How are my low-income students supposed to ‘remote learn?’

Ben J – Cincinnati, OH

Friday the 13th was the final, hectic day of school at my school in downtown Cincinnati. Not that we knew it would be the final day of school at the time, of course. Students and staff had been told by the district to report back to school the following Monday, in defiance of public health wisdom and educators’ common sense. Only on Tuesday would Ohio’s three-week “extended Spring Break” begin.

As a teacher, I tried to approach the day as normally as possible, despite the fact that well under half of our students were present. I had to continually disinfect my classroom while administering a test that virtually none of my students could manage to concentrate on – and who could blame them? Students at our school come from some of the most neglected, at-risk neighborhoods in the city. Now school, often the one stable aspect of their lives, was on indefinite hold.

We had been given packets of work to distribute to students, for them to complete over their “break”. Material in the packet was out of sync with our course content, and there was widespread pessimism that students would even work on, much less complete, their assigned work.

By now, students who have managed to complete their assignments – no easy feat when dealing with food insecurity, lack of stable housing, violence, and a global pandemic on top of it all – will be running out of content. They are being asked to turn to digital “remote learning”, and teachers are being asked to suddenly adapt their classroom teaching methods accordingly, no matter that very few of our students have computers at home.

Our school district is underfunded, but remote learning isn’t possible for many students without an infusion of resources. The state must provide a computer and high speed internet access to every student in need.  

The district has also set a deadline for us to enter our final third quarter grades. One obvious problem with this demand is that the assignments we need to grade are sitting on desks in schools which are now cordoned off for sanitation. It’s not exactly clear how we’re supposed to enter grades for assignments that we don’t have, but at least Ohio has announced that standardized testing has been canceled. I should also say, in fairness, that Ohio was one of the more proactive states in terms of school closure. 

Our union is fairly strong, which means teachers and other school staff like office workers are still receiving paychecks.

On the other hand, the children of downtown Cincinnati live in a rapidly-gentrifying, under-served, polluted environment. They already have to deal with racial harassment, job discrimination, and a lack of affordable housing. This crisis will hit them particularly hard if there is not a substantial investment in things like healthcare and public housing.

Schools in low income communities are asked to provide a wide variety of social services like  nutrition, mental health care, and social-emotional development . It’s a system that never really worked, and now the band-aid has been torn off. Everyone can see the systemic inequality for what it is. 

I have to hope that, if anything good comes out of this pandemic, it’s that people realize just how dysfunctional “business as usual” really was. Our kids deserve better, not just during an emergency but going forward, as well. We need to tax the rich to make sure families have what they need to give kids the stability they need, including community wrap-around services at schools like quality after school programming, basic health services and three nutritious meals a day. There’s no better time for working people to come together and build a world to be proud of.