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America Doesn’t Care About Mothers
I finally understand that help is not coming
I spent the first six months of the pandemic sure that help for mothers was on its way. Bills would be passed, systems would be reworked. Workplaces would shift to include caretaking within their cultures. A year of the country “staying home” would validate the work of stay-at-home mothers. As the fall brought more remote learning, we’d reconfigure school standards to keep children safe from virtual truancy and failing grades given over Zoom in the name of academic rigor. We would listen to women like Natalie Brown, mother of two and a PhD candidate, when she says we’d “shift our focus and policies to helping families survive this time in ways that work for them.”
When it came to the 2020–2021 school year, maybe that meant we’d take a cue from Bolivia and suspend academics. We’d figure this disease out and then we could start again, on an even footing, a year later. Maybe it meant remote school accompanied by a temporary measure that untied education funding from enrollment. If schools were allowed to keep their enrollment funding from the previous year, a working mother who pulled her kid from their kindergarten class because she couldn’t supervise their remote learning wouldn’t be culpable for impoverishing her neighborhood school. Maybe it meant a government check every month until the pandemic was over, so that women could pay a living wage to childcare workers to supervise their kids’ living and learning. Whatever the shift, we would have had to think outside the demands of our standard systems. As Brown notes, “This pandemic has underscored how institutions can’t just operate to promote their own agendas while ignoring their roles in the community ecosystem. Our university relies on public schools which relies on daycare providers and parents, etc. We need holistic solutions.”
Instead of holistic solutions, we have a funding and community crisis. My family’s school district is remote through at least October. People are taking their children out of school at a concerning rate. Yesterday, the principal of our elementary school took to the neighborhood Facebook page to tell parents how much money our school was losing each time a child withdrew. I feel for him. He is an excellent educator dedicated to equity. He’s working within a…
