In the past six months, the world locked itself away to avoid spreading a deadly virus. Entire countries worked from home on something called Zoom.
Schools buildings closed, and, overnight, teachers and support staff were asked to continue teaching, feeding, and engaging their students “virtually,” while locked in their own homes.
What we were asked to do was impossible. And we did it.
It wasn’t perfect. It was hard. Frustrating. Some students had technology and home support. Others had nothing; no one to help them. But over and over again, teachers and counselors and administrators and custodians and lunch ladies and paraeducators rolled up their sleeves and created ways to reach students with meaningful moments of learning.
It took the village of educators and parents to rise to this historic crisis.
But something undeniable was exposed: Some villages are made of stone and others of straw. Some villages have tablets and Wi-Fi and others have mom’s cell phone that she has to take to work with her. And the villages that need the most are most often communities of color, disadvantaged by 400 years of discrimination and generational inequities in access to health care, education, and justice.
Racial and social justice have been the great work of our union because you cannot separate equal access to opportunities to learn from the greatest barrier to that access: the intentional, institutional racism that still plagues our nation.
I’ve been reflecting on what I want the world to look like. That reflection takes me back to my years teaching homeless children. My students were Black children, brown children, white children. They played together and laughed together and sang funny songs with me. They ate healthy meals together. They visited the nurse together. They learned Spanish together. They learned English together. They depended on each other for kindness and comfort. We built an intentional, beloved community.
These babies belonged to all of us. Until the day they left. We rarely knew where they landed, and I could only pray that the love, confidence, and courage we’d hoped to give them would stay with them somehow and cover them like a blanket. But the world is a dangerous place, and a blanket is not enough. A blanket of love is not justice.
And so, NEA fights for racial and social justice and the world we want our babies to live in. And I know that seems impossible to win. But when has that stopped us? May we never settle for what is possible. We do what we must. And we must win. And so, I have no doubt, we will.
God bless you, hermanas y hermanos. It has been an honor.
