"COVID Is Not Failing Our Students, You Are" by Casey Montigney

Shue Medill Middle School

A Speech to the Christina School District School Board - January 2022.

Thank you to all of those who donated time to me tonight.

Before I begin, I want to acknowledge how proud I am of you, Mia, for serving on this board as the student representative. Your passion and commitment to improving education is unmatched, and I’m so proud to know you. I hope I make you proud. 

I would like to start with two disclaimers. The first is that I am so proud of Shue-Medill Middle School and all of the people who live and breathe in those walls; it has been my second home for ten years, and not only do we have incredible leadership there, but we also have incredible learning and collaboration happening there. My second disclaimer is that I am writing this because if I don’t, I might walk out the door, and I’ve never walked out the door on anything this important. 

Board, when teachers and administrators tell you that this is not working, you need to listen. Education has been broken for years, and we’ve made progress, but not nearly enough. Then COVID hit. And then it lasted. Most of us are so emotionally fatigued that we can barely get in our cars to come to work in the morning. These are the same people who so passionately recognized that they’d live in debt or live without their whole lives because they so adamantly cared to change the world for others. Let us remember one thing: as much as we portray educators as superheroes-- the people who can do anything and solve any problem, even in the most dire of circumstances-- we don’t wear capes. We are people. Right now, most of us are too tired to interact with our families when we get home at the end of the day. Most of us still have work to do once we get there. I myself have two toddlers. I put on a brave face and a big smile at daycare pick up, but what I really want to tell my children is that working in education is eating me alive, even more so this year than in years past. 

Let’s start with the obvious: teaching children requires a lot of training. The people working in our school buildings are professionals. Most of them have Master’s degrees. Many of them have multiple or even doctorates. Many of them pursue further education or training in areas in which they know less about simply to better serve the wonderful people in front of them. Let’s move to what is apparently less obvious to this district: Zoom teaching is not the same thing as in person teaching. Indirectly telling staff by sending a parent email that staff must zoom if a parent doesn’t want to send their kid is unfair and also against the MOU you signed. Hybrid learning means no one is learning. We also know that when it is safe to do so, in person teaching is more effective; we also know that it is not always safe to do so, especially in today’s circumstances. In what world is it okay to tell your teachers, who plan instruction based on years of experience and training and deep pedagogical knowledge of how the brain learns, that they need to change their in person instruction to Zoom instruction for the next day… at 6pm or later each night? We all know those modes of instruction function differently and require entirely different tools; we know teachers also can handle anything, so they must be up for working through the night to adapt what they’ve already spent hours on in the first place. Christiana Care is short on doctors and nurses right now because they are quarantining or in isolation. They are operating under crisis standards of care. We can’t even keep our test to stay locations open because we are short on staff. COVID numbers are at a record high, and those who are vaccinated are still getting sick (less sick, yes, but sick nonetheless). Not only are we asking teachers to shift plans at a moment's notice during the only time they have with their families, but we are asking them to do this when COVID numbers are rising around them and most of them have been hit personally by this latest surge and lack of care or testing. 

Let’s address an even bigger issue: in what world is it okay to tell your parents, many of whom have jobs themselves, that their child may or may not attend school on a given day with minimal notice? Students at Shue have expressed anxiety over not knowing whether they will be in school the next day; the student school improvement team I meet with unanimously expressed that they need to know the plan for the week or at the very least by the end of a school day what the plan is for the next school day. By not taking any sort of stand, as seems to be the common theme in this district, you are serving none of the people in your community except yourselves. Maybe it looks “stronger” to be open right now. Maybe we have years of poor reputation riding on our backs and you believe the only way out of it is to make it seem like you are pleasing everyone. That’s not leadership. Leadership is making tough calls and communicating them clearly. Leadership-- above all-- is listening to those you serve to find solutions you probably haven’t thought about yet. It means actually listening to administrators who tell you they have no idea how they can actually open or that you are breaking IDEA law by pulling paras and co-teachers to cover classes. How is it better to put everyone in buildings just to physically be there? If there aren’t enough people to run them well, we’re not accomplishing anything, learning stops, and poor behavior takes over as students recognize there aren’t enough adults to go around. The decisions you are making are not always the wrong ones-- but the way in which you go about them is unfair to all involved. People do not function well under the notion that anything can happen at any time. I’m sure many of you have read the viral account from a NYC student where he describes what school is like right now… if you haven’t, you should. The student is speaking the truth. 

Here, district leadership is a mirage. You pretend to care about what teachers are feeling…. But you also ignore simple requests that remind them that they are indeed professionals, like allowing them to work from home when no one else is in the building despite much of corporate America still working from home. We cannot be trusted to work at home, despite the many hours most of us work at home beyond our contracted hours normally. The most depressing place to work is an empty classroom. You also clearly aren’t knowledgeable about anything in the teacher contract except that we can’t strike, so you feel like you can do what you want. You preach self-care like it is the sickness we are fighting here and like it is another responsibility the teacher must juggle rather than finding ways to take things off of their plates. We can’t get teachers to do anything after school anymore, and I don’t blame them. They have nothing left to give. Finally, teachers are saying “no,” and everyone believes they are selfish. You help perpetuate that. Teachers are not selfish; they are finding that in order to survive, they need to step back, and even then, they are barely surviving. Nationally, over half of teachers are looking for a way out of the profession. What are you doing to combat that here? You have wedged so wide a divide between our district and the schools it serves that I don’t know if this administration can ever recover from it; the trust is gone. We aren’t just losing the teachers who might not have stayed anyway. We’re losing the best. I’ve seen the light go out in some of the BEST and most committed teachers in my building, and those are the ones we typically most rely on when things get tough. I know that our building is in better shape than most, and we are still floundering. 

