Let Every Heart Sink

Of the twelve days I was back in school, I was testing students for seven of them.  On majority of the other days there weren't even classes at all, leaving me to piece together informal sessions to help the kids that wanted it and knew how to get to my calls.  The last day of testing was a heartbreak.   I stood in the doorway of the classroom that I'm not allowed to enter and spoke to the teacher, trying to gather the kids I had to test.  I saw a long, straight black ponytail.  She was sitting alone with her face to a wall at a desk masked off with tape all around it.  

"Mya, is that you?"  I called out.
She spun around, covered in masks and spoke but I couldn't hear her.  I came closer.
"Why am I not with you anymore?" she called, eyes screaming over her mask.  
"Oh honey, oh my god, I'm so sorry.  You tested out.  Your brain is so big that you didn't need us anymore....but, but, whenever we get back in this building you can come with us....I still have the trailer full of books, you can take any of them whenever you want...."
I glanced furtively to the homeroom teacher, she was clutching her chest and her eyes were welling up.  
"I can....?"  Mya responded.
"Of course you can.  We are not letting you go, wether you like it or not.  I put you in my Google Classroom too, come on, say hi, everyone misses you."
And then I left.  

I started getting messages from fellow teachers.

"I've got appointments in Alabama, they're vaccinating teachers...."

"I've got one in Tennessee, they're letting us get it....."

I didn't do it.  

"Hey, Wagner, call me back."

I called my co-worker back after seeing the text message.

"You tested the Warren kids last week, right?"

"Yeah, two of them, even though only one of them is ESOL.  I had them in the trailer for two days, multiple hours.  Yafir can't keep his mask on to save his life, it was driving me crazy...."

"Their dad sent me a message Wednesday, he's positive.  When did you test the kids?"

"Last Thursday and Friday."

"No one called you?  The administration knows.... no one called you?"

"No,"  I responded.

"I'm calling in sick tomorrow, I'm going to isolate."

"Don't call in sick, tell them you are working from home so that they don't take your sick days...."

I paced around and then, called my principal.  I wondered if I was overreacting, then imagined walking into the school after receiving the information that I received and having everyone point at me like Donald Sutherland did in the seventies version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  I called again and left a message stating that I had been exposed and wanted to get tested before returning to the building.  I emailed my rosters of the children that were in the room with us when I tested the Warren children.  I thought of Pablo and Angel's mom.  She was really reluctant to return her children to the building.  Pablo was in the room those days.  I don't know how I would tell her that he might have been exposed.  

My principal called me at 7:00 the following morning, our report time.  She was apologetic, telling me that I wasn't contacted because the children had not tested positive.  She told me to come to work, that day.  There were no answers as to if the children had been tested at any point and if anyone knew if they currently carried the virus, or might have late last week.  I insisted that I needed to get tested.  Earlier "protocol" stated that if an employee got tested, they should not report to work until they received results. I was told to come to work.  I arrived, a little after 8:00.  I felt awkward, weird.  People who knew what was going on stayed twenty feet away from me whenever I left the trailer.  Some were angry that I came in.

My whole day was disrupted by testing matters for the ESOL test that I have starting on Monday.  More kids in my room and I don't even know if I have it or not. I didn't even get to do my classes and ended up locked in a small office with an administrator for an extended period of time preparing testing materials.  I even had to drive to the county office to pick up file folders, of all things, because my coordinator instructed me to "come and get them" even though I teach and work for a living instead of sitting behind a desk picking my ass.  I drove the fifteen minutes, one-way trip from the school and waited outside.  I even had to sign shit like it was Fort Knox and they wouldn't even let me use their pen.  Must be nice... I thought and repeatedly stood closer to the people than I should, just to make a point.  I drove back to the school, but not before driving past one of my student's houses and placing a bag of school supplies on her front porch.  I jumped back in the car and texted her, knowing that it would make her happy.  At least something positive had to come out of that drive and believe me, the fast food fries I picked up at the drive-thru didn't do it.   

I left work right at 3:00 so that I could get to the testing center before it closed at 4:00.  Now, it's just waiting.  

The Return, pt. 3

I rushed around the trailer Monday morning, trying to wrap my head around the fact that students that I had not seen in person in eleven months would be in there that morning.  I could hear my trailer-mate through the wall, vacuuming her carpet.  I heard the intercom buzz in.  
"How are you?"  the admin asked.
"I'm vacuuming the carpet in here."  she answered.
"Oh, okay!"  was the response.
"Do you want to arrange for a weekly cleaning of your trailer?"
"I didn't know we had to request that."  she answered.  

I had been having to call the parents of my students to arrange for transportation for the test I have to give in March.  I was very nervous doing this.  I can speak Spanish, but have to rely on all kinds of online translators and older brothers and sisters to speak to the majority of my families that only speak other languages.  And what I was asking was delicate.  I wanted them to understand that they did not HAVE to send their kids in for testing.  But I also didn't want it to appear that I was trying to influence them in any way.  Many told me that they thought the were required to send in their kids and that other teachers had told them so.  At these moments, I was very explicit.  I clearly told them that it was their right to NOT send their kids in, that their children would not be penalized either through bad grades or lack of grade-level advancement and that they were not the only parents that were uncomfortable sending their children to the building.  All of my families are immigrants.  I refuse to mislead them in any way and feel like it is part of my job that they understand their rights in the American public school system.  

