Legislature ‘24: Make schools safer, healthier for kids, teachers

What should our politicians be doing about education?

I don’t think that schools need a new curriculum, a new set of tests, a new miracle cure, a new set of banned books, a new set of banned ideas, a new dress code, a new set of budget cuts, a new discipline code, a new billionaire-inspired idea, or an armed faculty and custodial staff. I think teachers and students need schools that are safer, healthier places to teach and learn. Kids who are malnourished, sickly, absent, and threatened by the hazards of decrepit facilities will have trouble getting educated, no matter how skilled the teaching.

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed

Providing such environments would require an investment in upgrading and maintaining school facilities and grounds. The typical school building in America is about 50 years old, with 41% of districts requiring updates of heating, ventilation and A/C systems in over half of their schools.

Global warming is making Georgia’s early-August school starts dangerous in areas where the A/C doesn’t work well, or at all. School drinking water is often contaminated to the point of being unsafe. Decrepit buildings are causing injuries and distracting students from their studies. Nobody’s going to learn much when the building itself is a threat to one’s well-being.

Air in schools is often polluted, contributing to poor health among students and teachers. Heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems frequently malfunction or are outdated and in need of repair. The predicament of poor air circulation was especially critical during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, but was a problem before the outbreak and remains one in the aftermath of its worst. Schools with air-care interventions had about 40% fewer incidents of COVID-19 than did others during the critical period, perhaps in line with other factors that made life more bearable for those with resources than those without.

Sick kids often have no place to go for help. There is now a crisis in staffing schools with nurses, who are leaving the profession in increasing numbers. When there is little attention to sick and injured students, who may not have a good health care plan to fall back on or even a home to go home to, they will miss class, exacerbating the current attendance crisis, which in turn produces lower levels of achievement, however measured. Finding ways to expand nursing services in schools seems to be an important way of ensuring a healthier student body and, undoubtedly, improvements in learning.

Another way to improve student health is to provide meals. A lot of kids lack access to healthy diets outside school, and lack the nourishment that an academic commitment requires. Making sure that the meals are nutritious would also help, rather than relying on low-cost, low-value foods like pancakes made with bleached white flour, sugar and other unhealthy ingredients.

Unfortunately, many children and youths have been so conditioned to sweetened, heavily processed, fat-drenched foods at home that they won’t eat anything else. When politicians laud the wonders of eating unhealthy food, the effort to improve diets in a land of obesity will continue to be met with hostility.

All of these issues have concerned matters of health and safety, which I believe are prerequisite to taking an orientation to learning in school. There are additional safety issues that matter. I’ll mention one for which I have no good solution: school violence, especially that involving guns. Limiting access to the school through a single door; arming teachers and other staff members with guns or a box of rocks; having halls patrolled by armed guards; providing metal detectors and monitors at all entrances; each has been suggested, and each has been contested by those seeing how they might create more problems than they solve. This one’s over my head, I’m afraid to say.

While they’re at it, our politicians should fund another school-related job, school transportation, given the ongoing problem of finding people willing to drive school buses these days. And upgrade schools’ technology infrastructures. And raise salaries and reduce class size. Well, this list could go on and on.

Ultimately, attention to safety leads to greater care for mental health of students and teachers, along with physical health. Much attention to mental health concerns the students who act out in response to hostility. I’m much more concerned with the less obvious cases, those in which a caring adult or peer needs to see the signs of depression, anxiety and other mood conditions that lead to less obvious personal suffering. Much of what I’ve described here produces mental health consequences for kids, and for teachers. It seems cruel to place kids in perilous circumstances, and then deny them what they need to survive them.

It’s also wrong to ignore all these problems and pretend that they don’t matter; that buying a new curriculum will be a game-changer. It’s going to take work, money, and commitment to understanding real problems. Here’s one idea I would love to see legislated: Require every state politician to spend a week each semester substitute teaching in the lowest-performing school in their district, so they can see firsthand where the problems are and what the solutions might be.

I hope the Legislature is up to it.