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August 7, 2020 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
NORTHWEST
LABOR
PRESS
... Should schools reopen?
From Page 1
(International Standard Serial Number 0894-444X)
Established in 1900 in Portland, Oregon as a voice of the la-
bor movement. Published on a semi-monthly basis on the
first and third Fridays of each month by the Oregon Labor
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ration owned by 20 unions and councils including the Ore-
gon AFL-CIO. Serving more than 120 union organizations in
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Senior staff reporter: Don McIntosh
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Washington AFL-CIO to hold
online convention this year
The Washington State Labor
Council, AFL-CIO, will con-
duct its 2020 Constitutional
Convention via Zoom video
conference Sept. 23-25. The
convention was previously
scheduled to take place in July
in Wenatchee, but was post-
poned due to the COVID-19
pandemic. All WSLC-affiliated
unions have been sent a Con-
vention Call indicating their vot-
ing strength and the number of
delegates they can appoint.
Rank-and-file members who
want to represent their union as
delegates should contact their
local union for information
about how to serve in this role.
All will receive trainings and
step-by-step instructions on how
to participate via Zoom.
New Temporary Hours: Mon-Sat 12-6 pm
and active shooter drills, which
are required under state law. And
there’s no way to do that under
social distancing. And of course
the Oregon Department of Edu-
cation guidelines talks about iso-
lating anybody with COVID
symptoms. And any teacher will
tell you that on any given day,
there are a number of students
who have stuffy noses. And what
are we actually going to do when
the school bus arrives and one or
five or 20 kids have runny noses?
The logistics of what this mean
are just baffling to imagine, when
we know COVID is rapidly
spreading. There are so many
questions that have not been fig-
ured out, like how do you move
through the hallway maintaining
social distancing? How do you
eat and serve lunch with kids be-
ing apart from one another? How
do you have recess when kids
aren’t to be touching the same
equipment? For teachers that all
brings forward some pretty bleak
questions about how that kind of
classroom environment can be
developmentally appropriate for
kids, when you’re talking about
six year olds being asked to sit at
a desk for the entire day without
partnering, without sharing ma-
nipulatives with other kids, with-
out a teacher coming up right
next to them to read their writing.
So much of teaching is about re-
lationships and proximity, and
partnering and collaboration. So
what in-person teaching would
look like under those guidelines
isn’t the kind of teaching that
we’re all dying to get back to.
And so many of our teachers
have contacted me to say, “I feel
like I’m begin asked to play
Russian roulette with my own
life, or my immunocompromised
child’s life, or my parent’s life
who I’m caretaker for. The stakes
are very real.
Teachers unions have resisted
widespread adoption of online
learning as a replacement for
in-person instruction. Now the
epidemic has forced the issue.
How did you feel about the
way it went at the end of the
last school year? We do not be-
lieve that online is the best model
for kids, and we are forced to use
it and figure out how to use it
best. There are so many prob-
lems with online learning. Some
kids don’t have as stable internet
access as others, or any internet
access. So access to learning is
not equitable. There were many
students who did not engage or
who dropped off after a period of
time in distance learning and
stopped coming back. The dis-
trict did provide Chromebooks
and hot spots [portable Wi-Fi
connection], but there were stu-
dents who were sharing a hotspot
or Chromebook with siblings.
Beyond that, some students
have a parent at home who was
able to help and guide them
through learning, and other stu-
dents did not. Some students
have a quiet place to work, de-
pendably. And other students are
sharing a crowded living space
with many other kids and with-
out adult support at home.
Even in the best of circum-
stances, what were the limita-
tions you were seeing with on-
line learning? The lack of
relationships. Kids are looking
at a screen, they’re listening, but
you can’t make friends. You
can’t make eye contact with
people. Your teacher can’t look
over your shoulder to see what
you’re working on. The lack of
in-person social interactions
gets in the way of every aspect
of teaching and learning. Teach-
ing is based on relationships.
Partner work is a lot harder to
organize, face-to-face discus-
sion, all the engagement strate-
gies that we use in classrooms to
meet kids’ social and emotional
needs don’t work the same way
over virtual learning.
And that leads me to the worst
case scenario: How on earth
do kindergarten, first and sec-
ond grade students get some-
thing out of online learning?
It is a huge challenge. It’s not
developmentally appropriate for
a five or six or seven year old to
be sitting in front of a computer
receiving screen instruction. Ed-
ucators have had to be creative
in figuring out how to support
kids in developmentally appro-
priate activities while not being
able to be there with them. A lot
of teachers are figuring out the
best thing they could do, which
maybe would be small group
meetings with fewer kids, meet-
ing one-on-one to read with kids
over the Internet and providing
activities and projects that kids
can do independently at home
and then report back or email in.
But all these things are a huge
challenge with our little kids es-
pecially. We want to be there
with them. We want to show
them how to hold a pencil, how
to socialize with a large group of
people, how to wait their turn.
How to ask someone to play. All
these things, goals of early edu-
cation, are not there over dis-
tance learning.
—Don McIntosh
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW
nwlaborpress.org/schools-in-COVID