This afternoon, some of the members of the Worcester School Committee went for a bus ride. We're in negotiations with the drivers who drive directly for the district, and they invited us to come experience riding a bus now, and several of us took them up on it.
We started at the WPS bus yard on Fremont Street (seeing some great innovations going on there; more no doubt to come on that!) and went down past City Hall, down Grove and then back up the highway. And there were discussions of masks and spacing and cleaning, which is why we were there, after all. But the talk from the drivers and monitors kept coming back to one thing:
Kids.
The ones who can't sit still.
The ones who haven't had breakfast.
The ones who bounce around in their seats.
The ones who look for their driver every day.
The ones who listen to their music.
The ones who are quiet.
The ones who aren't.
I was thinking of this as I was reading this Atlantic piece on the load that has been shouldered by school nutrition workers during the pandemic; that even as school buildings closed, they kept coming to work. And now that numbers of children being fed has fallen--which is an emergency of itself--federal reimbursements for school nutrition have fallen, as has the work, and districts are laying off nutrition staff.
There are a lot of people who work in school districts who aren't teachers. And even while our teachers are scrambling to get connected with students online, some of those people are still not going to see kids.
That matters.
Sometimes it isn't the elementary teacher or your math teacher that makes the connection with you. Sometimes, the adult that matters to a child is the custodian (do you remember your elementary school custodian? I do!), or the librarian, or the lunch lady, or the bus driver.
Today I saw how some of them miss their kids.
I know that some of the kids miss them, too.
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