A Letter to the JoCo School Board

There’s a Johnston County Board of Education meeting tonight, so I figured I’d take a shot at one of them reading the opinion of a nobody political candidate, veteran teacher, and JCPS father.  

It’s become apparent to me that it’s time to give ALL stakeholders a choice.  It’s time to give parents the choice to send their kids to school.  It’s time to give teachers the choice to teach in person or virtual.  It’s time to be flexible with how the day looks, how the buses run, and how lunch is served.

I was wary about it for a while, and because of personal pre-existing conditions, I still am, but I already know what my choice will be, and as an adult, I am content with living with that choice.  I know a lot of teachers that will make the same choice I would have to make, and that is the choice to teach virtually.  A lot of parents would make that same choice for their children, but I’d be more than happy to help teach them.  Even if this high school teacher got reassigned for a year to help out with virtual third grade, I’d work my ass off with those little nine year olds.

I started this school year off with a pretty pronounced lack of motivation.  I can’t imagine I was alone.  Pandemic depression is a very real thing.  But I know how to handle mine now.  I’ve suffered intermittent bouts of depression long enough to understand it. But I had not yet seen the numbers behind how bad pandemic depression is for our young people.  

On the nightly news last night, they had a segment on depression during the pandemic.  There were several interesting statistics, but only one rattled me.  Only one convinced me I had to write this. Did you know that 25% of all teenagers have contemplated suicide since March?  

Twenty. Five. Percent.

Now just like a lot of you, I don’t believe everything I see on the news, or I take it with a good ole grain of salt, especially if it’s one of those channels that leans heavily, but if that is even close to true, it scares the hell out of this father of a teenage girl.  And guess what?  Historically, female girls contemplate it almost twice as often as teenage boys.  That means that for teenage girls, the number is probably at least ten percentage points higher than that.

That’s easily number one on my list of why it’s time to give ALL stakeholders a choice.  Here’s a few more.

The County has Already Chosen

The world has not stopped turning in Johnston County, y’all.  I’m sure you’ve probably noticed.  Neighbors have pool parties, kids are playing travel ball, the grocery stores and big boxes are packed, the mask divide has no more opinions left to spew.  

Every single person in this county has already decided how they will live in this pandemic.  Me?  I’m being careful, but I’ve got a heart condition AND asthma.  That’s my choice.  And whether I totally agree with other people’s choices or not, my opinion is actually irrelevant to their life.  They’ve proven that.  I’m NOT going to have much influence on the choices people make for how they will live in a pandemic, especially a pandemic that has no cohesive leadership, limited verifiable facts, and no foreseeable ending.

Every single person in this county has already chosen how they will live.  I can think of very few positives that come out of a government controlling people who have already made up their minds.

The Empowerment of Choice

To tag on to the last one, when people are empowered with choice, they normally respond favorably.  Can you imagine the parents stepping up to help run carpools and the parents who have fought against masks suddenly softening on them just to get their babies in school?  Can you just imagine the community coming together as one if a cluster breaks out in their school and they need a few extra hands to help clean for a couple of days?

Right now people are angry because they’ve already made their choice and the government is not allowing them to execute it.  That’s not going to end well, and I’m growing afraid that it’s not going to end well for the future of public schools.

Maybe, Just MAYBE, it’s Time for Public Education to Shine

Public education has taken it in the chops, the gut, the nuts, and everywhere else in the past decade.  It has been thoroughly trashed by politicians, bad parents, corporate enablers, fear-mongerers, and even a few people who were justified to trash it.  Most of those people have no earthly idea what the hell they’re talking about because they just want to destroy public education and they don’t care if they take down kids and teachers with it.

But now – and I mean RIGHT NOW – public education is in demand, so maybe it’s time for it to shine.  There are a million ways to make it shine, but there may not be a million more chances to be this “in demand.”  This could quite literally catapult public education to heights not seen in a quarter century in North Carolina.  Because even the people who are trying to destroy public education are seeing how essential it is RIGHT NOW.

