Letter: School decisions undermine equity stance

Following your July 24 editorial “Feds should stay out of local decisions about whether to reopen schools,” which I enjoyed, I felt the need to shed light on Indiana’s local actions on this topic. It appears that our school boards view the reopening of schools as a binary decision between instructor/student safety and quality in-person education. In this view they are missing the third leg of the educational stool: the family.

The decision to close schools assumes that families have the resources to provide daytime care for children, whether that be the parents, another family member, or a paid service (daycare, nanny, private school, etc.). While this isn’t a problem for the privileged members of our community who can afford this flexibility, it hits deep in our working class. This impact is only exacerbated for single parents, who often juggle working class jobs on top of parental duties. What options do you have when you’re working two jobs and your kids are now staying home for the foreseeable future due to school closures?

The decision by some Indiana school boards to delay or to not reopen this fall and furthermore to not put solutions in place for these impacted families is a failure of duty. I’ve recently observed many community leaders promoting equity and inclusion, yet at the same time supporting the closure of schools for COVID-19. This has me perplexed. If you claim that equity and inclusion are important, you must support these working-class families that are impacted by the decision to close the critical services of public education. These families, largely working class and minorities, are disproportionately impacted by your decision.

Indiana taxpayers spend approximately $10,000 per student each year on public education. If schools don’t reopen this fall, then we must put these funds to work on all three legs of our educational stool: education, safety, and supporting parents and families. To focus only on an e-learning platform is to ignore the vital third leg.

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Matthew Whiteside