‘You are all our kids, no matter what’: Award winning teachers band together, speak out to protect students
In the wake of the presidential election, dozens of the best teachers in the nation have banded together to say with a unified voice that public schools are valuable and that they must be safe places for students of every background, ethnicity, immigration status, sexual orientation and gender identity.
“You are all our kids, no matter what,” says the group, Protect Public Ed, in a video posted this week on its new website, protectpubliced.org.
The 44 teachers are all state teacher of the year award recipients. They said they were moved to speak out after a rash of troubling bullying incidents — at their own schools, in some cases, and in news reports nationwide — following Donald Trump’s presidential election victory on Nov. 8.
“Right after the election, we started seeing people inside and outside of the classroom feeling emboldened to say racially charged things to many of our students,” said Ryan Kaiser, Maryland’s teacher of the year. “That really started galvanizing how quickly we needed to get something done and get the message out there.”
Daniel Jocz, of California, said even in liberal Los Angeles, his students expressed fear of harassment and deportation.
The Southern Poverty Law Center documented nearly 900 hate incidents in the 10 days following the election, many of them in schools. Because the organization wasn’t tracking incidents before the election, it’s impossible to know whether Trump’s campaign — marked by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric and by allegations that he had sexually assaulted multiple women — coincided with a rise in such acts of hatred.
Many teachers have reported a change in the tenor and intensity of harassment on their campuses and in their communities. Talya Edlund, an elementary school teacher from Maine, said she and her colleagues wanted to create “a launchpad for teachers to feel like they could ‘You are all our kids, no matter what’: Award winning teachers band together, speak out to protect students - The Washington Post: