Speakout Columns
Doing the right thing
Jun 4, 2009 4:02 PM
The inside of the nurse’s office is very often one of those places in a school building that most of the staff rarely sees. In my building, it is on the first floor, off a main corridor and then down a second corridor. Unless you were looking for it, you would not even notice it.
In mid-May, it spilled out into the corridor, with chairs lined up on both sides of the hall, filled with students who were shivering and feverish.
They were sick with flu-like symptoms, and for the first time the nurse’s office was well and truly at the very center of what was going on in the building.
During the week of May 11, as more and more schools were closed, I listened to a doctor on TV ask what we were teaching our children by closing the schools. She believed that we were overreacting and that there was in fact no need to shut any school.
It’s just a flu, she said.
I teach at one of the first schools to be shut, IS 5 in Elmhurst, and I watched as each day that week the number of absent students grew and the number of ill students going to the nurse’s office increased. Staff members were also getting sick.
The air in the building was filled with concern, fear and questions. And, of course, germs.
But the only answer I could give my members was that the situation was being monitored by the Department of Education and the Department of Health, and that there were no reported confirmed cases of the suspected swine flu.
But even I knew that was a bogus answer, as most of the students were not being tested.
I am not a doctor, but I am a man of common sense. People were sick, and flu season to the best of my knowledge was over by the end of February. So something odd was going on and something needed to be done.
There was once a time when teachers were held in high esteem in the community. Our opinions once mattered. These days, our stature has been stepped on by people who have decided to play politics with education and turn the classroom into a widget pit for punching out numbers that the politicians can trade on.
Get the scores up and the politicians take the credit; if they slide, we are blamed.
The reality is, however, that schools are not factories; they are buildings where children and teenagers come, where families entrust them to us, with the expectation that we will teach and protect and guide them while they are in our care.
When we watch an illness sweep through our schools, when we watch children cough, sneeze, vomit and run back and forth to the bathroom in numbers never seen before, alarms need to sound.
I applaud the principal of my school. She handled this situation with the utmost care, the very best of compassion, and the kind of resolve that was needed at the helm.
While I recognize that mistakes were made by those outside the building, once the UFT got the DOE and the DOH moving from square one, these agencies took the actions needed.
Through this ordeal we taught our students a lesson in compassion, understanding and responsibility.
No family should ever think that their child would needlessly be exposed to any contagious illness, especially one that is new and carries with it a fear of the unknown, just because some believe it carries no life-threatening danger.
Thanks to the UFT, the DOE and the city finally stood up and did the right thing.
In this health crisis, we all became teachers and role models. Yes, even the politicians. We let the families of our students know that when push comes to shove, the politics stops and the numbers game can be paused in the best interest of the children.
And that lesson, which started in the nurse’s office, is an invaluable one for us all.
Dermot Smyth teaches social studies and is the chapter leader at IS 5 in Queens.
