Sitting in my hotel room, I noticed a posting on Nextdoor that advertised a protest to demand schools open for in-person classes. As I probed deeper, I saw that this was unfortunately a growing sentiment among a faction of parents. As I prepare as a teacher myself to go back into the “classroom”, remotely or in person, I’m reminded of how dependent America is on teachers to answer Zinyeka’s question. We are expected to fill every gap for our most marginalized children and be the nurse, therapist, coach, sponsor, and even parent. But in the midst of a global pandemic, we are being called to fill more gaps and now even being asked to risk our lives and indirectly our families. But I can’t teach from the grave so what will we do with our children then. This virus has shined a brighter light on America’s deepest inequities so those who have the means will be better equipped to answer this question, while the poorest parents will be blamed for not having an answer at all. So what do we do? We know underserved minority groups in low- income communities and schools have higher risk of contracting and spreading the Coronavirus, so teachers in those communities are inevitably more likely to contract it as well. This is not rocket science. So why is there a cry from parents to open schools irrespective of this knowledge. Well absent strong federal and state leadership to curb the spread of this virus, again someone must be responsible. Why not just put this burden square on the shoulders of teachers and schools as always? Sadly, this logic only puts more workload and stress onto already overworked educators. So I offer another solution as we reimagine who cares for our children and stands in the gap for our teachers and parents. Community. No one is going to jump out and come save us from this virus. Dr. Fauci is great and has renewed hope of a promising vaccine, but as history has shown us, black communities are the last to get access to quality healthcare or exploited by it. So we are all challenged to look in the mirror and ask what can we do. From parents looking to create unique learning co-ops or pod bubbles, to an entrepreneur who creates a virtual classroom to teach 1000 kids, we all have a role to play and must step up and play it. With this in mind, I started to connect with local Atlanta parents and community members to see what we could do. We started with a simple script for parents to talk about their student’s needs with teachers and volunteer tutors in order for them to create an individualized learning plan (ILP) for their child. Then I started to think about what spaces we could set up to facilitate safe spaces for student learning. Most may not know but a house full of kids does not make an ideal learning environment. Thus, I reached out to Atlanta’s Parks and Recreations to see if we can create popup tents and small outdoor tutor spaces in local parks. I am still waiting on this final word on this front. But, the idea is that parents can create learning pods for a consistent small group of kids where volunteers can tutor them in a local park or virtually online. Parents can sign up for an age-appropriate pod group online. The student pods and volunteers would be regularly tested and temperatures will be checked before each weekly session. Each pod and parents will work on designated learning goals from their ILP and regularly track progress with parents. Of course, this is only an idea and I am still waiting to hear back about how to create space for this in the midst of so many unknowns. But we have to start somewhere as a community building up space for us to show up and stand in the gap for those who need us most at this moment. So to answer Zinyeka’s question, “Who will raise the child?”, the resounding answer must be, “We will!”.
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Stressed out and overwhelmed by all the pressures of Corona and non-stop racism, my husband and I set out to get away from it all and take a vacation. So we attempted to put it all on pause and take a trip to Puerto Rico. But as we trekked to our flight, along the airport’s long terminal A corridor, a sculpture screamed a question that has been haunting me for a while,”Who will raise the child?”. It’s a profound sculpture by Zimbabwe Artist, Gladman Zinyeka, that explores the socio-economic and displacement effects of the AIDs pandemic in Africa. However, as a teacher and new black mother, in the trenches of a new global pandemic, the art spoke to me with renewed meaning and an overwhelming urgency to find the answer to its question. With long-standing systemic health and social inequities plaguing every aspect of our lives, according to the CDC, African Americans are at increased risk of getting COVID-19 and are 5 times more likely to be hospitalized and/or dying from Covid-19 than their white counterparts. Just as the AIDS pandemic disproportionately hit Africa by storm with over 50% of the world’s HIV infections in sub-saharan Africa alone and 30 million live loss present day, Corona too will adversely impact blacks in America and abroad, merely because most have poor living and working conditions. So the truth is that it is not a matter of “if” black families will be impacted by the Covid-19 virus, it is “when” and how will we as a community respond to the loss. Most are talking about the economic loss of this virus as if we are a business and this is just another cost of doing it. But as a teacher and a black mother, I think about the human loss and the generational domino effect of that loss that will reverberate for decades in an even poorer black community than before. Who will raise those children deeply impacted by the effects of Coronavirus and all its indirect casualties? Yet, on social media platforms and from members of the Atlanta City Council, there are demands to ban and punish black children selling water in the street and even punish their parents as they try to simply take care of their families. All the while, city parks and recreational programs have been shuttered, youth programs such as Pathfinder, STEP Forward and the Mayor’s Summer Youth program have all been decimated in the past decade, multiple service industry jobs have been adversely impacted by the virus and not to mention the city’s mismanaged Atlanta Worksource Agency which returned $1.3 million last year for failure to spend money and place people in jobs. So again, with all this loss, who do we point the finger at and blame for these systemic issues of poverty? It seems we’ve chosen to blame our children and the least among us at a critical time when they need us most. Just as with the AIDs pandemic, Coronavirus too will forever change the lives of our children, but it is vital that we respond with compassion, love and patience as we seek to understand the lived experiences of our children and their families in this season. So I ask again, as the late sculptor Zinyeka asks, who will raise our children as this pandemic devours our communities and our families and how will we as a community respond? |
AuthorEducator, student advocate and community activists. Archives
October 2021
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