Hi friends,
Sometimes, when I lose track of myself, I like to look back at my calendar to figure out what I was doing a year ago. I was teaching sixth and seventh graders. A friend had sent me a great article about two California art teachers who created PepToc, a hotline and poster project to get us through the hard times.
Their grade school students contributed sound and silly advice, recorded laughter, and all manner of encouragement, in answer to the question:
imagine someone needing a little bit of joy: “What would you say that you think would help someone else?”
Last year, the hotline got thousands of calls each hour. The students designed a poster that says
You are NOT the only one who wants to sigh loudly
with tear-offs at the bottom that say “it’s okay to feel sad” and “remember that there are people that love you.”
This morning I awoke feeling very far away from the teacher I was and also feeling very distressed about news of budget cuts to schools.
Last year, principals and parents were alarmed to discover that hundreds of millions of dollars had been cut from schools' budgets, forcing administrators to slash arts and after school programming.
The program which brought me into classrooms as a teaching artist was a casualty of those cuts. Schools need the infusion of outside programs to strengthen their curricula, support their staff, and offer a broad range of dynamic learning opportunities to young people.
According to a meta-analysis published in January, there has been troubling learning loss during the pandemic. The paper was based on data from 42 studies across 15 countries.
Susanna Loeb, an academic who was not involved in the research, noted that
“Students, on average, are far behind where they would have been without the pandemic and this reduced learning is much greater for groups of students who were already more likely to be struggling in school.”
The Adams administration has also revised the funding formula for schools to boost allocations for students who live in shelters, and for schools that serve large numbers of students with disabilities. Those changes must be approved by an oversight board, but officials hope they will go into effect for next fall..
But the needs of students who fall into none of these special categories are greater than they were before. And that has made a challenging job far more difficult.
[E]ducators struggled to absorb a spike in behavior issues among their students after in-person school resumed while still dealing with their own lingering challenges.
“The behavior was so extreme,” said Peter, a middle school art teacher in Manhattan, who asked to use only his first name so as not to identify his school. “They [students] were traumatized, and they were acting as students with extreme levels of trauma do, and we were not prepared by any means.”
Let the Mayor know that he needs to restore school budgets so that we can recover from the pandemic.
Just for good measure, take some education-adjacent quick actions you may have missed earlier in the week.
Contact Mayor Adams, Speaker Adams, and your council representative to demand #CareNotCuts. This quick action is from JFREJ!
Sign on to a quick action to defend the Brooklyn Public Library’s budget.
As we await the fate of student loan cancelation, I must recommend this article about City University, and its important history as a free public system.
March over the Brooklyn Bridge this Sunday for a free and fully-funded CUNY!
I decided to called the PepToc hotline (707-873-7862) today to see if the line still functions —it does! I received the wise advise to punch a pillow if I’m frustrated. I also got these words of encouragement:
I trust that you can make things right.
I appreciate their confidence in me.
with love,
L