Reopen the Jersey City Public Schools Now. The Time for Excuses is Gone.
More than seven months have passed since we began this school year, and in that time you, the Board of Education and Superintendent Franklin Walker, have failed to strategize and prepare for the contingencies that would allow a successful reopening under the guidelines and recommendations of health officials we so venerated last year when we closed the schools.
Three basic categories must be addressed in order to reopen: facilities, faculty, and families. And while that may seem like an oversimplification, solving complex problems begins by developing approachable categories and containers for solutions.
Since the decision to start this school year remote was made, only one priority should have mattered: to plan in each of these areas sufficient to reopen the schools as soon and safely as possible.
Considering the arrival and distribution of the vaccine as well as all scientific recommendations, research, and observations regarding COVID in general, and the data around COVID in other districts which have opened, we should already be back. The statewide transmission rate has been under 1.0 for more than a week. Hospitalizations are on the decline. And all of this has occurred while restaurants increased capacity and schools reopened and families gathered for spring break and spring sports restarted. We are heading in the right direction and no longer reeling as we were last spring and last fall.
So your job is not to plan for how to keep kids home longer. Not to pursue technology that makes it better or easier. Not to spew platitudes like “remote learning is here to stay.” This is an urban public school in the most diverse city in the country and your job is to reopen it now. The lives and well-being of all our children depend on it. They depend on you. Our children can’t wait.
In January of 2020, JCEA President Ron Greco howled like a madman at a city council meeting where the topic of an appointed school board was being raised. He labeled the entire council bigots and was escorted out by the police, embarrassing himself and our district. Why? For you. For you, Superintendent Walker, because he believed you deserved a chance to do this job. For you, the Board of Education, to remain elected to represent the interests of our community and our kids.
He threw the entire weight of his position as union president, and all that brings with it, behind all of you. Because the JCEA has maintained for years that homegrown leadership is the best way to see our district flourish. They cried loudly to the community that the board candidates they support and the superintendent they want will put us on a track to success. And they convinced the electorate and won the day. But in this key moment of testing, many months after the initial shock of the pandemic has been mitigated, where do we find ourselves?
You claim to have the facilities are ready to go. Good. But it seems you were unable to work with the man who defended your honor at the expense of his own and chart a realistic pathway for sufficient in-person teacher presence. Nor were you able to effectively communicate with your single most important collaborative partner about your plan for getting teachers back into the classroom. Nor did you bother to look at the calendar and see how the dedicated teacher vaccination week might affect teachers’ schedules for returning. Your collective favor with the JCEA only makes your failure more spectacular.
As for how you have handled preparing families for the re-opening through your communication, it’s best to say it’s as if we had been planning a wedding for months and were about to meet at the jeweler to pick out rings and you called the night before and dumped us over the phone. At no point in the past seven months have you made your plan clear to us. No sense of the if-then scenarios that could affect re-opening. No messaging that prepared us for a range of possibilities. Just a weekly half-sensical robocall. After this gut-wrenching betrayal how can we ever trust you to lead again in the future? How will we believe you when you say anything about September, or about testing, or about facilities? How can we know that you even understand the complexity and depth of the challenges our city and kids face?
This is no longer just a health issue. This is a humanitarian crisis. And once again those kids in our community in greatest need are bearing the greatest burden. We cannot stand for that. You should not be allowing it. You are feeding the cycle of generational poverty. You’re expanding the school-to-prison pipeline. No one will ask these kids later, “I see you dropped out of school. Did you happen to be a JCPS student during the pandemic? You were? Ok. You’re hired.”
Even more lives are going be destroyed when hundreds of kids never recover from this year because you wouldn’t find a way to open the schools part-way now in preparation for next fall. Yes, many have died in our community, people we’ve known and loved. Some of them might have been preventable, many not. This coronavirus is an insidious, amoral force that caught us off guard and did exactly what unthinking viruses do to so many vulnerable people.
But we’re facing a new threat to the vulnerable in our community — the children, youth, and families who already face many obstacles to a safe, healthy, and flourishing life: the collective incompetence of district leadership. This virus will plague our schools and decimate lives long after COVID is contained. And there seems to be no vaccine for your incompetence.
It’s clear there was never a real plan all along. It’s clear there is no plan now. And it’s clear that you are incapable of creating a plan. The drive and commitment of our teachers during this INTERIM remote learning period has given cover for your ineptitude, but now the light has been shone for all to see.
You have had your chance Mr. Walker. You took the mantle of leadership — with all the difficulty that it brings — and you have failed to lead. And you, the board, have failed to hold him accountable. The measure of a leader is not taken when they lead with the wind at their back. Rather they are measured by how they lead when headwinds are strong and unexpected. Crisis is inevitable. Trials and challenges are too. And as crisis came, you have shown that you are not a leader and not fit to be superintendent. Not now as we strive to reopen our schools, nor afterward, when the crisis has been averted. And many of you should never have claimed to be ready to lead our schools as members of the Board of Ed. Our teachers and the kids they so passionately serve deserve better.
Mr. Walker, if you are unwilling to drive toward opening the schools this marking period, the only course of action that remains is for you to tender your resignation effective immediately. And some of you on the board, unwilling to drive him to that result, should do likewise. And failing that, the board should terminate the superindendent’s contract and bring in an interim leader who can handle the one task that is before this district: to reopen it. Not in September. Not sometime next year. Right now. Before the year is out. To help our kids get reacclimated to in-person school BEFORE we come back after the summer. To show our community and our kids that we are not a wayward, complacent, failing district. Rather, to show them that our passion for our schools, teachers, and kids drives us to do what is right, even when it is hard and even when it requires sacrifice. Even if that sacrifice is your job.
