I want to tell a story about educators in the time of COVID. It is a simple story about 386 clear plastic bags, filled with the hope and promise of education as community. It is the story of my school, ARISE High School, in Oakland, California — and it is the story of myriad schools and educators around the world building bridges toward learning with the tools they have. From a distance. But close to the heart.
When my non-educator friends and family ask me how my school is doing, I try to paint an image that is as honest and clear as possible. I keep returning to two narratives.
First, it is terrible. No matter how well we do online learning (and I believe my school is doing it about as well as we possibly can, within the boundaries of the current paradigm) the limits are still deafening. We cannot stand out in front of school and see sleepy eyes turn to laughter as we sing to a student about how happy we are to see her. We cannot sit down beside a student, hand on his shoulder, as he struggles through the frustration of not understanding the first math problem on the page. We cannot gather for lunch to prepare for the first camping trip of the year next weekend when we will be able to sit under the stars and forget about the rigid roles of teacher and student and the boxes these roles hold us in.
The places we are able to reach when we are face to face simply are not possible through a screen. This is a true story. But it is not the full story.
The second narrative I share with my friends and family — the story I wish to impart to you — speaks of the hope and affirmation of community in the midst of times that try hard to leave us in despair.
ARISE is a small high school, serving just under 400 students, in the center of the Fruitvale neighborhood. 39 educators, our entire team, commit hearts, hands, and spirits to our mission of “empowering our students with the knowledge, skills, and agency to become highly educated, humanizing, critically conscious, intellectually and reflective leaders in our community.” Since March 12, the last day we welcomed our students to campus, this team of educators, from every single classroom teacher, to our custodians, to our administrators and counselors, has worked audaciously to ensure the wellness, safety, and academic success of each one of our brilliant students…
Like our operations and student support teams who meet at 8am every Friday morning to prepare a week’s worth of lunches for 150 students and deliver them to the front doors of every single one of these families.
Like our teacher teams in each grade level who met multiple times over the summer and spent hours working together to build semester-long Collaborative Community Action Research Projects to ensure their students would be engaged in relevant and meaningful work that teaches them about the moment we are in and the world around us instead of returning to business as usual in the Fall.
Like our head of school who spent two weeks in June traveling to the homes of 68 seniors to conduct individual graduation ceremonies for every one of our graduates and their families.
Like our entire team reading We Want to Do More Than Survive by Bettina L. Love and spending Friday afternoons engaging in book group discussions of what it means to be an abolitionist educator.
Like our custodian and lunch coordinator who has taken on the role of English Language Learner support and now attends several classes every day to support newcomer students who are just beginning to learn English as a second language.
Like every one of our 39 staff members who conspired, cajoled, created, and committed countless hours to prepare 386 individual bags, each one containing the exact items from six classes that every ARISE student needed to begin the school year set up for success. 386 plastic bags filled with: copies of The Autobiography of Malcolm X for 12th grade English AND water colors for Art 1 AND academic planners for all 9th graders AND copies of Demand the Impossible for Leadership class AND writing journals for Creative Writing AND packets of practice problems for Algebra 1.
The list goes on. 386 plastic bags.
Filled with everything students needed to begin their year. But, more importantly, filled with the love that comes from a group of educators working to build a beloved community, the foundation for education; for, if we are going to truly teach our students, especially in this time of mandatory distances, we must be grounded in belief and hope.
“Collective hope is a shared vision of what could be, with a shared commitment and determination to make it reality. Collective hope can be likened to the soul of the community as it bolsters and protects the existential dimensions of community life, its faith, purpose, meaning, and collective imagination” writes one of my educator heroes Shawn Ginwright in Hope and Healing in Urban Education.
This is a simple story, a love letter to the educators at my school — and a love letter to every educator in the world right now who is taking the distance and disaster of a global pandemic and molding it, through love and innovation and labor, into something that looks like education — and, even more importantly, something that feels like community.