A letter to the Havre Public Schools Board of Trustees

Shutdown of schools

I am disappointed in the decisions to close schools. In rural Montana, our students face varying degrees of connectivity and lack of appropriate device issues. This means that not every student has a device or internet connectivity and yet our schools are sending students to remote learning for semesters, quarters, or weeks at a time. The achievement gap is already huge, it is getting bigger by the day, and now, we are going to make it insurmountable by going remote without every child having a device or connectivity. 

Secondly, teachers are spending countless hours recording lessons, getting packets together, whatever our students may need so that they can learn for the next two weeks, but you know what? Many of the students aren’t going to watch the videos, they’re not going to do the lessons, and we will just have to reteach when we all return in person. Those that do the work while on this two-week shutdown will be bored on return because they’re going to have to do it again with their peers who decided they could take two weeks off of school. 

We really need to stop treating quarantines as positive cases. A question was asked at a local school board meeting about how many positive cases were from the school environment and the school nurse answered that 70 percent of the quarantine cases are from the school. Positive cases and quarantine cases are not the same! Yes, many of our students are on quarantine because of being a first contact to a positive case; however, the positive cases are coming from students’ parents/guardians, or outside of school from somewhere else.

We are doing our part to stop the spread in the schools. We are sanitizing desks/tables regularly, the custodians are sanitizing common areas, we are washing/sanitizing hands in and out of the classroom, our classrooms are socially distanced, and we are wearing masks. However, I would also like to point out that even though classrooms are socially distanced, and/or students are wearing masks, they’re still being quarantined. It should be noted that the CDC says six feet or masks, not six feet and masks. Many students have been placed on quarantine that should not have been since they were correctly following CDC guidelines. 

In two weeks, COVID-19 isn’t just going to disappear. It will still be here, our community will still be affected by it, our neighbors will still be getting sick. We get this. We understand this. Shutting down school doesn’t help. So, what, we shut down for two weeks? OK, then what? We all get back together, kids go to work, parents/guardians go to work, family members go to the local pub, and cases spike again. Are we going to continue this rubber band motion of spike, shutdown, spike, shutdown, etc.? Where does this get us in the educational spectrum? 

The education of our students, and the mental health of our students, should be a bigger priority than we’re making it. Our students are struggling; they’re struggling a lot. Those not in education don’t see this every day, they’re not in the classroom. I wish for one day, people would put themselves in the shoes of the educators and see what we see. They would be deeply saddened. 

  Shutting down schools is not the answer to stopping the spread of COVID-19. I think our communities need to stand up for the education of our next generation. These students are going to be leading this country some day and don’t we want them to be knowledgeable when they take over? 

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Heather Haney is a Havre High School mathematics teacher.