Schools reopening: Perspective from a struggling parent of an at-risk child

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They just want their babysitters back, an Oakley School Board commissioner said while being broadcast live during a school board meeting.

They probably just want their kids back in school so they can smoke weed in the house again.

Parents of young children are literally the worst, most awful people 70% of the time, so you know you’re under pressure, but you need to ignore them.

They aren’t worth listening to (ever, really). This was posted by a community member on London Breed’s Facebook page.

All the rich white parents suddenly concerned about mental health can take a seat. Most of them are causing their kids anxiety by pressuring them to complete asynchronous work and feeding into their sense of entitlement.

Sorry/not sorry. This was a tweet sent out by an Oakland teacher and secretary of the Oakland Education Association.

These disparaging remarks and misguided criticisms feel to me each time as if I am being punched in the gut. Yes, I do want schools to reopen. No, it is not because I am a horrible person.

For the majority of the pandemic, my son and I sheltered in place in a Single Room Occupancy hotel. Our SRO totaled 65 square feet, with no kitchen and no access to a kitchen, no couch, no desk, no nothing except a twin-sized bunk bed in which the top bunk was used solely as storage. We had two windows in our room, but since we faced a rat-infested alley, the windows were sealed shut and at no point were we ever graced with sunlight. We shared a filthy, tiny bathroom with 12 other residents. Our only furniture was a fold-up tray and one fold-up chair, and this is where we prepared our meals, where we ate our meals, and also where my son did his homework and distance learning.

I cannot express to you how profoundly traumatic it was for my son to quarantine and attend remote school in this setting. When it was time to log onto his Zooms, he would start crying, his entire body convulsing and his eyes pinched closed as if to shut out the world. Each day I watched his spirit sink, deeper and deeper until it got to the point where every morning and every night I found him irrevocably thrust into a well of his own despair, his own anger, his own fed-up-ness with his everyday, all-day surroundings.

He had no reprieve from our struggles, every day a reminder from the moment he woke up till the moment his head hit the pillow that his mother did not finish college, that his mother got divorced, that his mother made poor choices, and that his mother could not properly provide for him.

Surviving the pandemic is not the only adverse childhood experience my son has had to endure. Five years ago he was also removed from my custody and placed in foster care. The pain and suffering he endured being separated from me, having lost everything in the blink of an eye, at such a young age, is a wound that remains open and raw till this very day.

My son is only 8 years old today, but he can tell you what it is like to go to bed hungry because he didn’t have enough to eat in foster care. He can also tell you what it is like to live in a house filled with strangers, where you are unloved and where nothing belongs to you. If only you had heard his cries when he was being torn from me. If only you had heard his desperation, heard the screams that woke him from sleep for so many months after he returned home. If you had heard that, if you had felt that pain and suffering of his, then you would understand how cruel it is to deprive children like him of the basic human right of in-person schooling and socialization.

There are children who exist, and many of them, just like my son. Children who are among the most vulnerable, the most disadvantaged, the most traumatized and depressed. For these children, even before the pandemic, their daily lives presented with challenges that the general population could never even begin to fathom. Then the pandemic ushered in inequities so staggering that it is absolutely incomprehensible to me that local officials and teachers have not rushed this whole time to do everything they can to get these children back to normality.

Over the past couple of weeks, things have really started moving along. The San Francisco Board of Education approved a tentative agreement between the teachers union and the city and county of San Francisco, Mayor London Breed announced that San Francisco will be moving into the red tier on Wednesday, and teachers now qualify for COVID-19 vaccinations. This collaborative spirit and forward momentum needs to keep happening, because at-risk children are suffering.

Michelle Chan is a parents’ rights activist, writer, founding director of California Families Rise, and mother of the most amazing 8-year-old boy in the world.