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Sunday, May 15, 2022

A Return To The Dark Days

 


By Jill Jenkins

Across the United States extreme conservatives are attacking curriculum, school districts, schools and educators. The environment is toxic.  Teachers who already spent countless hours adapting lessons to on-line formats for the pandemic before returning to the classroom to help traumatized students who have lost family members to COVID 19 and the security of a classroom community while feeling isolated learning on-line at home. Many parents were balancing teaching their children and working at home in financially difficult time where housing costs and food insecurity made life difficult . All of this negatively impacts many students. Teachers have stepped up and should be celebrated as heroes.  Instead of embracing and supporting these heroes, parents are asking to scrutinize textbooks, curriculum and even teachers.  These are dark days.

 

In Lehi, Utah a young educator revealed her LGBQ status on Tic Tock happy that her students were using her classroom to share their own LGBQ status with her after hours.  She felt she had created a safe place.  Instead of accepting her, the school suspended her while they blasted the local television news  with her post until the conservatives were aghast and then fired her after an hour-long school board meeting.  She could have sued for discrimination or first amendment rights to free speech, but instead she accepted her fate, ending her career as an educator in this state.

 


Although many teachers share family pictures and stories with their students in attempt to make them less alien and more human to young people, this might not be the right time for that.  We are entering a dark age and protecting a teacher’s career might mean staying off of social media.  School districts are so fearful of these conservatives that some have began accepting student teachers only from colleges affiliated with the dominate religious organization and hiring only those teachers.  As a result, they are populating schools only with people of the same religious beliefs and cultural beliefs as the majority of the population. The districts want to avoid controversy.  Unfortunately, not every student shares the religious belief, and culture, so those students feel alienated and the majority of the population is not prepared to deal with a more diverse world when they leave the confines of the community.  No one wins.



Even more difficult is those in a teaching career who do not share the same religious, cultural, or even race as the majority.  Not only will teachers who are gay lose their career, but teachers who are a member of another ethnic group, teachers who have a child out of wed-lock or teachers who have an abortion. are all in danger.  We have to return to a time when students were shocked to see a teacher at a store, where teachers have no life outside of school and above all that teachers never use the restroom.  Stay off of social media, remove all the pictures of your family from your desk and quietly endure until the time that teachers can be celebrated as heroes. Remember if we lose emphatic teachers, it will be the lost children who will suffer, not the loud mouths trying to politicalize education.