Related Data

• One in three people in the U.S. know someone who has been shot. (Goss, Kristin, “Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control,” Princeton University Press, 2006. p. 2)
• On average, 32 Americans are murdered with guns every day and 140 are treated for a gun assault in an emergency room. (The Brady Campaign to Report Gun Violence)
• Every day on average, 51 people kill themselves with a firearm, and 45 people are shot or killed in an accident with a gun. (The Brady Campaign to Report Gun Violence)
• An average of eight children and teens under the age of 20 are killed by guns every day. (The Brady Campaign to Report Gun Violence)
• In March of 2014, 318 people in California had died from the flu—an airborne virus. (The Sacramento Bee, March 7, 2014)
• The number of Ebola cases so far this year: 9,936. How many people have been killed by Ebola: 4,877 (World Health Organization)
• There are three countries with widespread transmission of Ebola: Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia. Mali and Senegal had travel-related cases but Senegal has been declared Ebola-free. Nigeria, Spain, and the US have had travel-related and locally transmitted cases. In the US, there have been four cases and one death. (CDC, October 26, 2014)

Sample Frame:

I want to talk about the American response to the Ebola virus outbreak for a minute as we begin our work today. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last few weeks. There is much complexity to this situation—I’ve been struggling to figure out the most important thread to highlight among race, health, class, and fear. At the same time, compared to the number of Americans who have died from gun violence in the last year, the Ebola epidemic, worldwide, hardly warrants a mention, so I am simultaneously ambivalent about talking about it.

I was sad to read an article about a school in New Jersey where parents put a lot of pressure on a school to quarantine at home two students from Rwanda. Bowing to (or cowering from) the pressure, the Rwandan family is indeed keeping their children at home for 21 days.

Rwanda (in East Africa) is 2600 miles away from the nearest Ebola case in West Africa. I fear that what’s happening here is that parents from the dominant culture in the US (white, middle class, English-speaking) are conflating all of the African tribes, cultures, and countries as dangerous and threatening–xenophobia. Rwanda is as far away from Liberia as Tegucigalpa, Honduras is from San Francisco and is as culturally different. This is a classic situation of “othering”—of not seeing the humanity in a group of people because we don’t see them as equally worthy of distinction, attention, and consideration. In this case, the people in Africa have dark skin—that’s what they have in common. Because most Africans have dark skin, we should be afraid of them, no matter where in the vast continent of Africa they come from? This is preposterous and dehumanizing in the name of panic and fear. I also fear that the association of dark skin with Ebola further exacerbates the persistent and insidious association of blackness with inferiority in our country—a phenomenon that still persists however overtly or subtly in our national discourse.

This is something that happens sometimes in the context of dominant culture. Those who belong to the dominant culture can perceive dehumanizing sameness in others. There is that very derogatory and classic question, “They all look the same, don’t they?” that we sometimes hear people in a dominant culture say about another group. We use the word Latino or Asian to indicate a child’s or parent’s or colleague’s race. To what degree do we also seek to understand their unique cultural background? There are, after all, 28 different cultures and nationalities within the US Census Bureau’s definition of the word “Latino.” Similarly, there are 49 countries and countless cultures represented in the word Asian.

This is a good time for us to remember too that disease spreads in places of high poverty and low education. Africa has not always been a place of extreme poverty and weak education. Sophisticated societies flourished in African prior to colonization, slavery, and the subsequent globalization. Current systems of privilege and oppression rest on that history—while we are not the people to who caused the oppression during the centuries of colonization and slavery, we are indeed responsible for doing what we can to counteract current manifestations of dehumanizing oppression.

One of our equity strategies is that we seek to know our students deeply and personally. We want to know exactly how our students identify culturally because we know that culture is part of being a human. Our students develop the trust in us required for them to learn from us when we truly see each of them as unique, special, and worthy of questions about their backgrounds beyond what we can observe about them racially. We also want to know about the unique cultures of our students because awareness of students’ cultures can help us tailor our instruction to best meet their learning needs. Please take the time today to learn something about one of our student’s backgrounds that will help you understand and honor the complexity of who they are.

Let’s be careful, each of us, not to get caught up in a national frenzy of fear and panic that leads to dangerous and dehumanizing practices, even subtle ones here in San Francisco. We have been here before as a nation—several times now—let’s use what we know about history and justice not to repeat our mistakes of the past. Here’s to a week of relishing the cultural complexity and beauty that our students bring to us every day.

