Concerns about the coronavirus tend to fall flat when they’re coming from teachers sunbathing on the beach with a margarita in hand.
So warns the United Teachers Los Angeles’s union members as they begin to plan their tropical spring break trips. “Friendly reminder,” a Facebook post uploaded to a private members-only group says. “If you are planning any trips for spring break, please keep that off social media. It is hard to argue that it is unsafe for in-person instruction if parents and the public see vacation photos and international travel.”
Note what they did not say: “Please don’t travel, since obviously we believe this virus makes it incredibly dangerous to be indoors with other people.” It’s almost as if there are other motivations for keeping classrooms closed.
The Los Angeles teachers union has also argued that any attempt to fund the reopening of the county’s classrooms is a “recipe for propagating structural racism,” and they have accused any city official who might disagree of endangering the lives of teachers.
Meanwhile, one of their allies in the northern part of the state (Matt Meyer, the president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers) was caught taking his daughter to a private school that was open for in-person instruction after insisting during a meeting that public schools should reopen only after all teachers have been vaccinated.
The teachers unions’ coronavirus hypocrisy shouldn’t come as a surprise, given how much of it we’ve seen over the past year. But it’s still infuriating, especially since students’ academic and social well-being is on the line. Children and young adults are failing their remote classes at alarming rates, and millions of at-risk students have disappeared from the academic system altogether.
But no matter — these are all things Los Angeles’s public school teachers can contemplate from the resorts in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, just so long as they keep it off social media. Right?
