If You Haven't Believed Us
By:  Susan DuFresne

If you haven’t believed us when we’ve told you how stressful being an educator can be,

and if you haven’t believed us when we tell you our workloads are humanly impossible,

and if you haven’t believed us when we’ve told you how implementing mandated developmentally inappropriate standards, test prep, constant testing, and the inhumane sorting, ranking, and culling of our students via high stakes testing deeply scars us - often traumatizes us - because we KNOW how much it hurts many of our students,

and if you haven’t believed us when we’ve told you that corporate education reform has sucked nearly all the joy out of teaching and learning,

and if you haven’t believed us when we’ve told you that our lives are impossible to balance because we are expected to be a nurse, a counselor, a therapist, a mentor, a parent, a speech pathologist, an occupational therapist, a physical therapist and more for children suffering from major trauma, generational poverty, bullying, abuse, neglect, mental illness, behavior disorders, physical illness - without full-time nurses, counselors, or sufficient mental health supports,

and if you haven’t believed us when we tell you we don’t have enough resources to do our jobs - that our class sizes are too large and our children more needy than ever before, that we need more teachers and para educators, trained and certified behavior interventionists, full time nurses and counselors, mental health services provided as needed on IEPs, small class sizes, adequate curriculum and materials so that we can actually teach,

and if you HAVE believed us, but you haven’t done everything you can to tell your legislators, your governor, your state superintendents of public instruction, your Congressmen/women, your school board members, your superintendents, and your administration that these things must stop...

then by all means take action, because teachers are literally dying.

Two beautiful human beings - teachers who devoted their lives to our children - were lost to suicide over the weekend. This is happening all over the country - to both children AND educators.

We must put the humanity and joy back into public education and we must reduce workloads and testing.

We must stop putting so much pressure on teachers to be superhuman and we must give us the resources we need to do our jobs.

And we must stop pressuring our children with this abusive toxic system.

Believe us and take action.

If you or someone you know is struggling please reach out.