Dr. Stephanie Jones is the University of Georgia Josiah Meigs Distinguished Professor, Mary Frances Early College of Education. She wrote this piece after tornado threats last week in some parts of Georgia, which required schools to get students down on the floor and away from windows.
Many of those children, Jones said, huddled together without the masks needed to keep them safe from another storm, the delta variant of COVID.
By Stephanie Jones
Tornado warnings pushed Georgia students and teachers into crowded hallways and safe spaces last week, which is scary enough for anyone in a school and everyone who loves someone in a school right now. But tornado warnings in 2021 will escalate another risk and intensify the danger to children, young people, teachers, and all workers in school.
With very few schools mandating masks, we are having hundreds and thousands of young people and adults hunkered down in small, poorly ventilated places. It is not only possible and likely, but guaranteed that COVID-19 is infecting many Georgians in the very places that we hope will be the safest for them.
What will our children think of us when they reflect on the fact that we not only continued to send them to indoor school in a pandemic, but did so with very few or even zero precautions to protect them from a virus that had been mutating into more dangerous variants and infecting children and teens in higher and higher numbers?
They will know that doctors and scientists were begging eligible teens and adults to get a vaccine to help protect the vulnerable and young children and pediatricians were insisting that a mask mandate in school would be essential. They will learn that children and young people were being hospitalized at a much higher rate than earlier in the pandemic, and that children’s hospitals across the country were struggling to keep up with the demand on their capacity and resources.
They will also learn that even vaccinated people were being infected by and spreading the virus at alarmingly high rates, as documented in Israel where 78% of the eligible population was vaccinated and the country was experiencing one of the world’s highest infection rates in August, 2021.
And perhaps more importantly, our children and youth will look back on this time and realize that we knew there were long-term effects of this new disease, something we now call Long COVID, that were having a devastating impact on adult and youth lives many months and even more than a year after their infection and that asymptomatic and “mild” cases “were not spared these long-lasting effects.” Doctors and researchers are working hard to document and understand these ongoing physical, cognitive, and mental complications that emerge and continue long after initial infection.
They will know these things, and they will know that in many places across the country we failed them, not even taking the basic and effective precaution of wearing masks to keep our germs to ourselves. Mister Rogers reportedly urged adults to: “Please think of the children first. If you ever have anything to do with their entertainment, their food, their toys, their custody, their child care, their health care, their education – listen to the children, learn about them, learn from them. Think of the children first.”
My precious 5-year-old niece is starting kindergarten this fall in a public city school district in Ohio and she is so excited. She has lived more than a year and a half of her short life in a pandemic and spent her pre-kindergarten time with close family and occasionally some children, mostly in outdoor and fairly safe settings. This is the first time she will be in any kind of group childcare setting, in any kind of formal school, and her experiences there will have a lifelong impact on her.
The school asked that kindergarten students come to school for half-days for a week before it began for everyone else. They have a mask mandate and social distancing protocols in place and they wanted the children to get used to wearing their masks, have practice washing their hands a lot, and become comfortable with social distancing. I know very little else about this school, but that single decision tells me that at least at that time they were thinking about children, their physical safety, their emotional comfort and security, and their need for a little extra special attention during these difficult times.
Children and young teenagers have very little control over their own lives, they are almost always subject to the whims of the adults around them as well as the adults they don’t know who are making policies that shape their experiences. That’s a dangerous and vulnerable position to be in, since so many adults are busy carrying on with their own lives, stresses, and agendas and are not necessarily slowing down enough to be thoughtful about what is in the best interests of young people.
The power that children and youth do have is their potential to influence the adults’ behavior around them, but that requires that adults are humble enough, thoughtful enough, secure in themselves enough, and that they respect children and young people enough to change their thinking and their actions.
I won’t spend time here recounting all of the many, many innovative options for safer schooling during this pandemic that have been published widely across the country in the last year and a half (but here are some pieces that might jog your memory about creative community-based learning and outdoor learning).
And don’t get me started on the fear-mongering of “learning loss” and lower test scores, and the failure of so many places to allow their teachers to do anything different even when we had the perfect opportunity to pause the practices in schools that have produced high levels of stress, anxiety and depression in the last twenty years and do something dramatically different that might counteract the out-of-school stresses and anxieties that have escalated for young people even pre-pandemic. As I’ve seen others say in a variety of ways in the last year, it’s hard to learn anything when you’re not alive, struggling with chronic illness, or experiencing depression.
We know that a sense of security, safety, consistency, and predictability are important for positive learning to take place. Unfortunately, we will be faced again this fall, with many disruptions, quarantines, grade-level and school-level and maybe even district-level shut-downs that will create a chaotic and disjointed social and learning environment for students.
Teachers, again, are in an impossible situation as they find themselves at the center of a political and ideological battlefield where children’s and youth’s best interests are not being prioritized. It is so important to remember that the teachers’ working conditions are the foundation for students’ learning conditions, and thus the uncertainty, anxiety, and stress teachers experience during these times will be felt by their students.
Whatever our next move is, I hope that we can individually and collectively put children and young people first. They are depending on us, and I don’t know about you, but I want the stories they tell about growing up in the pandemic to include memories of adults doing everything we could to keep them healthy and safe,
I hope they can tell stories about experiencing the sudden shift to virtual learning and how schools moved forward to do their best to accommodate them and their families with in-person and distance options; about curriculum being shifted to incorporate the realities of life in a global pandemic; about high-stakes tests being completely reconsidered as a relevant way to assess learning; about teaching and learning undergoing creative transformation that changed the trajectory of formal schooling; and about communities holding space for young people to feel supported and encouraged in an unprecedented time.
Maybe now, in the quiet after the storm, we can reflect on the dangerous position we forced our young people and teachers into as they waited out tornado warnings. And perhaps some creative thinking will start happening again as we think about children first.
The author of this guest column, Stephanie Jones, is a University of Georgia education professor.
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