A Message from My Past Self

We all need to continue to push for a better public school system, because no one will do it for us.

Going back through old posts, I found a draft that was over three years old that seems worth sharing as public schools creep past the halfway mark towards summer. I’m not going to change the original wording, which was shared on social media at the time, but I will add some links and footnotes for context.

September 23, 2020:

My response to a parent who seemed angry about our day of action¹ today:

For the record, we are trying to get people to take action because we are understaffed and under-resourced. We want to be in class with students, and we don’t want more and more teachers to leave the profession.

If we could get the legislature and others to act by voting alone, we would, but we voted and it didn’t work. If we could do it with protests outside of school hours, we would, but we protested outside of school hours, and it didn’t work (largely because many of the same parents and community members who call us essential and say we are abandoning kids have actually “abandoned” those sa…