Dear School Committee: Where are you?

School Committee,

If you’re listening, this is for you.  If not, that’s the problem.

My name is Annette Love and I am a junior at GHS. I really love to learn but I don’t get to do that right now, at least not in school. Who is to blame for this? I know that it’s easy to point fingers. To say “look at your teachers, it’s their fault, they’re the ones stopping school from happening.” However, there is another point just as important to consider.

The paraprofessionals have been in contract negotiations for over a year now, the teachers have been working and negotiating since before the start of this school year. They have attended meetings, rallies, negotiations, and practiced work-to-rule. In short, they have done everything that can be done, legally, to be heard.The timing of this strike was strategic, right before a long weekend to give time to come to a compromise without impacting their students any more than necessary.

It is easy to point fingers at our teachers because they are out there, every day, meeting and rallying. Where have you been in this time? Where are you while our teachers stand outside, even on the weekend when they could have been home with their families, asking for their voices to be heard? How can you say that this is all their fault? How can you blame the woman who taught me to read, the man who gave me the confidence to sing, and the countless adults who have stayed after school to help me to understand? How can you say that you know what is best for the education of children that you have never met, ignoring the advice of those who work with us each day? 

How can you know what is really going on inside of the schools? When was the last time that you were bitten by a child trying to keep them from hurting one of their classmates? When was the last time you asked your child how their day was and they told you that it was hard to learn because of class size and student behaviors? When was the last time that one of your students wasn’t able to get the help that they needed because your district refused to hire enough people to run interventions?

It is time to stop stalling, to stop cutting off communication between students and teachers, to stop rudely dismissing students from the school newspapers instead of letting them tell the truth as they see it. It is time to finally come to a compromise, to stop sending negotiators and actually attend meetings yourselves. It is time to do your jobs and protect our rights to an education by giving our teachers the resources that they need to teach us.