I put on the N95 that Alec bought me for my birthday and entered the school.  Families stood out front, waiting for their children to be let in for testing.  I saw Prem.  His whole family starting waving at me.  None of my kindergartners  showed up for the test, though the communication log indicated that one had said they would come.  Two fifth graders were there that were supposed to come on a different day and none of the ones were there that had indicated they would be present on Monday.  I started getting worried.  If mistakes kept being made as to which days the students would arrive, I could end up with a very large group in a really cramped, unventilated trailer.  

I have to admit, it was really good to see Prem and Juan in person.  Somehow, Prem looked smaller than he did before.  Juan was very excited to let me know that he was wearing new clothes.  I spread them out in the trailer and got them started on the test, even though it was hard to get them to stop talking to me and each other.  I passed out candy that I told them they had to save it for later because I didn't want their masks off, using this really long skeleton hand I have.  Juan had to pee, so I watched him from the trailer door while he ran toward the propped open door to the building.  He returned a few minutes later, looking sheepish.

"Um....Ms. Wagner, there's not any soap in the bathroom....."

If I was a volcano, I probably would have looked like Krakatoa at that moment.  When people first started talking about students re-entering the buildings, one of the biggest points of conversation was that there is only cold water in most of the bathrooms in our schools.  The answer?

"Water temperature doesn't matter.  It's the soap that matters."

And they still hadn't put fucking soap in the student bathrooms in the middle of a pandemic?

At the end of the day on Monday, an announcement was made telling us that our "sanitation buckets" hadn't arrived, but that there were provisional supplies for us to retrieve from the building.  At this point, we had been out of school for eleven months and back in the building for four days, all the while being promised that everything would be ready when they required us to return to the building.  When I entered the building, I retrieved a zip lock with my name on it that contained a face shield, student masks, one bottle of hand sanitizer and some disposable gloves. There was no bag for my trailer mate.  I returned and placed these new items next to my two rags and surface (?) sanitizer wipes.  

I finished my two days of testing fifth grade and moved on to first and fourth.  I started realizing that with this schedule, most teachers would only be face to face with students testing for two days.  Because I had been assigned to test all grades, I will be face to face with different students for six days, and additional days for make-ups.  I set up more desks and walked around the trailer with a tape measure, trying to get them six feet apart.  I could tell that by the end of the week, my group was going to be significantly larger.  

Late in the week, students began reporting that there was soap in the bathroom.  Mitigation measures with first graders posed a significant challenge.  One arrived with a very overused paper mask on that continuously fell off her nose.  At one point, she took it off all together.   I rigged up a new mask that would fit her face.  They had no concept of social distancing and constantly moved mere inches from each other and from me.  I reminded them over and over, but it just wasn't working.  The fourth graders were clamoring away from the first graders because of their lack of social distancing.  They also needed consistent help with technology, forcing me to grab their laptops and log them in, negating anything near a six foot distance.  By the last day of the week, I had nine kids crammed into the trailer and I was ready to start stacking all of the furniture that was being stored in there outside to give us extra room for distancing.  

Late on Friday, we were told to pick up our "sanitation buckets".  I was imagining a bucket, chock-full of cleaning stuff.  I figured I would finally get the disinfectant spray bottle instead of just the dry surface (?) wipes.  The Lysol wipes I bought were getting low.  I thought there might be multiple bottles of replenishments, so we wouldn't run out of things.  Maybe there would even be a Lysol-type spray that would just saturate the whole place.  I knew we weren't getting any air purifiers or plexiglass dividers or invitations to be part of a testing protocol or temperature checkers.  But maybe a couple of extra adult cloth masks?  I couldn't help but think of all the things that might make this a little safer or limit the amount of stuff I was buying on my own or couldn't find at all.  

I received an empty bucket, with a sign on it that said "Sanitation Station".  There was an empty bucket for my trailer-mate, too.  

The Return Continues

I cancelled my small groups and spent the first day back in the building cleaning the trailer with the supplies that I brought with me.  I actually found myself mentally marveling at the Lysol wipes I had "scored".  I cleared out as many shelves, desks and closets as I could and stacked everything on one side of the room until I was ready to start dragging it to the dumpsters.  I scrubbed down everything, the blinds, inside drawers, window sills, even the walls at times.  I was really behind on other things that I needed to do, but could not exist in that trailer in the state it was in.  On top of it, though the kids have not been officially called back into the building, they were coming in for testing starting the following Monday.  I am on the schedule to test different groups of kids nearly everyday until the end of March.  In that trailer.  The thought of my students having to sit in that filth infuriated me and motivated me to try to make the thing livable.  

I really avoided going inside the building.  The two staff bathrooms we have are closet-sized and shared between countless people.  I discovered that our key cards weren't working anyway, making it difficult to even get into the building if I wanted to.  I questioned how many days I would be able to not pee for like, nine hours.  

