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This Is Us
My School Laid Me Off
My conscience wouldn’t let me quit. But then the choice was made for me.
Let me get this out of the way: I didn’t want to go back.
I didn’t want to return to in-person school for myriad reasons, but the first few are what I consider “personal.” I have asthma and suffer from ear, nose, and throat allergies year-round. I am partnered to a Black man who is much more likely to receive substandard medical care and, as a result, takes more precautions around social distancing and limits time outside the house.
I would not only be exposing myself to a classroom full of children (and by default their parents, their grandparents, and their friends) and school employees (and by default their children, their parents, and their friends), but he would be secondarily exposed. In addition, we are transplants. We live in New Orleans but are from New York and Cincinnati — if we get sick, our familial networks are too far away to help.
The second set of reasons are biological. I am not the first to point out that schools are breeding grounds for disease. Lice, ringworm, pink eye, chickenpox, whooping cough, and other infectious diseases frequently spread in schools, to say nothing of the common colds and flus that occur every semester. School nurses and…
