Five years ago, I wrote an essay about my "Michigan Hero" and I wrote about my mom and the struggles she has had to face in her job, a job as a teacher in the Detroit Public School System. At the time, the district was under an emergency manager and it was deemed that the district couldn't get worse than it was at that point. The district was laying off all of their teachers and recalling them afterward if they wanted to keep their job. This resulted in a teacher shortage, and the teachers of DPS all just wanted to make sure their students were taken care of.
More recently, Detroit Public Schools teachers have been under fire once again. DPS teachers are still under an emergency manager, Darnell Early, the former emergency manager for Flint. Before an emergency manager came into play in DPS, there was a budget surplus, and now the district is millions of dollars in debt. The result? Teachers are still paying out of pocket for supplies for their students, and still spending their free time doing extra work to make sure their students are getting the education they deserve. But now, no one is paying attention to these teachers, and now is the time they need attention more than ever.
The buildings in the district are falling apart, and district officials will go to lengths to make sure the teachers don't have a voice, there is even a law that states that teachers cannot hold strikes. District officials and other people have a huge misconception that these teachers don't care about their students. I have never heard something so ridiculous in my entire life. I have grown up around DPS teachers since my mom's second grade students were older than I was. I have never come across a teacher that blatantly doesn't care about their students like some people are making accusations of. Teachers are natural rule followers, and these specific teachers have followed the rules as far as they possibly could to try and get someone in a higher position to listen to not only their concerns about their own job, but their concerns about their students. The hardest thing to swallow about the situation is that these teachers have done nothing but follow the rules, and no one in the district has paid attention to them. The result? These teachers are holding sick-outs.
The way sick-outs work is that teachers from various schools will call in sick to protest the inequality that goes on within these districts. When enough teachers call in sick, the school in question has to close for the day. Because teachers can't officially protest, this is the only way they are getting the public to pay attention to the disgusting conditions these teachers and students have to attempt to survive in. Sick- outs have been causing a ton of controversy within the district, because some people believe that these sick-outs are just teachers acting as a "band of rebels" so they can "take away from instructional time". This isn't the least bit true! Teachers hold sick-outs to get the public to try and pay attention to their hardships, and the amount they have to go through to try and get their students a quality education. The photos below show exactly the kind of conditions these students and teachers have to try and thrive in, and why they must protest. Just take a look at how disgusting the bathroom conditions and warped gym floors are in these photos.
All of a sudden, the district is completely up in arms over these teachers' sick-outs. The reality is, they just want a vulnerable victim to pin their mistakes on. The district was not up in arms over losing hundreds of hours of instructional time due to power outages and weather conditions. The district claims that they are concerned about the students not getting meals when schools are closed due to sick-outs, but they haven't attempted to open buildings to feed these students when there are sick-outs. If these politicians where worried about the students, all of these problems would've been fixed years and years ago. The truth is, they aren't worried about the students. Their only concern is getting re-elected. The people who have genuine passion and concern for these students are the teachers and staff who build relationships with these kids because they see them every day. A passion I have witnessed first hand as the daughter of a DPS teacher.
All teachers want to do is teach their students. They don't want to fight the district. They don't want to see their students suffer. They don't want to have to teach in disgusting conditions. They don't want to worry about the stability of their jobs, or if they'll have access to their pensions. All these DPS teachers want to do is teach their students. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.
