NYC Educator: Letter to Staff on Easter/ Passover Break

NYC Educator: Letter to Staff on Easter/ Passover Break

Letter to Staff on Easter/ Passover Break

Dear colleagues:

This last week or two has gone by in a blur for me. Without actually leaving my home and going to work, it feels like one day just blends into another. Last night I was thinking about someone at the union who told me we were going to fight Cuomo on the rollback of Easter/ Passover break. It felt a world away but I’d only heard it 24 hours earlier.

It’s not easy for me to find words now, and I usually have them bubbling around everywhere. Here’s the thing—like you, I’ve been working around the clock trying to manage these online classes I’m giving. Like you, I’m on a pretty steep learning curve. We’re not the first to do this. There are a whole lot of cyber charter schools, and they are terrible. Bill Gates did an online program at a city school and it bombed, The students walked out in protest. Yet here we are trying to do this thing with virtually no prep whatsoever.

And now, while we’re already under all this pressure, we learn that our much-needed break has been pulled out from under us by Governor Cuomo. Cuomo looks like a big hero on TV, as he’s evidently a grownup who’s not insane. (Our standards for heroes have dropped since we were kids.)  It’s hard for me to see him like that. One of the reasons there are not enough hospital beds is that Cuomo has been closing hospitals for ten years. He’s also about to turn down almost seven billion dollars in Medicaid funding and talking cuts to education as opposed to taxing the New Yorkers who could best afford it.

Cuomo is responsible for our cumbersome and much-dreaded evaluation system. So forgive me if he’s your hero. He’s certainly not mine. That said, the legislature CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Letter to Staff on Easter/ Passover Break