Flint Educators Ask: ‘How Dare You Poison Our Children?’
When teacher Michelle Gushen celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in her Flint, Mich., high school classroom this year, every one of her students said they have a dream, too. And it’s about clean water.
“Who would ever think a child would have to ask for clean water in the United States?” Gushen asked NEA President Lily Eskelsen García during her February visit to the area. “And [we] don’t really have an answer for them,” Gushen said.
But NEA does have an answer for Flint students who have been asking their teachers if they’ll die from drinking the lead-poisoned water that poured from their faucets last year. The Association also has a message for lawmakers: Not for one more second will NEA stand idly by in the midst of the institutional and environmental racism that enabled the water crisis in Flint.
“My brave colleagues are worried and heartsick, but they are determined that justice will be done and their union makes them strong,” wrote Eskelsen García in a post to her blog, Lily’s Blackboard.
In the short term, this means NEA members will fight to hold accountable those who are responsible for poisoning some 8,000 Flint children, and press Congress to make critical investments in nurses, counselors, nutritional programs, and special education supports in every Flint school, says United Teachers of Flint President Karen Christian. Because the very best strategy to countering lead exposure in children, says Dr. Helen Binns, director of the lead evaluation clinic at Chicago Children’s Hospital, is to provide them with excellent educational experiences—at school and at home.
In the long term, it also means tackling the institutional racism that causes the excessive exposure of Black and Brown Americans to toxic air and water.
“How dare you poison our children?” demands Flint teacher Darlene McClendon.
Not an Act of God
The Flint water crisis is entirely man made. At its headwaters are men who would sacrifice the health of poor, Black children to save some dollars.
The actions that would enable Flint to poison its own children kicked off in 2011, when Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder pushed through a far-reaching law that expanded his ability to seize power from the elected leaders of this majority Black city and hand it to an “emergency manager”—a person whose primary duties appear to be cutting costs.
The emergency manager law “rests on the premise that democracy in predominantly African-American cities is unnecessary and that the state knows best,” wrote Louise Seamster and Jessica Welburn in The Root. Indeed, 52 percent of Michigan’s African-American residents—compared to 2 percent of White residents—live in areas that are governed by emergency managers, report Detroit NAACP leaders.
In 2014, Flint’s profit-motivated managers made a decision: They would stop buying water from Detroit, ending 50 years of service, and instead get it from the Flint River—a graveyard for abandoned appliances and auto parts. The city figured to save about $8.5 million.
Soon after, Flint residents noticed changes in their water. A pastor told the New Yorker it got so stinky he stopped using it for baptisms. General Motors complained the water was rusting their auto parts. And yet, when Flint residents protested the smell, color, and taste of the water flowing from their taps, state officials told them to “relax.”
Eventually, a local pediatrician determined that the percentage of Flint children with lead poisoning doubled after Flint switched to the river, and even tripled in some neighborhoods. At the same time, Virginia Tech researchers found that at least a quarter of Flint households had water that exceeded regulatory limits for lead. In some homes, the drinking water actually met the definition of toxic waste.
“Everyone was being poisoned,” says Eskelsen García.
‘Are We Going to Die?’
These days, the fifth- and sixth-graders in McClendon’s classroom play distractedly with plastic water bottles. This year’s students are less attentive than previous groups and “when you ask them a question, it’s gone like you didn’t teach them Flint Educators Ask: ‘How Dare You Poison Our Children?' - NEA Today:
