Teachers in Florida banned from giving kids band-aids
Absurdity and bigotry go hand-in-hand
Welcome to a big Sunday edition of Progress Report.
In tonight’s edition, we’ll start with our main story, then outline some recent headlines, including some nice wins worth celebrating. There’s a little bit of everything tonight, which would have marked iconoclastic The Clash frontman Joe Strummer’s 70th birthday. The future is still unwritten.
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When a student in Angela’s first grade class developed a hacking cough one morning early last week, her first instinct as a teacher was to send the child off to the nurse’s office. It was muscle memory from a decade already spent in the classroom, the standard protocol to ensure that the student received care and the rest of the class avoided further exposure to any potential illness. This year, however, things are a bit more complicated.
Over the summer, the administrators of her well-regarded K-8 school sent staffers a series of memos outlining new protocols and precautions for the year to come. Among the changes was the stipulation that students would no longer be eligible to visit the nurse’s office or receive any kind of care from school staff unless their parents filled out a consent form.
“We’ve been instructed to not even give a bandaid to a child if they have a cut,” explains Angela, who is speaking under a pseudonym to maintain both her anonymity and her job. “Even if their arm is hanging off, we can’t call 911 unless the family has consented to their child being cared for.”
Further complicating matters was the fact that teachers are not permitted access to the database of consenting parents. Angela was thus obligated to call the nurse’s office to check whether the coughing student was eligible to receive care, a call she was forced to make over and over again as the inundated office proved unreachable.
Angela suggested that the student text her parents, but that too went unanswered. Time ticked by as the first grader sat coughing at her desk, with her teacher desperate to help but unable to do so without risking termination. Having spent 11 years working in schools attended by mostly low-income students, Angela was unsurprised by the lack of immediate response to the text.
“Families are busy, they have tons of jobs and they're not so worried about checking a box on a website when they have families to feed and bills to pay,” she says.
This is the new reality for children and educators in Ron DeSantis’s Florida, where an ongoing political war on “woke” is remaking every aspect of public education. The strict limitation on medical treatment was a provision of DeSantis’s infamous “Parental Rights in Education Act,” which he pushed through the legislature last spring.
Though wide in scope, the act is better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law due to the overtly bigoted limitations it imposes. Intentionally vague and intended to intimidate, those provisions prohibit discussion of gender in some grades and make it dicey for LGBTQ+ educators to mention their own families in the classroom. Where federal guidance would seem to protect them, the state education department has ordered teachers to ignore instruction from DC.
As a teacher in a K-8 school in the Orlando area, Angela says that a diverse community is being stifled and silenced, much to the detriment of both students and educators.
“There’s no asking of pronouns, we are not allowed to have any gender-affirming or gender-questioning, or anything that isn't heterosexual in our classroom libraries,” she explains. “If we are not in a heterosexual relationship, we are discouraged from having our family photos out for children to see.”
Bianca Goolsby, a former public school teacher who runs the education non-profit Teaching for the Culture, says that educators she knows in the Tampa Bay area have been told that they can only call students by their legally given names. Intended to discriminate specifically against trans kids, it also has the effect of disqualifying any and all nicknames. Everything is now a risk.
“You've had educators who wear the ‘Protect Trans Children’ shirt and have been cyberbullied and attacked by these groups that are mobilizing online,” Goolsby says. “You have Moms for Liberty that are literally educating their members to call out these educators and target them and get them fired. You have children that don't feel like they have a safe place. Some of them don't even have a safe place at home. There are some major implications happening right now.”
DeSantis’s assault on public education has produced multiple laws designed to implement a white supremacist agenda on students and teachers throughout Florida. The Republican fixation on Critical Race Theory and DeSantis’s own obsession with “woke-ism” as a catchall term has made teaching history almost impossible, with conservative parents watching like hawks for anything that might rattle their self-perception.
Seeking to avoid lawsuits, school districts across the state are preemptively scrubbing walls, gutting curriculum, and censoring teachers and libraries. Even book donations and Scholastic sales are now banned in some districts.
Florida’s public schools have been starved over the past two decades, which have resulted in a plethora of problems that have nothing to do with “wokeness” or trans kids playing sports. The state’s average pay for teachers ranks 48th in the nation, overall school funding is in the tank, and conditions in many schools are downright miserable. Combined with the draconian gag order on identity and history just instituted, teachers are leaving the classroom en masse.
Angela says many of her award-winning peers bowed out after last year, and if things stay this difficult, she’ll feel as if she has no choice but to leave the only career she ever wanted when the year is over.
“The biggest thing that the educators are feeling right now is burn out, even though school just started,” Goolsby reports.
This is no accident. DeSantis’s campaign is not just one of vindictiveness, though it is certainly that, but also part of a generational effort to unravel the public school system.
He recently invited cops and military vets to fill some of those teaching vacancies with the minimum of qualifications, essentially turning public schools into militarized factories of extremist conservative ideology. DeSantis is also backing 29 school board candidates this year with both financial support and the imprimatur of his endorsement.
Each one of them is a far-right lunatic extremist that rants and raves about “gender ideology” and mask mandates; many of the candidates have also been endorsed by for-profit charter school associations, while some previously worked for private religious schools.
Teachers this summer experienced some of what it would mean to have their work shaped by ideological fantasies of far-right fanatics, with new state curriculum training provided by Hillsdale College, a private Christian university that teaches a gospel informed by Reaganism, Focus on the Family, and science denialism. A Charles Koch-affiliated organization also contributed to the curriculum.
For now, teachers are doing their best to balance the new state orders with their own moral compasses and the years of professional training that fly in the face of DeSantis’s agenda. Little acts of resistance can add up.
“We have a Gay-Straight Alliance club — it has to be student-led, it can't be adult-led — and we received an email instructing us that if a parent asks if we know whether their child is in that club, we have to report it,” Angela says. “But I’ve just decided that if I find myself in any situation where I have to report on a child to their families, I will conveniently have the worst memory ever.”
Alright, now for some (mostly) good news and wins worth celebrating.
Missouri: In yet another example of how most people see policy as entirely separate from politics, voters in the now-solidly red state of Missouri are primed to pass a historically progressive marijuana legalization initiative. Not only would the initiative’s success legalize recreational marijuana, it would also automatically expunge many criminal records with weed-related charges. Missouri would be the first state in which such a mass expungement would be directly authorized by voters.
Washington, DC: The nation’s first “baby bonds” program is off and running. When children from DC’s lowest income families turn 18, the city will provide them with up to $25,000, money that can be put toward their education or similar endeavors. Thus far, 832 children have been identified as eligible and entered into the system.
Boise, ID: I’ll celebrate any publicly financed, high-quality affordable housing development I can get, especially in a growing city in a state that could use some political balance. This one does the trick.
New York: A reminder that politics and representation can be joyful. Kristen Gonzalez, the progressive candidate running for State Senate in Astoria, Queens, showed up to a canvassing event at a massive public housing project in style.
Iowa: More on this in the weeks to come, but Iowans are going to be voting on gun rights this fall. The result of the ballot initiative will be quite instructive going into another legislative session and the 2024 campaign cycle.
Austin, TX: The city council in the state’s increasingly expensive just raised the minimum wage for city workers to $20 an hour. Here’s hoping private employers follow the lead.
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