‘This Board’s Responsibility Is to Protect its Staff,’ Says Union President
Teachers have faced immense pressure during the pandemic and school “culture wars.” Teacher wellbeing is a demonstrated requisite for strong student outcomes.
Public comment from the Tuesday, July 25, school board meeting.
Good evening. I’m Daniel Hall. I’m a community member. I’m a teacher at York High School. And I am the union president.
I want to thank the over fifty teachers here tonight, representing our interests and our passion to see our colleagues supported and our colleagues feel the respect and love they deserve.
This board does a great job talking about how wonderful teachers are, how teachers are the fabric of the community. It’s a challenge. It’s challenging to support teachers. Teachers are challenging. We have a lot of strong opinions, strong beliefs, and we have a challenging job that requires us to make a lot of difficult decisions on a daily basis. For instance, oftentimes our students in their interactions with each other don’t make the right decisions. One student could be bullying another student. And its our job to step in and protect students from other students sometimes, and do difficult things like call a bully’s parents and have a conversation—a difficult conversation—with the student’s parents about what’s going on and what the behavior of their child is, the child they truly love and care about. But we do that because it helps the environment in our classrooms, it helps the environment and makes for better education of all of our students.
And in the same way this board’s responsibility is to protect its staff. And when the staff is attacked by members of the community, we expect and we need the board to speak up for us, and to do what it needs to do to protect us as teachers so we can go into the classroom and do our jobs. And that’s not an easy task. It requires hard decisions. It requires tough choices. And it requires strong stances, and to not look the other way when attacks are made of its staff. I look forward to working with the board to figure out ways to protect the staff from attacks, unreasonable attacks, from the community. Thank you.
Actions Steps You Can Take
Forward this email to your Elmhurst friends. It’s important the community knows that our teachers are looking for support.
Email boardofeducation@elmhurst205.org with your support for teachers.