You pretend to care about the unimaginable workload that has fallen on administrators and school nurses. Where is the support? Why are we carrying on like business as usual when nothing about this is usual? Why are nurses also contact tracers? Why are nurses and administrators expected to work 24/7? You also pretend to care about the parents and the students, and yet you run this district like it's a failing business rather than a place where we are trying to educate real human beings. Education is messy because it has many moving parts; in a district that fails time and again to communicate in a timely and concise way, education moves from messy to entirely unpredictable and catastrophic. COVID has stolen our sense of connection to people, and this district furthers that divide with every decision that is made on the district level. Every poor communication, lack of communication, and lack of recognition of any stakeholder opinions furthers that divide. 

COVID concerns are not just a problem here, and I acknowledge that. Schools all over the country are feeling the burden of COVID fatigue. Yet somehow, our district does an especially good job at exacerbating that feeling. Something we talk about at Shue is how students’ perceptions are their reality; we don’t need to always agree with it, but we do need to acknowledge it and empathize with it. Teachers, administrators, nurses, paraprofessionals, custodial workers, secretaries, bus drivers, students, counselors , families… We are all living through an unprecedented time. 

Our perception is our reality, even if you don’t agree with it. 

Let’s talk about the reality of education in Christina School District right now: we don’t have substitutes. Our paraprofessionals (and others) are covering classes, which means they aren’t servicing students as they should. We’re short full-time teachers, which means class sizes are larger than normal and some special education students don’t even have a special education teacher. In some schools, classes are combined and principals are teaching an incredibly large group of students in an auditorium, which wouldn’t be okay normally let alone when students should be distancing. We hand out hundreds of masks everyday to our students, and the vast majority of them don’t wear them properly, so who knows if they are doing a thing or if they are just for show. I stand in the main lobby first thing in the morning; the number of students coming off of their buses without masks would be enough of a reason for any students riding a bus to not come to school if a student on their bus had COVID. Most of our guys  believe they are invincible, as middle schoolers do, because developmentally it makes sense for them to believe that. Teachers are burnt out, and even the most devoted of our supposed superheroes are barely making it to work on time, crying on their ride home, and wondering if their retirement plan or medical benefits are really that important or if they should jump ship so they feel anything better than what they are feeling right now. Even the most passionate of us are wondering what the hell we’re still doing here. 

People get into education because they feel a calling to a higher purpose. They want to change things for people. Educators are, as a whole, regardless of their role in the system, generally selfless when it comes to serving others. As a district, you have taken advantage of that fact. 

I feel it is my responsibility as an instructional coach, someone who spends her entire day supporting the work of educators, to speak on their behalf. Everyone else is too tired to say a thing, and while I’m exhausted myself, I also can’t sleep at night because I’m the empath who feels what everyone else is feeling way too hard and way too real, and if I lose this last stroke of passion for this career that is woven into my very soul… then where am I? Where am I going? How can I lead if I can’t address issues head on? What is left if the passion and the fire is gone?

I am an instructional coach and a teacher. I am an improvement science leader. I am a lead mentor for new teachers. I serve on the Professional Standards Board. I am a union rep. I lead partnerships on equity, special education, restorative practices, service learning, and improvement science. I am a former Christina School District Teacher of the Year. I’ve presented countless times, all over the country, on the amazing work we do here. I am a parent. I don’t name these things to make it seem like I am in any way exceptional: I am the norm. Most educators wear so many hats and often so many hats at once that we don’t know how to take any of them off. This is where the fatigue sets in. I am also not one of those people who want to strongly believe in that negative reputation of the district because I truly believe we do great things here or else I wouldn’t be as committed and as involved as I am; however, right now, I believe that those great things are happening in our schools and not our district office. We are telling you that we are barely surviving. Are you listening? Our perception is our reality, regardless of if you believe in it. For once, will our district lead? 

I call on all of you to do something about this. Your educators are too tired to do it for you at this point, and quite frankly, it is not our job. Your entire job is to serve the Christina community, and you are failing. You’ve done a nice job at trying to turn your stakeholders against one another-- pitting educators against parents-- the community against each other-- blaming anyone but yourselves.

COVID is not failing our students, you are. Let’s stop using it as an excuse. 

Ask your schools what they need and then stop at nothing to get it for them. 

Every system works as it is designed to work.

We are not okay. 

-Casey Montigney

Shue Medill Middle School

Christina School District

About the Author: Casey Montigney has been an educator, advocate, and improvement leader for the last ten years. As an instructional coach, she spends a lot of her time helping teachers find their voices while also advocating for education policy changes to make their voices heard.