It’s the “First Day of School Eve”for me and as I prepare to meet my new students in a little box on Zoom, I find myself in a space of anxiousness for so many kids on the other side of this little box. In this little box, across Atlanta and America, students are gathering to learn and to start their own journey of “distance learning”. But I am anxious for the little faces I will not see in my little box. For far too many of Atlanta’s kids, there's so many barriers already for them to learn and now in the continuous saga of this Pandemic, now there are entire boulders. From internet connectivity, lack of devices, and limited parent supervision, teaching in this climate just got a whole lot harder than ever before. That’s why when I got a text yesterday to help give kids lunch because Atlanta Public Schools (APS) added another barrier to the list for kids to get food, I grew even more frustrated. APS required families to preorder lunch a week in advance ONLINE. Did they miss the memo that families already are struggling with internet access? Did they not consider how their lunch request process would adversely impact the very community of students they sought to help? How did they not understand that families with so many odds against them would find it more than difficult to request food online a week in advance? Why didn't they provide a call-in option or other alternatives for ordering food?These were the million and one questions in my mind because I knew kids would go hungry if we do not find alternative solutions. Now more than ever, we must be more intentional about how we create solutions in this season. Yes, we are all under a great deal of pressure and must meet a ton of ever evolving needs but we must stay intentional about how we design solutions during and after this pandemic or we risk deepening the hole of inequity that we seek to solve. So, tonight I answered the text of course ready to help and advocate for families that could not. I made lunches for the local nonprofit who is standing in the gap for working parents, frustrated with broken systems and continued inequity but resolved to be apart of the solution. Yes, I pray that my little bit of help removed some of the barriers that some of our kids are facing so that more kids in Atlanta can be ready to learn from their little box on the screen. But it still reminds me that we have so much work to do as we begin to reimagine rebuilding education better than before. We don't want to ever go back to "normal" or where we were because that did nothing for poor black and brown children. We must use this space to retool ourselves, introspectively root out inequity, build new systems and processes that are rooted in community and people, and most importantly include those very people every step of the way. We no longer can build solutions without the people we are building for and just show them a fancy presentation at the end. In the words of Dr. Amber Johnson, we have to radically include them at the beginning. Solutions must speak to the human experience and not a business and efficiency one. Yes, that may take longer and may feel uncomfortable but if we don't we risk more generations of families stuck in poverty, low income communities with poor health and poor education. If I have learned nothing else from this pandemic, is we must be willing to do something radical in this moment to get to where we are going. I mean the FDA has a projected vaccine in 1 year when it normally takes a decade. So yes, we have to be willing and ready to be radical. On this "First day of school eve", I am challenging every teacher, community leader, parent and elected official to be radical as we rebuild for our future so we can remove these boulders that stand in our kids way and so those little faces in those little boxes have a fighting chance.
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AuthorEducator, student advocate and community activists. Archives
October 2021
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