If Greene and the board will not stick up for staff and students during a pandemic, when will they?

It is tough being a teacher, a student, and a parent right now. Every day on social media, I see good people stretched to the limit and about to snap. It is heartbreaking, but what is equally heartbreaking is how the superintendent and school board DON”T care. I used the word don’t purposely because where they occasionally say they do, their actions, or often lack of actions speak much louder.    

It started last summer when the super said she was for opening schools. That if she had the say, that is what would happen, and I believe because of that, rather than look for things that would have made us safer, she haphazardly made them open. Contact tracing is dreadful, social distancing is nonexistent, mask-wearing is inconsistent, and the list goes on and on.  

Then rather than making it easier for everyone involved, she made it more difficult by putting more on people’s plates while simultaneously giving much less time to do it. The board’s reaction has been to sit back and shrug its shoulders, well that, and give the super a glowing review. Warren Jones gave Jesus a 45 and Greene a 44.    

Every step of the way, rather than supporting staff and students, the district inexplicably has decided to go the other way, and the latest example of this is with testing. 

Rather than cancel all district tests, and push for the cancellation of state tests, DCPS wants families to send their children in for a practice test. How does that make any %@#$ing sense? Don’t they know there is a pandemic? Don’t they know people are stressed to the breaking point? Of course, they do; they just DON”T care.  

Other districts are pushing back, but DCPS sure isn’t one of them. 

DCPS cares about every little thing but the most important thing, and that is the people. 

The district could have fought against the executive order, but nope, Greene said that was a south Florida thing. 

The district could have demanded robust contact tracing, but nope, Andersen said that’s all on the DOH. 

Instead of canceling the state tests, DCPS says, nope, we want even more tests. 

Every time the district is given a chance to do the right thing for students and staff, it has passed; it has said nope.