Teachers hold sway in school's plan
Josh Rosenberg, father of two Guggenheim Elementary School students, isn't happy with the district's new hybrid plan and wants the five day a week in school option back. Credit: Newsday/Lane Filler
A crowd of about 200 parents and children came together Monday at Paul D. Schreiber High School under a blazing sun to protest the Port Washington School District’s plan for elementary schools this fall, targeting with their ire Superintendent Michael Hynes and the school board.
These parents want their kids back in the classroom full-time, which was the district’s plan until it announced a shift last Thursday: Now these students will be in the classroom just two days a week.
The speakers and attendees were impassioned and convincing. They said the remote learning that began in March was terrible, they cannot afford or find day care, and they aren’t able to oversee their children themselves. They think a full return to classrooms is crucial to their children's academic growth and the rarity of COVID-19 infections in the community makes a careful return safe. They argue that putting children in day care three days a week will expose them to so many children it will make sticking to cohorts in class pointless.
And they said they support the teachers: they always have. The New York State United Teachers union is a powerful political body, and a good deal of that influence derives from the trust of parents in the teachers who help raise our children. That alliance fostered the opt-out movement, resulting in more than 50% of 3rd-8th graders on Long Island not taking standardized tests. Teachers said they’d have to spend too much time teaching to the tests, and parents held kids out of tests to ensure that did not happen. That killed a teacher evaluation system which was to be based partly on those test results.
Given that history, it's unsurprising that all their ire is reserved for Hynes and the board, but it's also unfair.
A letter penned Friday by Regina McLean, the president of the Port Washington Teachers Association, shows the union was never on board with a full five-day return to classrooms for elementary school children, and that their pushback was a primary factor in the change of plans.
According to the letter, the union wanted only a hybrid plan and a full remote learning one before the district “decided to pivot to a full return to school for all elementary students without any input from teachers, nurses, paraprofessionals, parents, etc. The district committed to the idea of ‘all-in’ before it was vetted and without evaluating the complexities of this idea.”
The union felt the “all-in” blueprint was unsafe for those back in school buildings and educationally inappropriate for those who remained home. Those students would have watched lessons streamed from Chromebook cameras set up in classrooms, which the teachers rightly said was not the best method for remote instruction.
Hynes says he owns the fact that remote learning in the spring was lacking. He says they will do better this year, and swears he is committed to seeing the full five-day plan come online by Oct. 5. He says he had hoped the district or BOCES could set up a better distance-learning system for kids staying home but that never came to fruition.
Parents have a right to be angry at him about these failures. But the teachers, according to their own letter, had a huge part in ruling out having elementary school kids in class full time to start the year. Knowing that, parents might want to have more patience with district leaders whose plan to return to classrooms five days a week was deemed unsafe and unfair by the teachers they trust.
Lane Filler is a member of Newsday's editorial board.
Lane Filler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
