Money Doesn't Talk, It Swears

Desperate times call for desperate measures, I'm told. We are fond of telling one another that COVID-19 has stressed 'our system,' be it healthcare, education, governance, business, among others but what we really mean is that the pandemic has laid bare the shortcomings of what we've built that benefits some without ever benefiting all so extensively that our weaknesses are visible from space. 

If ever there was a moment to look at what we are and how we’ve gotten here, this would be that time and maybe it’s also when we should assess where we should go from here and how we should get there. As is so often the case, there are too many home fires burning and not enough trees.  

And lest we forget, it wasn't the easiest of times around here in pre-COVID-19 days (sounds quaint doesn’t it?) as many, if not too many, private and public initiatives were postponed and delayed until we had ‘better days.’ Now, our calendars don't seem to have any sign that those better days will be arriving any time soon, and nowhere will this be felt harder and more severely than in our schools.  

Too many years of kicking the can down the road on addressing the financial needs of public education have left us with a school system that literally cannot afford any more bumps in the road, even though much of our future would seem to be unpaved. 

If you think this year's budget deliberations were difficult and the proposed way forward the Board of Education has created will be painful when, and/or, if, the new school year starts, you may need to rethink your definition of pain once that next year unfolds.  

Some of us have learned to say 'distance learning ' as if it were 'abracadabra' or some other magic phrase but it's not and we'd need more than one fairy godmother to make it happen here. 

We don't have the dollars to invest in developing the curriculum needed to support distance learning, to train the teachers to deliver that instruction, the infrastructure to connect our households to those distance learning opportunities, and the computers to put in all those homes and apartments where our children live, much less support the existing classrooms to which our children hope to return.  

In a school system in a poor city such as ours, with so many families struggling to make ends meet (even as the ends keep moving farther apart) and many of our children relying on free or reduced breakfasts and lunches, making sure they have juice boxes takes priority over assuring access to Chromebooks. 

If you think that the impact of our current crisis is greater and more damaging on Main Street than Wall Street purely by coincidence, you're either naive or stupid. Or both. We’ve postponed the heart to heart conversation we’ve needed to have on the importance and value of public education for all the decades I’ve lived here. Let’s finally face the facts, own the obligation to change, and do what we know we must if we are to fulfill the promise of greatness that those before us knew we were capable of. 
-bill kenny