OP-ED | The Time is Now to Stand with Connecticut Students and Educators | CT News Junkie

With solely a handful of days left within the 2022 legislative session, we’re at a pivotal second for passing laws crucial to Connecticut’s kids, lecturers, and public faculties.

All through the pandemic, educators have been applauded for the important function they’ve performed in sustaining the highest-possible requirements of faculty security, social and emotional assist, and educational progress regardless of vital challenges. The pandemic has additionally raised severe considerations amongst neighborhood members and their elected officers about faculty staffing shortages and schooling finances shortfalls which have left college students in overcrowded school rooms and in under-resourced, poorly maintained buildings.

The Connecticut Training Affiliation (CEA), representing tens of hundreds {of professional} educators and advocating for the scholars they serve, urges you to take constructive and instant motion.

The time is now to face with Connecticut’s public faculties and the scholars and educators on the coronary heart of these faculties, and to make investments that underscore your assist. Three necessary measures would just do that, and all of us have to encourage legislators to take motion to:

1. Go the Instructor Recruitment and Retention Job Power proposed in Senate Invoice 427 and embrace incentives to raised appeal to and retain lecturers, akin to particular COVID service credit score that acknowledges lecturers’ sacrifices throughout the pandemic.  
2. Prohibit the educating of distant and in-person college students on the similar time by a single instructor. Used as a cost-saving measure, this inequitable apply is detrimental to college students on either side of the display screen.   
3. Assist faculty indoor air high quality with bond funding and classroom temperature requirements referred to as for in Senate Invoice 423. For individuals who argue that the associated fee is just too excessive, look no additional than the latest $500K settlement awarded to Wilton households whose kids’s well being deteriorated due to poor air flow, mould, and substandard air high quality of their faculties.

Lecturers have gone above and past to make sure in-person studying and protected, wholesome situations in Connecticut’s public faculties, however they can’t do it alone, they usually can not do it with out the legislative dedication and funding that makes these achievements doable and sustainable.   Public schooling is the nice equalizer in our society, however provided that we spend money on it. There has by no means been a extra necessary time to face with our educators and their college students.

Kate Dias and Joslyn DeLancey are president and vice-president of the Connecticut Training Affiliation, respectively.

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