Related Data:

• The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is $3000. (New York Times, Friday, October 3, 2014)
• Fifty-nine per cent of students in SFUSD qualify for free or reduced lunch. (www.sfusd.edu)
• To qualify for free/reduced lunch in San Francisco, a family of four lives on less than $36,000 per year. (SF Gate, September 30, 2013)
• Starting salary for a teacher in SFUSD is $47,000; starting pay rate for a paraprofessional is $17.05 per hour. (www.sfusd.edu)

Sample Frame:

As we begin our work this week, I want to talk for a minute about the housing situation that we’re facing in San Francisco right now because it affects our students, our families, and most likely, many people who work here with us.

Here are some staggering numbers. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco right now is $3000. Fifty-nine percent of students in SFUSD qualify for free or reduced lunch. At our school ____ % of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. To qualify for free lunch in San Francisco, a family of four subsists on less than $36,000 per year—that is $3000 per month. Let’s think about that amount of money for a moment in a city where an average cup of coffee is over $2. The starting salary for a paraprofessional in San Francisco Unified is $17.05 per hour and the starting salary for a teacher is $47,000, respectively yielding $2387 and $3916 per month before taxes.

We already have first-hand experience with what this means for our students and for our colleagues. Many of you have been graciously and empathically trying to manage the increasingly uncomfortable living conditions yourselves and for our students, from working with parents who’s children have long BART or car rides because they’re traveling from distant suburbs to finding services to help with laundry for families who are co-habitating with several other families in a small space. (customize this paragraph with examples from your own school.)

It’s worth noting that the children of middle and upper middle class homes often have their own sleeping spaces—they have quiet places to do homework—they often get sufficient sleep because their journeys to school in the morning are short. Our children who travel from afar, or share a couch at night with three other people, or attempt to do homework on BART, come to us less nourished by food and sleep, and often with the shame (apparent or not) of not being prepared for school, in the ways that we traditionally describe readiness—well-rested, well-fed, clean, homework completed, and with a backpack of appropriate school supplies. This is too important for me not to state the obvious—children who experience the stress of uncomfortable housing and economic scarcity must overcome that stress to be fully-available learners. This is a layer of effort that our students living in more economically stable situations do not face.

It’s important to acknowledge that gentrification doesn’t affect our students proportionally. In San Francisco, where socio-economic status and race often align, our African American, Latino, and Southeast Asian communities are disproportionately affected by the rising housing costs. For many of our students, this creates a feeling of being ostracized in their own neighborhoods where their families may have lived for generations.

Here’s just a reminder to us all, myself included, that being an educator committed to equity means, in this case, that we hold in our consciousness the realities of our colleagues’ and students’ housing situations that might affect their performance and experience of school. This does not mean that we lower our expectations of the greatness, in any given moment, that we expect of these humans. But it does mean that we hold awareness in the front of our minds so that we are open to creative and supportive ways of helping them reach their greatness. “You don’t have your homework today? I bet you were doing something really important. Let’s find you a partner who can help you get caught up for what we’re doing in class today and you’ll need to stay after school today to make sure it’s done.” (Might be a spot to ask for other examples of what it means to hold awareness and creative ideas rather than judgment and anger.)

There are several ballot initiatives this fall that will seek to address the housing crisis in San Francisco. Without endorsing anything specific, here’s to hoping that enough of our fellow voters in San Francisco share our concerns about fair access to affordable housing to ease, however slightly, this aspect of inequity.

This is a great opportunity for me to acknowledge this dedicated staff. As stated above, a teacher’s average salary isn’t going to cover the median rent in this city. I know many of you commute from other cities and that for others, surviving the rising rent costs in SF is a constant struggle and something that you worry about. This means that some of you often come to work tired from a long commute or preoccupied about your own housing situation. In the same vain that I ask you to be thoughtful about our students’ experiences outside of school, I am thoughtful about yours. I appreciate you for the effort and energy you bring to our young people everyday. Please take care of yourselves and let me know if there are ways that I can best support you. [Possibly insert an offer of appreciation like there’s coffee and donuts for you tomorrow as a small token of appreciation for all that you do.] We’re all in this together.