Recently, my mother and I were chatting over zoom when she asked a most unanticipated question: “are the schools in your area offering ‘mental health’ days?” I was nonplussed; the idea of a “mental health” day has a long history in our family, and my sister and I were allowed one per quarter during high school if we kept our grades up. So I wasn’t exactly sure what she was asking. However, I replied that I knew the Baltimore County Schools had recently announced they were giving the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off to reward teachers and staff for working so hard to return to in-person learning, and I asked her whether that was the kind of thing she meant.
It turned out that she did, in fact, mean “mental health” days and that the school districts in the St. Louis area are taking what are effectively “snow days” from time to time, supposedly to support the mental health and wellbeing of students and staff alike as they continue to struggle with the impacts of the pandemic. My niece, who is a sophomore in high school there, has apparently had some already this year, and my mother was curious about how regional this phenomenon was and what my thoughts were as an educator about it.
Little did either of us know that what we were discussing at the time turns out to be part of a far larger pattern, reported on this past week on NPR, and that the justification being offered by at least some of the St. Louis area schools about aiding mental health might not be so magnanimous after all. With the pandemic only intensifying and accelerating the staffing challenges already confronting education, it seems that schools at all levels in this country are now fighting on a sometimes daily basis simply to keep their literal doors open. Add in the bus driver shortage (so prevalent here in Maryland that I don’t even feel the need for a citation for this claim) and we not only have under-staffed schools; we have under-studented schools.
The simple truth, as my sister, the social worker, reminded me the other day, is that “burnout” is rapidly becoming a by-word for all who work in the human services sector of the economy, and insufficient employment in our schools is going to join overwhelmed hospitals and overworked actual mental health care providers in weighing down any return to “normalcy” we are longing to experience. Indeed, the very day the NPR story aired, I learned the sad news that one of the teachers at my school who had only just been hired in August—and a 15 year veteran in the profession!—had resigned effective immediately, citing his uncertainties about his ability to care for the kids anymore. Other colleagues, of course, have had to pick up his classes, putting an ever-greater burden on them, and the risk of popping even more “rivets” increases. Toss in the new omicron variant of COVID, and one might begin to think that the wonder isn’t that NPR can report on so many schools cancelling classes unexpectedly; the wonder is that so many schools are managing to stay open at all.
Yet, what has me motived to write once again isn’t the growing mental and emotional ennui and exhaustion that people who actively care for others are feeling right now. No, what has triggered this particular post is something one of the people interviewed in the NPR story said. The reporter was speaking with a mother from Montgomery County about their board of education’s decision to cancel the half-day of school the Wednesday before Thanksgiving when this individual remarked that:
Sitting there in the audience as a parent, it really hit me that I … and everybody in our community can no longer count on the public schools. And I feel like after the last year and a half, there was a lot of that sentiment that this is just not something we can count on [anymore].
Here was someone from one of the wealthiest school districts on the planet—whose teachers cannot even afford to live in the county where they teach and so face enormous daily commutes in the D.C. traffic—and she’s complaining about the inconvenience of losing what was a half-day schedule in the first place. To say I heard those words with a wide range of emotional response is a restraint on my part (and a lot of cortisol in the amygdala for that early in my morning!). But my overwhelming feeling was a sense of angry sadness because this mother’s words were simply capturing the essence of what so many interviewed in the story were basically complaining about: we need schools to babysit our children so that we can go about our adult lives, and we’re tired of having our adult lives unexpectedly interrupted.
Now, having written extensively before about how anti-child and anti-parenting our culture has become, hearing it yet again shouldn’t have surprised me or pressed so many of my proverbial buttons quite so quickly. But part of the reason why I say my reaction was “angry sadness” is that the insight this NPR story provoked was the realization that we have created a socio-economic system of such massive consumption that it requires our schools to serve as housing centers for our children simply to function. In fact, listening to the hourly-wage essential-work parents interviewed for this story, it was clear: they have no choice but to see schools this way because without essentially tax-funded day-care centers for their children, no one in the house eats and even the house could disappear.
However, just because our schools do serve this purpose doesn’t mean they should, and while I’m not naïve—education in this country has always served an economic role—school-as-babysitter should not be one of them. What’s more, the fact that the pandemic has revealed our economy’s total reliance on this school-as-babysitter paradigm to sustain itself should give all of us significant pause. Because what it says about a society that it has become so consumed with consuming that its citizens must live paycheck to paycheck isn’t pretty.
In fairness to the NPR story, it did address the negative impacts these disruptions in schools are having on children’s learning, especially at-risk children and those with special needs, and I add my voice that the sooner we address all the learning loss the pandemic is creating (about which I have spent much of the past year writing), the sooner we can rebuild our economy and stabilize our collective lives once more. But if all we do is return to the old paradigm that understands our educational system simply for the role it plays in enabling the full adult employment needed to drive our consumption-dependent version of capitalism, then we will have missed the opportunity for reflection and educational change which the pandemic has provided us.
I do agree with President Biden that we can build back better. But only if we change our understanding of what “better” means.
References
Casert, R. & Woodward, C. (Nov. 27, 2021) Latest Variant Raises Alarms. The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?edid=b9d0869c-d482-4d22-8580-334a16babaab.
Kamenetz, A. (Nov. 23, 2021) Parents are Scrambling After Schools Suddenly Cancel Class Over Staffing and Burnout. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2021/11/23/1057979170/school-closures-mental-health-days-families-childcare-thanksgiving-break.
Light a Candle 