Teachers Know Schools Aren’t Safe to Reopen
No wonder our union is considering a strike.
We are high-school teachers in Brooklyn, and we love what we do. We want nothing more than to go back into the classroom and teach our students. However, we have little confidence in New York City’s strategy for reopening during the pandemic. Officials have given families and teachers vague assurances and clichéd promises, but few concrete plans and steps. Schools are not yet safe enough for us—or the students—to return.
The department of education says that schools will have adequate ventilation, more nurses, and sufficient custodial staff to maintain elaborate hygiene theatrics. Officials claim that they have purchased enough “electrostatic disinfectors” and personal protective equipment for every school. And yet the budget is in such crisis, due to shortfalls in tax revenue and potential cuts, that 22,000 city workers and 9,000 teachers may face layoffs as soon as October 1. The department promises accountability and transparency, but will not even disclose how many educators became ill in the spring. It’s Schrödinger’s reopening: The city both can afford to do it all and can’t afford what we had before.
Teachers are in an exceedingly difficult position if unsafe buildings reopen. No wonder the union is considering a strike, an extraordinary action that would have detrimental consequences for teachers in the city. The Taylor Law, passed in 1967 after a Transit Workers Union strike that shut down New York City, imposes penalties on public-sector workers and unions who strike. For each day a worker is out, two days of pay are deducted. The city would issue large financial penalties to the union, which members would eventually pay, and the union’s leadership would face possible imprisonment.
We can lose a couple weeks’ pay without falling into bankruptcy. But that isn’t true for many of our fellow teachers, three-quarters of whom are women. In 2019, the median rent takes up 65 percent of a first-year teacher’s salary and 42.5 percent of the average teacher’s salary.
But the alternative to striking might be worse. Teachers in the city are already familiar with the health costs of the coronavirus. Several of our colleagues got sick in the spring. Some of our students did too. One reported having a temperature of 104 degrees. The family of another student got so sick that she was forced to be a full-time caretaker, for both of her parents and her younger sibling. Several had parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles die from the virus.
New York City teachers have heard the horror stories from states with schools that have CONTINUE READING: Teachers Know Schools Aren’t Safe to Reopen - The Atlantic
