ROCKVILLE, Maryland — “Enough is enough,” declared Jeremy Levine, a featured speaker at the teachers union rally. “You will not sacrifice our lives, disrupt our communities, and endanger our students, for what? Test scores? Or a few folks to get their free babysitters back?”
“Keep the schools shut,” Levine said on Tuesday, until teachers are vaccinated, buildings are upgraded, and community spread drops even lower.
The cars crawled by, honking in support, as part of a massive car rally against the Montgomery County school board’s plan to reopen schools for most students by the end of April.
Levine then got real.
“Mario Salvi in 1964 at Berkeley: ‘There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, it makes you so sick at heart, you cannot take part. You can’t even passively take part. You’ve got to put your bodies on the gears, upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.’”
The “machine” in question here is a public school system with 160,000 students. The rally Tuesday night was the protest, organized by two unions: Montgomery County’s chapter of the National Education Association and the Service Employees International Union. The aim: overturning the county’s reopening plan, which would slowly return students to school starting in March and give all students a chance to return by the last week of April.
The demands at times were simple: get teachers vaccinated, require masks at school (Gov. Larry Hogan did that in a Tuesday executive order), and improve ventilation. Vaccines have been a source of continual frustration. Many protesters objected that teachers find it very hard to find vaccines. In fact, a PTA-like group called MoCo Vax Hunters formed to find vaccine appointments for teachers. According to Montgomery County Public Schools, 5,427 public-school teachers in the county have been vaccinated as of Tuesday.
These things, vaccines and better ventilation, would make things safer for sure. But many teachers went overboard in stating the dangers of teaching.
“No Tributes. No Hunger Games. We are NOT expendable,” read one teacher’s sign. “You will not sacrifice our lives,” Levine said. The implicit theme was that opening schools to in-person teaching amid 3% and falling positivity, mask mandates, and universal testing of students and staff was likely to lead to teacher deaths.
Also, the teachers at the Rockville rally pushed back on the criticisms of virtual learning.
“The physical classroom is not always the answer,” teacher Gianna Morales argued.
I asked one high school teacher what she thought about the academic and emotional costs of a year-plus of distance learning. She responded by calling on her young son who sat in the back seat. “How much do you like Mrs. Ellington? How awesome is kindergarten?”
The teacher went on: “He’s doing amazing. He’s doing really, really, really awesome. He’s got wiggle breaks … He’s learning to read. The teacher’s phenomenal. We’re really happy. We’re keeping him virtual.”
“Our kids are getting a tremendous amount of education and attention,” one art teacher from Montgomery Village said. She had covered her car in printouts of the computer drawings her kindergartners had done. “So, they’ve learned things. That is unbelievable.”
She added that the masking and distancing rules might make the classroom no better than remote learning. “There’s not going to be a great benefit to being in the classroom … You’re going to be so restricted as to what they’re able to do. At least if they’re at home right now, they could take breaks away from the screen. They have their home. They could go outside for a minute, they could come back in. So, to me, there’s more freedom. And there’s more energy that they’re able to expend if they spend it — if they’re at home.”
One car at the rally had a sign held by a student. “I learn so much in virtual school,” it began, before listing all the things this kindergartner was learning virtually.
“As a parent,” another teacher, who teaches in Gaithersburg, said, “I go back and forth on” whether students suffer from learning 100% remote. She gestured at her high school daughter, “I think this one would rather like to see human beings again at some point in time, but you know, at the same time, we want to keep everybody safe.”
There was also anger at how teachers seem to have fallen in public esteem. One teacher asked, “why should we face vitriol” for opposing reopening?
“Across the nation, the rhetoric about teachers and their unions have changed dramatically through the COVID-19 crisis,” Levine said. Now, “teachers are villainized for trying to keep themselves, their families, our communities safe.”
“And they call unions special interest groups? Well, unions are made up of people — workers, to be exact. Educators have always been the most underappreciated segments of the working class.”
The median earnings of a Montgomery County resident in 2019 was $51,000, according to census data. Only the lowest-paid entry-level teacher in MCPS makes less than $51,000. By Step 2, a teacher without an advanced degree is earning more than most Montgomery County workers. The average income is over $60,000. A married couple with two school teachers is guaranteed to earn six figures and have health insurance and retirement accounts.
But there were strong labor-union vibes nonetheless. One school teacher wore a red shirt emblazoned with a black clenched fist. Another attendee carried a sign saying, “Solidarity is essential to safety.”
The workers of Montgomery County were, by the hundreds, standing up to their employers (the school board) and to the parents who wanted the teachers back in the classroom with their children.
