School Is In Session

But our kids still need us

There are not enough bus drivers to collect all the kids.

Teachers have been quitting in droves.

In fact, no one wants to work in the schools anymore.

Do you blame them, though? We refuse to pay these people enough to handle what their job has become. But our solution is not to pay them more and give them an incentive to keep teaching (although some school districts are finally trying). Instead, we are making sure there are AR-15s on campus for the resource officers to use when there is an active shooter.

The key word there is “when”.

You see, we have done precious little to protect our kids from the next school shooting. We have done precious little to protect what few teachers we have left from the next school shooting. We have done precious little to protect even ourselves as the parents from the next school shooting. We have just assumed it is going to happen and have shrugged and wandered off.

If our daughters get raped in the school bathrooms, we have ensured that they are forced to carry the rapist's baby, even if their body is not ready to do so.

We have put policies in place to prevent kids and families from making their own medical decisions with regard to transgender youth, thereby pushing kids who might otherwise survive and thrive to kill themselves.

We have stopped talking about bullying. Which makes perfect sense given that we, the parents, have become bullies ourselves toward their teachers and school administrators. We would not want our hypocrisy to be too glaringly obvious.

We have dropped all pretense of trying to prevent the next pandemic outbreak. In fact, the attitude persists that our children should go back to school without any safety measures in place.

After years of full and partial shutdowns, our kids are proving to be socially inept and behind academically.

In sum, we are sending our kids to school unprepared and unprotected.

All the while, our kids are looking to us and asking us to help them. They do not want to die at school. They do not want to get sick. They do not want to be bullied. They do not want to be unhappy. They do not want to live unfulfilled lives.

They need us to teach them. They are looking to us to teach them. Even when they are telling us how stupid we are because we will not let them wear stilettos to gym class, they want our advice on how to survive.

Because of the world we have created and/or accepted, we have made our own jobs as parents that much harder. We have taken on the burden of teaching our kids morality, social cues, ethics, and even academic subjects. Which is fine. Parents should be the first line when it comes to teaching our kids. But we absolutely cannot abdicate our responsibility now that we have asked for it. We cannot get mad at the teachers for our kids' failing grades. We cannot get mad at the teachers if our kids get shot. We cannot blame the teachers if our trans children are bullied into suicide.

Because these things are our responsibility (now) as parents.

It is time that we as parents step up and make their teachers’ jobs easier. We need to stop attacking them. We need to stop restricting their ability to do their jobs. We need to start paying them what their job is worth. We need to find ways to protect them on campus. We need to stop assuming it is their job to stop the next shooter.

The best thing we can do for our kids and their teachers is to show them that we value them more than we do ourselves. Our kids and teachers need to come first. We need to defend them.

We may be sending our kids to school, but they still need us to teach them.