Letter: Appreciation For Educators And Community
Elementary school class in school library in Amherst. Photo: arps.org
We, the undersigned, understand and empathize with the frustration that many feel with the continued closure of our school buildings. The limitations of remote learning and the profound impact having kids at home has on working families has pushed many to their limits. The struggle is real and not felt equally. This past year has shown more than ever how much our society relies on public schools for provision of social services. We are all experiencing loss, grief, trauma, and a sense of powerlessness. We need to be kind to ourselves and to each other, and come together as a community.
We recognize that educators are working harder than ever to make remote learning as good as it can be. Having kids at home has offered an opportunity to see into the classroom, and we have been impressed with the thought that has gone into adapting pedagogical approaches for the virtual environment, the efforts by educators to build community and to keep students engaged in what is a challenging medium. We have seen educators demonstrate exceptional creativity and willingness to learn new technologies while teaching. We have seen middle and high school syllabi that are comparable to — and in some cases, superior to — college syllabi on similar topics. We have seen that remote learning, in some cases, can afford a better student-teacher ratio, allow educators to more easily meet their students one-on-one, and provide technological advantages, such as language translation and captions.
We support the right of APEA members and their elected leadership to negotiate for the safest working conditions they can, and their right to expect agreements to be honored. While we understand it is not the intention of anyone to pressure individuals to return to school if they are not comfortable, public discourse can have that effect.
Stating the obvious, at the root of the problems we face is the inadequate federal and state response to the pandemic. While the COVID metric agreed upon in September by APEA, the school committee and the superintendent may seem low and rigid in hindsight, it is what the parties agreed to and we respect APEA members’ right to stick to it. Any return to in-person school will take careful planning, in collaboration with educators and other school staff, to ensure that students who are the highest priority — as identified by the educators and beginning with the side letters already on the table — return to a safe, healthy, and supportive space.
We encourage all, no matter their position on when to re-open school buildings, to direct their energy and activism into advocating for state officials to allow school staff to be vaccinated now, to make widespread testing available in schools, for a restructuring of state funding to school districts, and for taking the community closure precautions that the CDC recommends.
There is light at the end of the tunnel. By September, we are hopeful that we can safely reopen for all students who want to return. In the meantime, we want to acknowledge and applaud our educators who have made herculean efforts to provide an education under incredibly challenging circumstances. We, as a community of parents, educators, and administrators need to work together, across our differences, to come up with the best possible solution for our children, families, educators, and the greater community we all share.
Amber Cano-Martin
Catherine Corson
Toni Cunningham
Irene Dujovne
Laura Hunter
Sheilah Jones
Amy Martin
Laura Muller
Jennifer Page
Thank you for writing this and voicing this position which is shared by many parents.
All of this. I am grateful that someone took the time to articulate this perspective. “While we understand it is not the intention of anyone to pressure individuals to return to school if they are not comfortable, public discourse can have that effect.” Our words matter. As we say at Fort River, let’s choose love.
Dear Toni and others –
Thank you for writing and sharing this. I believe the issue with the argument in this letter is captured in the following sentence: “While the COVID metric agreed upon in September by APEA, the school committee and the superintendent may seem low and rigid in hindsight, it is what the parties agreed to and we respect APEA members’ right to stick to it.”
This pandemic has tested the adaptive abilities of our educational systems to their limits (and beyond). The APEA leadership appears to have “won” a negotiation about the metric that is in their current MOU. As we all know, this was negotiated at a chaotic and highly unstable time, and there was much less available information then than there is now.
APEA leadership could represent a good faith interest in addressing the academic and social-emotional needs of kids by a willingness to re-negotiate that number in the face of emerging evidence. There are many districts, large and small, who are doing so safely.
As we hear about school systems opening across the Valley, the state, and the country, does it seem fair to Amherst kids that they must stay home because of “APEA members’ right to stick to it?”
I also do not agree with the school committee’s approach to asking individual teachers to circumvent their union’s position. However, I certainly do not feel that “two wrongs make a right.” This MOU metric should be re-negotiated, with the advice and guidance of public health experts, using the most up to date available knowledge.
Thank you very much for sharing this thoughtful letter, and thank you especially for your whole-hearted and completely accurate support for the individual teachers. They are making heroic efforts, all across the state and the country. However, for the reasons above I cannot support this letter.
Thank you for your time & attention.
Sincerely,
“This MOU metric should be re-negotiated, with the advice and guidance of public health experts, using the most up to date available knowledge.”
Perhaps, but be aware that some recent “guidance” about reopening schools before staff and students are vaccinated (including remarks from the new CDC director, and a paper published last month in JAMA by CDC scientists) appears to have seriously statistical and logical flaws — please see the comments to the JAMA article by other scientists here
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2775875
and further comments here
https://www.amherstindy.org/2021/02/05/from-other-sources-news-for-and-about-amherst-30-a-special-focus-on-reopening-schools/#comment-4472
Rob,
With all due respect, as a scientist like yourself knows– a comment is a comment. Anyone can have views on how the study, analyses etc. should have been done. That is a very different thing from a retraction in which the authors and/or journal decide that there are serious enough concerns to remove the paper from the journal. If there is a retraction (which there has not been), it would then be appropriate to point to these comments as carrying substantial weight.
