Some District 75 Concerns

A (different) teacher contributed these words. He prefers to remain anonymous)

It is nearly impossible to practice social distancing when most, if not all, of our students require hand over hand prompting with everything from washing their hands, to wiping their bottoms to completing classwork. These children unfortunately won’t wear masks so the classroom is going to be extremely unsafe; yet D75 is telling parents they can come to school 5 days per week. Many of our students are in diapers and paraprofessionals are required to change their diapers in unventilated bathrooms.

Like many community schools, our classrooms are also unventilated but they are much (much!) smaller than any regular DOE classroom.

A very challenging part of our day as D75 educators is when a child is going into crisis; we often get bit, spit on, kicked…you name it! The scary behaviors not are spitting and biting; that is so unsanitary for everyone in the classroom (reminder: they don’t only spit on the teachers who will be provided some sort of PPE).

During fire drills our students need their hands held at all times and they need to be in close proximity to an adult. The same goes for shelter in place drills/lockdowns. Since we will be hybrid we will be having twice the amount (at least) of fire drills and lockdowns since a certain number need to be conducted every single year and the kids of course need to participate so this means we will be in extremely close quarters with our students very often.