Westport Teachers: Full-in Return is “extremely unwise”; Paediatrican, Parent:“prioritize your job, which is to teach.”

Last week’s Board of Education meeting garnered 63 public comments on the Superintendent’s choice to re-open elementary and middle schools full-time on February 1st, just days before the Governor announced vaccines for educators are delayed until March. Comments can be found here.

With so many public comments - many several paragraphs long - the Board elected to stop reading them, with the promise to post them publicly and read at a later time, in order to attend to their full meeting agenda. Even with the time saving measure, the meeting was pushed until after midnight on Wednesday morning. It’s unknown how late tonight’s meeting will go, or if the Board of Education will comment on staff or family concerns.

The letters were mainly written by Westport educators, some of whom said they were “overwhelmed, stressed, scared, disconnected, anxious, uncertain, nervous, lonely, worried, exhausted, tense, drained, and uneasy.” according to one group-authored letter. Others described their love for the district and their jobs, but their feeling “undervalued and underappreciated through actions of the Board.”

Some parents brought up concerns for the students who elect to remain virtual, specifically referring to a change in specials scheduling, saying “Distance Learners depend on zoom specials to stay connected to their schools, classmates, and beloved specials teachers. What you have presented is not equitable.”

However not all unread letters criticized the decision to return. One high school parent/paediatrician told the Board of Education “I respect teachers as much as I do physicians so with all due respect I ask that you prioritize your job which is to teach. Leave the job of health and safety to those of us that have spent lifetimes studying it. Listen to the CDC, AAP, and National Academy of Sciences, who have all stated that at this point in the pandemic returning children to school will not change the outcome that you’re imagining.” The parent continued to request that high school seniors are allowed to finish their high school career in-person.

In addition to the Health Report and transition discussions, tonight’s meeting will include a review of the superintendent’s budget - which administrators were told to cut by nearly 1% in order to keep an increase of around 3% instead of the proposed 3.98%. High school class sizes will be looked at in particular, followed by conversations about capital expenses.