School Closures Pit Female Teachers Against Working Moms Feeling Compelled To Stay Home — Where Are The Feminists?
The nearly year-long school closures in some jurisdictions have affected many working moms who have felt like they had to give up their jobs to care for kids no longer in school.
Joe Biden said that one of his priorities was to reopen schools, but that hasn’t happened yet in many places where the teachers’ unions have been shifting the goalposts.
The CDC has said that it’s safe to open schools and has published guidelines on how to do that safely.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has said that teachers don’t need to be vaccinated before schools can be reopened. Earlier this month during a White House Press Briefing on COVID-19, Dr. Wolensky said, “There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated.”
NBC News Political Correspondent, Ali Vitali posted a tweet with a link to a story that highlights the terror of teachers which clearly isn’t based on any science.
I think about this story from July all the time. Teachers – 76% of which are women – telling me they wondered if they should draft their wills before going back into the classroom and how torn they were between love of teaching & staying healthy. https://t.co/x8xB45O2qE https://t.co/CwRfhsA08S
— Ali Vitali (@alivitali) February 15, 2021
Vitali’s article from July noted, “[m]ore than 3.5 million Americans are full, or part-time, public school teachers— and 76 percent of that workforce is female.”
Some teachers who spoke with NBC News said they felt left out of the discussions about reopening, or that the debate leaves out the realities of the classroom that they know well. For instance, how kids, especially younger ones, will likely need frequent reminders to not touch their face, their mask, or their classmates. Or, as Laura Hammock, an elementary school teacher in Jacksonville, Florida, already foresees, there could be difficulty social distancing because of space constraints in classrooms.
“It’s gonna be hard to put … 20 kids in a classroom with desks six feet apart,” she said. “You know, it’s not like we have extra money to add on to our classrooms.”
Other educators, like Amanda Lukesh, a middle school teacher in Lincoln, Nebraska, fear that by going back “it’s not if you get COVID, it’s when. When am I going to get it?” She has even discussed the possibility with her husband of drafting a will before going back to school.
Source: NBC News
What’s missing from this is the toll that this is taking on many working-class families — especially working moms — that are making tremendous sacrifices to pick up the slack left by the continued school closures pushed by teachers’ unions.
Karol Markowicz of the New York Post wonders where all of the feminists are these days.
The US jobs numbers for December were grim: 140,000 jobs were lost amid new lockdowns across the country. But the gender breakdown of the losses was stunning. As the National Women’s Law Center notes, “Although net jobs lost hit 140,000 nationwide, women lost 156,000 jobs while men actually gained 16,000.”
Even more female workers may have felt forced to “voluntarily” give up their jobs to be home looking after kids exiled from their school buildings at the behest of powerful teachers’ unions. Oh, and as CNN reports, the job losses hit black and Hispanic women disproportionately. Feminists are supposed to care about minorities, along with women, aren’t they?
The giant, roof-busting elephant in the room: Women have been hit especially hard by the pandemic in large part because school, in many major American cities, has all but ceased to exist. And yet that deafening sound no one hears is the tragic silence of a feminist movement that has chosen to side with teachers’ unions instead of with women throughout the country who are bearing the brunt of these school closures.
When kids have to be home, the workload of child care, meal preparation and playing Zoom Sherpa lands squarely on moms. Some kids attend schools that have been closed for in-person learning since March. Other kids, the lucky ones, attend schools operating on an extremely truncated schedule, one to three days a week.
Source: New York Post
There have been businesses that have remained open during even the most restrictive of lockdowns. Grocery store workers, first responders, and gas station attendants are among them.
Yet, many teachers are now wanting to get pushed to the head of the queue for vaccines because their work is considered “essential” but how is it that they should be prioritized ahead of people that work at gas stations or big box stores, or even line cooks?
Frankly, according to a new study from the University of California, it appears that during the pandemic, line cooks have had a higher mortality rate than healthcare workers.
Line cooks had a 60% increase in mortality associated with the pandemic.
The top five occupations that had higher than a 50% mortality rate increase during the pandemic include cooks, line workers in warehouses, agricultural workers, bakers and construction laborers…
…[Sociologist and post-doctoral student Alicia] Riley says the hope is that there is more focus on protecting these groups of people who hold high-risk jobs. In California, food and agricultural workers are currently next in line to get vaccinated.
“We’ve all been touched and supported by the work of these people,” she says. “Not only is their labor essential to our lives but their lives are essential.”
Source: CNBC
I’d love to know if the teachers who are so terrified about going back to the classroom that they have to make a will have gone anywhere at all in the past 11 months. If they have gone to a grocery store, big box store, or a gas station. have they asked those employees or their Door Dash driver if they’ve updated their wills?
