Opinion | Can Randi Weingarten Save Public Schools? - The New York Times

The parents were talking about pandemic schooling, so, unsurprisingly, the conversation quickly turned to emotional devastation.

It was a Wednesday night in December, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was sitting in a living room in a giant suburban house in Mason, Ohio, for what was billed as a “Stressed Out Parents Strategy Session.” The crowd of about a dozen or so people, most of them women, was a friendly one. The event had been organized by Katie Paris, founder of a Resistance group called Red Wine & Blue that mobilizes suburban women. No one there seemed mad at teachers unions, and a few were teachers themselves. They weren’t upset at schools for closing too long, because theirs had opened relatively quickly. But they did want to talk about the anguish of the previous year, and the damage done by even a few months of what’s euphemistically called remote learning.

Elisa de Leon had two kids in the affluent local school district, but worked as a bilingual school liaison in a much poorer one, where many children didn’t have internet at home, or a quiet place to work. “I see kids going from straight A’s to all F’s,” she said, adding that many of her students wanted to leave school altogether. This year, she said, had been better than last, but the mental health toll has been grueling; she said it seemed as if she was referring two students a week for treatment for depression, even though the school had only one therapist.

Joy...

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