I live this on both sides– my husband, his two brothers, and sister-in-law all teach in-person in Massachusetts public schools. My family members’ experiences echo what the CDC has stated– cases are isolated and are not occurring due to transmission in their schools. In addition, my 5 year old attends a remote learning center in Amherst where she is in a classroom all day with 10 other children. Every local district has provided more in-person learning than ARPS (see link to my December Indy letter below). I find it hard to envision that Hadley would have brought students back last week if there was any evidence that transmission was happening in their buildings.
Many have been frustrated with Republicans’ unwillingness to trust science throughout the pandemic. This desire to discredit CDC scientists when it comes to schools is the other side of the same coin. I’m not saying to trust blindly but I am saying that it is inappropriate to put the same weight on two comments as on an article written by experts and peer-reviewed by 3 or so other experts, all of whom presumably asked themselves the very same questions about the quality of the papers that informed their position. As the CDC is in the business of protecting public health, I think we should be asking ourselves why they would be motivated to put students and teachers in a situation if it is clearly unsafe and will exacerbate the pandemic.
https://www.amherstindy.org/2020/12/11/85-percent-of-hampshire-county-towns-have-in-person-learning-when-will-we/
Thanks for taking the time to write, Allecia.
We both agree that the peer review process generally sets a higher bar than most other forms of editorial scrutiny, yet it is never* infallible. But please note that — unlike our comments to the Indy — all JAMA comments are also reviewed by the editors
https://jamanetwork.com/pages/commenting-policy
(and many are rejected). Independent of any additional authority imbued by that editorial review, the first two JAMA comments also speak for themselves: both appear well-founded, and both raise serious questions about the JAMA article.
I understand — and empathize with — the predicament in which this pandemic has placed parents of young kids. I also sympathize with those who are older or who may otherwise be at higher risk for serious illness (or worse) from a COVID infection. But as much as we might like the CDC to make this terrible problem go away, unfortunately this JAMA article (authored by 3 of the CDC’s scientific staff) does not appear to be the hoped-for magic wand. I have no idea what motivated** these 3 CDC staffers to publishing this article, and give them the benefit of the doubt if they’ve made an honest mistake. So I’m with Galileo: good science requires careful observation, clear reasoning, and a healthy dose of skepticism….
— Rob
[*Even in mathematics: I spent several years in my “youth” writing synopses of recently published papers in my field for Math Reviews, and was surprised when one of the first articles landing on my desk had an easy counterexample to a claimed theorem — the editors of the journal that published the article may have been asleep at the wheel, but I also wonder if the Math Reviews editors had devised a clever test for us rookie reviewers. ;-]
[**One hopes the “publish or perish” principle doesn’t prevail at the CDC!]
Rob,
To clarify, I didn’t state that schools should be open because remote learning is inconvenient for families with young children. What I did state is that my husband teaches in-person in a public school 20 mins away daily— he is safe, transmission is not happening in the school. Three of our immediate family teach in-person in eastern Mass— transmission is not happening in their schools. My daughter spends 21 hours per week in a remote learning center classroom with 10 other kids. She eats there, interacts with other ARPS students when not online— transmission isn’t happening there either. And transmission isn’t happening in Hadley schools, where they’ve had 81% of elementary school students in person daily.
Calls have been made to restore trust in science (see link). The JAMA paper cites five studies on transmission in schools, one with negative findings. Restoring trust won’t happen if those of us who sit on editorial boards and are most familiar with the peer review process are willing to dismiss six teams of scientists, peer reviewers, and editors— and the official guidelines for schools put forth by the CDC—because the findings don’t support our preferred view and have been questioned in two comments.
I hope that we can each do our part to communicate appropriately about scientific findings. Science isn’t infallible but it’s hard for me to dismiss the findings of multiple research teams that fully match the daily experiences in my household because two individuals have alternative views.
https://www.ama-assn.org/about/leadership/effort-restore-trust-science-must-begin-now
Best,
Allecia
Rob and Allecia, these thoughtful posts reflect the incredible complexity of this decision-making process.
Of note, the MA Department of Labor Relations has ruled (2/9/21) that the decision itself is not an appropriate subject of negotiations.
“any decision as to which educational model to utilize is a non-delegable management right that cannot be susceptible to the process of collective bargaining.”
(Page 7):
https://pubinfo.dlr.state.ma.us/ViewDocument.aspx?view=P:\TM%20Documents\Case%20Docs\ULP\MUP-20-8369\Dismissal.PDF
One hopes that the district & union are able to move towards a safe re-opening in a collaborative fashion.
However, this ruling means that the decision to re-open is best informed by careful consideration of expert opinion, and not at the negotiating table.