Clark County School District Superintendent Jesus Jara listens to a question during an editorial board meeting at the Las Vegas Sun offices Thursday, Aug. 22, 2019.
Sunday, April 26, 2020 | 2 a.m.
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On the front lines of the global coronavirus pandemic, our unrelenting health care workers continue to battle COVID-19. But meanwhile, unsung heroes are feverishly working to reinvigorate imaginations and continuing to train our next global leaders: America’s educators.
Nearly eight hours a day, 180 days a year, the nation’s children are left to the care of educators. Now, they are tasked with ensuring their students are hitting academic milestones, even though they are miles away from the classroom.
Our teachers are working harder than ever in this new normal. They are working overtime to keep our students from being swallowed up whole by the chaos caused by this insidious presence in our midst.
In the last few weeks, they have quickly adjusted to the need to provide distance learning options for our children. Something that has never been tried before on this scale — encompassing our entire population of 320,000 students — something that none of us could have ever dreamed of needing to consider in such a rapid fashion.
Teachers continue to find ways to support our kids with disabilities and our English language learners in this new dynamic. They work to find solutions for those who don’t even have access to technology, and they try to help our kids maintain relationships with their peers as a part of their vital social learning.
Add to this the number of parents who are looking to our teachers for support like never before.In the weeks since we were forced to close our schools, parents have had to become intimately engaged in the education process. In their kitchens and living rooms, they have become de facto teacher’s aides, ensuring that each day away from the classroom retains a form of academic structure for our children.
It is our teachers who have provided parents with guidance on how to make the process seamless. One more task on their list of duties — and all of this while tending to the needs of their own families through these times of uncertainty of the future. The mounting pressure cannot be ignored.
UNESCO (United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization) estimates that, globally, some 63 million teachers in 165 countries have been affected by school closures. Like our school district and elsewhere in the United States, distance learning has been the go-to option for continuing education until we determine the best path forward.
If all of our children came from homes in which technology was readily available and parents were well-equipped to support their children, this would be a much lighter load to carry. Unfortunately, that just isn’t the case. Nearly 70% of our families receive assistance for free and reduced-price meals. That’s a frightening reality in the face of a push to make technology-based distance learning the chief option for recovering from this upheaval to our way of life.
Our teachers are under a tremendous amount of stress. We all have to do what we can to help them navigate through these difficult days with ease.
As we continue to discuss the path forward, it is vital that we continue to invest in our teachers. Now is the time to provide them with professional learning to improve their craft in this shift to digital learning. If these efforts are going to be successful, they have to have the necessary tools to support our children.
Teachers know what it will take to bring our system back in a way that will ensure our families feel supported and our children don’t lose too much ground. They also know what it will take for them, our front line on the education side of this war against COVID-19, to survive with their own peace of mind intact.
Now, more than ever, we must invest in our schools. We fail to do so at our own peril.
Jesus Jara is superintendent of the Clark County School District.
