Interview With NPR’s On Point Radio

This August, our founder Siriana had the fantastic opportunity to join a live radio show and share her thoughts on virtual learning in our nation today.

Listen to Siriana’s interview here (around 40:05).

Anthony Brooks (WBUR On Point Radio): We’re going to go to one more teacher, Siriana Abboud. She’s a former Pre-K teacher in the Bronx. She’s joining us from Cleveland, Ohio. And Siriana, great to have you. Thanks for joining us.

Siriana: Hi Anthony, thank you so much for having me.

Anthony: Well, we appreciate what you do and we’re happy to give you a voice. So, if I understand correctly, you were a teacher of preschool in the Bronx. You decided not to return this year. Tell us why not.

Siriana: So in March, I did not see a healthy, safe, viable option for returning to school in the fall. We’re learning now more than ever that young children are more efficient at transmitting the disease than we first thought. And in a world before a pandemic, my amazing, supportive school could not keep me healthy. I mean, me and all my students, all my families and colleagues, we would be consistently sick from August until January. And this is before a pandemic. So I really did not see any solution being put forth that protected me and the families that I teach.

Anthony: So what would you have liked to have seen in your district, or state? I mean, is there something that your district or state could have done that might have made you feel differently?

Siriana: Well, like everybody’s been saying . . .you have to look at it case by case. In New York City, most of my families were essential workers. My families had to take the subway to get to their homes, their schools, and their work. So in just the act of getting to school, I was already exposed to thousands of people on a daily basis. So in my opinion, there was no safe way to open up schools in the fall. I can’t talk about later on. We have to see how the pandemic keeps turning out, but my biggest point is that we had this entire summer, and we had from March to prepare for online learning.

What happened in March when we left our school . . .was not virtual learning. It was emergency learning. Teachers did not know the difference between Zoom, Google Hangouts, and other resources that were there to help our children. Children did not have access to computers or internet connections that we could’ve spent this time giving them.

And so, I think we spent the summer kind of just sitting on our hands, and we waited for policymakers—not teachers—to make the decision.

Anthony: Meira Levinson, as we listen to Siriana here, I mean, I’m struck by a couple of things. I mean, this idea—you touched on this earlier in the hour, if i’m not mistaken—this idea that we had so much time to really think hard about you know, how to do online learning right. And we didn’t use that time productively.

Meira Levinson (Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education): Yeah, although I would actually, I mean, I’m torn. I am, in part, exactly with Siriana. We had these months. We should’ve planned to do educating effectively this fall. And on the other hand, we actually wouldn’t have had to plan for high-quality online learning if we had taken the pandemic seriously enough and just engaged in public health control measures. Right, countries around the world have reopened schools, particularly primary schools, but also middle and high schools safely—without exacerbating community transmission, without killing teachers or kids—because they took the public health steps necessary to get the pandemic under control. And they allocated their resources to schools, so that they and their kids and their families and the teachers could actually come back to school safely. So in some ways, that’s where we should’ve spent these lost months.

Anthony: I wanna ask you both a question. Siriana, stay with us, and Meira, as well. So this is from a listener on Facebook. He asks, “I hope you will ask them if they will expect to lose their paychecks when they don’t work like everyone else. I love teachers in metro school districts. They have a remarkably hard job. But when an entire society is built on the premise of compulsory K-12 education, you can’t just pull the rug out from under it and expect there not to be catastrophic dominoes.” Siriana, what do you say to our listener about that?

Siriana: Well, with all respect to your question, I’d like to ask another question that, before this pandemic, when teachers were overworked and overqualified for the kinds of tasked that we’re expected to do, we put in more hours than asked.

I’m a preschool teacher, and I was required to get a Masters, rightfully, to educate young children.

But I was still seen as a babysitter. So I want to ask that, before the pandemic, were people asking my paycheck to be increased, based on the work I was doing?

And then beyond that, when I was doing emergency virtual learning in the springtime . . .we were offering two hour-long circle time virtual sessions for our children. We had 14 out of 18 children coming up, and we were offering supplementary material on the side. And this is on the preschool level, where I only had 18 students. So I know for a fact that . . .elementary and secondary teachers that have multiple classrooms and hundreds of students, they are putting in more work than ever to offer high-quality virtual learning.