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.