All or Nothing

This is all simply my opinion, and this one might be taking it a bit too far, but it’s how I feel.  Partial opening is ridiculous.  It just is.  If you open for two days a week, those two days will see no social distancing, an inability to manage or punish mask usage, and a bunch of kids of all ages leaving those school grounds and not adhering to the rules we’ll attempt to enforce in school.  

In other words, since most of these kids are leaving school and hanging out with their peers without social distancing or wearing masks, does it make any sense whatsoever to social distance them the morning after they had a Truth or Dare kissing party or whatever it is the kids are doing these days?

It doesn’t matter how many days a week they go or how many guidelines we try to make them adhere to on our campuses, if a kid has COVID, another kid will soon have it.  So since the schools are going to be about half full anyway with all those kids who choose to let me and others of my ilk teach them virtually, you get really small class sizes and a clientele that wants to be there EVERY DAY.  Not two days a week, but every stinking day.  And why is that?  Because they’ve already made their choice.

The Choice Requirement

Somebody is going to reply to this and tell me that one death is one too many, but you could say that about anything on Earth, from driving a car to a stampede at a Black Friday sale, and that is precisely why we MUST give every stakeholder a choice.  MUST. You can’t require teachers to teach in person, you can’t require students to learn in person, and you might as well say bye-bye to an attendance policy for a year because it won’t be enforceable.  

“But what if somebody dies?”  Well, the way I see it, they chose to be there.  We gave them the choice, and they chose the risk. Most adults I’ve talked to WANT that choice.  

“But what if they take it home to a loved one who dies?”  If you have somebody at home who probably shouldn’t be exposed to it, maybe it’s not such a great idea to send that particular kid to school this year.  Again, it’s your choice.  I’m not sure what my daughter would choose simply because of the chance of bringing it home to me and my ailments, but that’s our choice to make as a family.

“But what if a teacher dies?”  That teacher will have made the choice to teach.  Right now at least half the teachers I know would go back TODAY if they let us.  Yeah, maybe I’m not one of them, but again, that’s my choice.  

“But what if the school has a cluster and needs to shut down?”  Well, I feel we are going to beat this poor word to death, but choice will rise again.  And this is why an attendance policy is out the window for this year.  If a cluster happens at a school, you shut down for two days to clean, contact trace as best you can, quarantine where necessary, and then give kids AND teachers the CHOICE to go back.

Lastly, I Said I Was Going to Fight for Kids

More precisely, in all of my campaign platforms and materials, I said I was going to fight for public education because it’s the only guaranteed educational delivery system where ALL students have equal opportunity to learn, and fighting for public education is absolutely fighting for kids.

But I want to fight for kids’ mental health now, too.  Twenty-five percent have contemplated suicide in the past six months.  I went to several resources to check the number.  One in four kids have thought about ending their lives.  In the past ten years, that number has ranged from fourteen percent to seventeen percent annually.  That means we’re in the midst of a fifty percent increase in morbidly depressed teenagers in only six months.

Now let’s put real numbers to those percentages. There are about 950,000 teenagers in North Carolina.  In the past six months, 237,500 of them have contemplated suicide.  That’s staggering to me.

I battled depression and addiction for twenty years.  It’s been a very real part of my life.  For a growing number of our children, it’s becoming a very real part of their lives.  And what’s bad about that is that depression, anxiety, and mental health deficiencies may never really go away fully.  In other words, what’s happening right now could stay with them the rest of their lives in a very debilitating way, possibly regressing as they get older.  Or worse – to me, at least – the longer they sit idly by and watch this virus that hasn’t stopped life outside of schools completely destroy life inside them.

It’s simply not fair to the kids anymore, and I just don’t want to see this continue.  180,000 people have died in the past six months in the US.  And 7,425,000 United States teenagers have thought about killing themselves.

Want to make it even more real? 456 students at Cleveland High School have thought about ending their own lives in the last six months. My daughter goes there.

I swore when I ran for office that I was going to fight for kids.  I think by asking the Board of Education to give us all a choice, I AM fighting for them.