It was announced Monday morning that the public school system in Alexandria, Virginia would close on March 8 to accommodate a strike organized by the Women’s March.
According to the school district, 300 staff members requested Wednesday off specifically to honor International Women’s Day, leaving schools with no choice but to close their doors.
Political points, for these educators, come before students.
The protest, a coordinated effort between the Women’s March and the International Women’s Strike, encourages women to participate in “a day of striking, marching, blocking roads, bridges, and squares, abstaining from domestic, care and sex work, boycotting, calling out misogynistic politicians and companies, striking in educational institutions,” and more.
Its mission is markedly radical and explicitly anti-capitalist (as articulated in the International Women’s Strike press release). This is especially notable given that the average teacher in the Alexandria City Public School system earns nearly $73,000 a year according to the district, almost $20,000 higher than the median household income in the United States.
Thanks to the faculty’s decision to strike en masse, working parents will have to find childcare or stay home themselves on Wednesday, only exacerbating a problem that feminists’ routinely bemoan.
While these teachers take time off on Wednesday, parents are literally being forced to pay the price of their activism, scrambling to find free childcare, forking over a fee to secure it, or taking the day off themselves.
The latter two options are costly for all parents, but will be especially taxing on low-income families, a group the women’s movement purports to represent. According to the Census Bureau, almost 10 percent of families with related children under the age of 18 in Alexandria live below the poverty line.
Did the hundreds of educators who applied to take the day off think about that?
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
