozle Silver Lining Department. Just a week or so before the events described above, my daughter adopted a terrier puppy from a shelter near her home. This beautiful, intelligent and affectionate puppy was scheduled for euthanasia and my daughter’s adoption staved off her demise with only hours to spare. Obviously her new ward had to come with her when she relocated to join her Mom and Dad to wait out the pandemic. Without knowing exactly how it would work out, I expected my big hound, who has always been good with other dogs, to get on well with the much smaller puppy. I’m happy to report that they have very quickly become BFF’s.
Hunker down, y’all. The worst is yet to come. Our best hope right now lies in being distant, while still being together. Good night and good luck.