Tag Archives: public schools

Pandemic Wake-Up Call: Easter 2020

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The coronavirus pandemic is our newest wake-up call. But instead of listening to the call from our political leaders, how about listening to others?

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This is a wake-up call for the nation from Laura Bowman, Parents Across America Board Member.

We need to focus on what’s truly important for our children.

What is important is their face-to-face interactions with caring, experienced, human teachers. It’s ensuring they have what they need in their homes and communities, so they can better succeed in the classroom. It’s fully and fairly funding our public schools so they’re ALL well-staffed and well-resourced.

You are seeing why so many of us have been saying the following:

  • We need to adequately fund our schools and pay school staff better. Take it from parents who will be homeschooling their kids for the foreseeable future.
  • Packaged digital curriculum delivered through a screen is far inferior to face-to-face learning and is only useful in a limited set of circumstances. The amount of screen time children will experience during school shut-downs will be truly alarming and harmful to their eyes and bodies.
  • Children need and deserve nutritious meals every day. Too many children live in food insecure homes. We should never deny children a meal.

    This statement, found on Facebook, expresses the gut feelings that many of us have.

    This coronavirus pandemic is exposing the glaring inequities so many children experience each day. Too many endure scarcities of food, shelter, and proper healthcare. Children bring these issues with them to school where they’re told by policymakers that their standardized test scores and data are what matter, regardless of their current life circumstances.

    Our Wake-up Call: Our nation’s public schools are crucial.

    Our public schools are often the hearts of our communities. I hope we all better appreciate them going forward.

    I want to thank all of the folks who beat the drum of public education support with me each day. Thank you for always, always keeping the best interests of children at heart. You inspire me and give me a lot of hope.

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    This is a wake-up call for the nation from Sergio Flores, Educator.

    Discover Your Civic Power

    In the past twenty years, elites and billionaires have ruthlessly taken advantage of major crises at the expense of everyone else. … The past record of crises – Nine-eleven, Hurricane Kathrine, the market bubble of 2008— shows how easy billionaires or elites profit handsomely while millions of unsuspecting, confused, and even shocked working people lost constitutional rights, life savings, and even their houses.

    This is a exceptional time when these vulnerable workers could get together to articulate and advance inclusive and progressive ideas. Indeed, this grave moment presents the perfect chance to effectively promote and practice the neglected civic values of solidarity, justice, fairness, and the search of common good that now seem to hold the key to save us all from the worst effects of a pandemic.

    Who knows? Perhaps in a much kinder future, this crisis of 2020 will be referred in the future as the moment teachers, and the working people as well, discover their civic power!

    Many look at the Easter season as a time of rising. Others see it as related to spring and that season’s increasing light. We welcome the season.

    It is a great time to wake up and embrace a new day and perhaps a new way of life. It’s a time for discovery and rediscovery as we pull together as a nation and a world. And with renewed hope, here is my Easter wish for this latest call to action. May history help guide us.

Martin Luther King saw Easter as a time for taking direct action.

Thankful for Government Schools

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Our Schools, Our Responsibility to leave them standing strong for the next generation.

Our Schools, Our Responsibility to leave them standing strong for the next generation.

Where would I be without the American government schools that I’ve known most of my life as “public schools”?

No one can say with certainty what might have been. But in this case, with the governing of “government schools” being taken out of the hands of the public, think about our country without public schools.

My grandfather on my dad’s side died when his family was still very young leaving my Grandma Young raising a large family on her own. The family lived on “the other side of the tracks” — figuratively and literally in my hometown. Back then, the area was looked at as the “black side” of town but like most labels, there were exceptions like being low-income whites.

But the government schools in this Midwestern blue-collar town were decent enough, the military during WWII offered the GI bill, and anyone with the ambition, talent, and “grit” to improve their lives could prosper with the help of government education programs.

My dad ended up teaching upper-level high school mathematics for 30 years and built his own small businesses, which he still operates. He started with a Dairy Queen to supplement his teaching during his summers “off.”

Could he have gotten this far in life without government schools? Could he have advanced his education strictly with his paper routes and iron factory work? Well, the factory is gone now so no one there can do that anymore. And I think it’s fair to say that without a chance to further one’s education is some way, success in business is an exception, not the rule.

If he hadn’t gotten ahead in life with the help of government education programs, like the GI bill, where would I be today, a girl on the bottom rung with six brothers? If family resources are limited, what do you think? Well, I’m pretty sure, like many of us have done when our own children were looking at colleges, we’d do the math.

Without government-run public schools —publicly governed, publicly supported— I’m pretty sure I would not have had the opportunity and pleasure of serving the public as a doctor of veterinary medicine for the last 30 years. The freedom to choose the profession I did was only possible because government schools exist in America. For that, I am thankful.

And for that reason, it is worth fighting to preserve the system.

“An Act —To strengthen and improve educational quality and educational opportunities in the Nation’s elementary and secondary schools.” The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act … This is the type of law we need.

To all my fellow warriors supporting the effort, I’m thankful you are in the fight.

Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy the day; you deserve it.

UPDATE 11/25/19: My father passed away in 2016, 4 months shy of 92, still working in his businesses with his mind as sharp as ever. His warning was for us to take note of the similarities of our times to pre-WWII. With that in mind, we should be thankful that we live in a republic and be asking ourselves what we can do to keep it.

Don’t Fail

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Fail, failing, failed — “Don’t Fail Idaho” is the new theme of advertisements on radio and other media here in this state. For me, it is a risk to even use the word (especially in a title) because many people won’t read past that word. The education reform war has created hyper-sensitized people making it less likely that we can even have a casual conversation about education. And that is exactly what we all should be doing every chance we get.

In a waiting room yesterday, I ran across an old acquaintance I’d worked with on a fundraising committee for a youth project many years ago. Believe it or not, I did not broach the education topic – at first. We talked about agriculture, our food supply, our land, rodeo, and politics. When we did get to education, he admitted he didn’t know much of what was going on in that arena but said, “It sounds like what I’m experiencing.” He moved closer to hear what I had to say.

My point: If we can’t get past some obstacles, establish a connection and some common understanding that we share a problem, we can’t expect to establish the kind of public support needed to overcome the forces we must in order to reclaim the public school system and re-instill some sanity to a “reform” effort. A dissenting voice can’t compete with a moneyed interest any way other than with people power.

Will this person I talked with jump right in the fight? I doubt it, but the next time he hears the “Don’t Fail Idaho” propaganda, I can bet you he will think twice about which “side” they represent. He will doubt. He will question what the best way to improve our schools really is. I bet he will compare any further effort to privatize schools to what he knows was the outcome of privatization of the prison system and he will relate it to a further takeover of our land and food supply — and he will make the connection to children.

Failing to Make the Grade

Failing to Make the Grade

Don’t fail to engage. Anyone know the rules for engagement?