As the world continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, people in the United States are having important conversations and debates about safety in school. Is it safe to reopen schools for in-person learning? What policies and procedures need to be in place to ensure safety for students, teachers, and staff? While these are important and challenging questions, they are based on a false premise. That schools were ever safe places to begin with. Instead of scrambling to reopen buildings and slather everyone with hand sanitizer, we can use this global pandemic as a national wake up call. To deeply examine the roots of our educational system and work to build something new. The demand that students should learn in environments where they don't feel safe is foundational to the educational system in the United States. Schools in the US have always been used as mechanisms to reinforce inequalities. Many students have never felt safe in these environments and their fear is used as a weapon to attempt to force them to conform and assimilate. Those who don’t are often pushed out of the school system—often into the prison system, hence the school-to-prison pipeline. The history is long. The examples are many. Here’s a non-comprehensive list of students who have not felt safe in schools:
Many schools in their current forms do not even attempt to be safe spaces for children. They rely on harsh discipline and punitive measures to enforce rules. In one of my studies in Pittsburgh, Black girls described their schools as “prison-like” with hallway sweeps and in-school suspension rooms that are “cold, claustrophobic and prison-like.” But it does not have to be this way. If you are one of the people finding yourself arguing for safety in schools amidst a health pandemic, I invite you to the larger conversation. The conversation about abolitionist teaching, and liberatory approaches to education, and restorative practices in schools, and police-free schools, and schools without sexual harassment, and communities-in-schools. The conversations are happening, the work is happening. Join the scholars, and activists, and educators, and counselors, and parents, and students on the ground working for a revolution. As Bettina Love says: “We must struggle together not only to reimagine schools but to build new schools that we are taught to believe are impossible: schools based on intersectional justice, antiracism, love, healing, and joy.” Yes, we should advocate for physical safety for all the children and adults who work in schools. But I am uninterested in a world where we go back to business-as-usual once a vaccine is found. Real transformation of schools requires us to expand our imaginations to create a vision of new possibilities. I am fighting for schools that facilitate the physical, emotional, and spiritual safety for children. Schools that joyfully uplift the full, complex, and beautiful life of every single student. Britney G Brinkman, PhD Comments are closed.
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AboutEMPOWERTAINMENT aims to take a critical look at media in regards to how gender and women/girls are portrayed. From popular articles, videos, and websites, to original submissions, we want to not only examine the media and its relation to gender, but help shift it. Archives
November 2017
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