Late in the day, the former occupant of the trailer stopped by.
"Hey, I know I should have gotten on this sooner.  I'll start carting all my stuff out, it'll be gone by Friday."
"Awesome, thank you!"  I was beyond relieved to not have to drag all of that stuff to the dumpster.

"Hey, is this really all the sanitation stuff we are supposed to get?"  I asked pointing to the Dollar Tree air freshener, rags and pack of wipes. 

"You're supposed to have more than that!"  he exclaimed.

"That's my old air freshener, you're supposed to have the hospital-grade spray!  They gotta bring you that!"

The intercom came on and interrupted him.  

"THIS is making me mad!"  he burst out, pointing at the intercom.
"She is making me mad!"  he went into a bit of a tirade and I agreed with everything he was saying.  And then, I realized his mask had come off while he was ranting.  I stepped farther back and hoped he would leave.  

I returned Thursday morning.  When I opened the door, the two bags of trash from the previous day's clean up were still there and the carpet had not been vacuumed.  There were also no additions to my "sanitation station".  I took the trash to the dumpster and started trying to teach my classes.  The desktop in the trailer does not have a camera and we are obviously required to have the camera on while teaching.  I have a work-issued Chromebook, but it is such a piece of shit that I usually just use it as a second monitor and use my personal laptop to do all of my school work and teaching.  I noticed problems immediately when I entered the video-call of my first class.  Lagging, sound going in and out, images that weren't showing, teachers getting kicked out of their own classes.  Our building did not have the bandwidth to support all of us teaching online from the same location.

"Didn't have this problem when I was teaching from my house...."  I heard one teacher say.

"I upgraded my internet...AT HOME."  another muttered.

It continued all day.  Some people didn't give classes at all.  

"We are going to have a virtual tornado drill!"  an administrator announced early in the day.

"Staff that are outside should come in the building when we have it!"

I felt a little confused and pictured all of us huddled in a hallway having a COVID spreading party.  Later in the day, the tornado alert starting going off and the teacher I was video-teaching with commanded the students to find a safe place in their houses and pretend there was a tornado coming.  Many looked confused and just sat, staring back at their monitors.  Other teachers started exiting their trailers.  We walked to the school.  Our key cards still didn't work, so we were locked outside during the virtual tornado.  We walked around the school and through the parking lot.  We saw a teacher exiting his car.

"My trailer is freezing!"  he exclaimed.

"Mine is too!" another responded.

"I saw Ms. Goode teaching in the cafeteria, her heat must be out too!"

"I had to warm up, so I've just been sitting out in my car!"

We walked around the building, trying to find an open door.  When we finally got let in, the virtual tornado drill was over.  I decided that since I was in the building anyway, I would break my no-pee streak.  I emptied out my box in the teacher workroom and opened the little Christmas gift the school had given us months earlier.  It was a school t-shirt and one very small, thin face mask.  As I returned to the trailer, I ran into three staff members not wearing masks.  That evening, I emailed an administrator and requested the missing spray for my "sanitation station".  I also asked if there was an onsite vacuum I could use so that I would not have to carry my own back and forth.

I pulled up to the building Friday morning and dragged all of my stuff to the trailer.  The intercom buzzed.

"Ms. Wagner, I will get you that stuff!"  the admin. announced.

"Thank you!"  I responded and started trying to get ready to teach.  I stepped outside to make another trip to the car for my vacuum cleaner and saw a hand in the window of the front half of the double-wide, waving.  A colleague stepped out that I have not seen in a long time.  

"I'm scared." she said, immediately.

"I called in the first two days back, my blood pressure was really high.  I have not stepped foot in that building." she continued.

"Did they give you the cleaning stuff?"  I asked.  

"No.  There is nothing in there.  I got nothing.  They parked the vacuum in there but didn't even do the floor or take out the trash.  How are we supposed to think the "COVID deep cleaning" is being done weekly if we can't even get basic cleaning done?  Am I really supposed to trust that our two little bathrooms are being cleaned through out the day?"  

I shook my head.

"Look.  This is bullshit.  But, every time I go near the building, I'll text you and bring out anything you need and leave it outside of your door."

"Thank you."  she responded.  

The spray never came.  I spent the last hour of the day vacuuming the filthy carpet and thinking of the kids that would be in the trailer with me on Monday.  I wiped everything down, over and over again.  Their parents trust me, I kept thinking.  What if one of them got sick after coming in here?  I kept moving the bottle of hand sanitizer I had brought from home to different parts of the trailer.  I put extra paper masks from the box I keep in the car on my desk.  The two rags and suspicious wipes I was provided with sat in my "sanitation station".  

And then, I left.  I really had to pee.  

The Return, pt. 1

So, on February 3rd, I returned to the school building.  This might sound silly from a woman pushing fifty, but February 2nd is my birthday. After eleven months of no in person teaching, did I really have to be at work at seven o'clock in the morning the following day, wearing hard pants and shoes?  Couldn't they have picked SOME OTHER DAY?

I have been assigned a new trailer.  I wasn't happy about that, either.  I know that beggars can't be choosers and that last year was the first time in years that I had had my own classroom, but jesus, it took nearly a week to clean out the last one and I really wasn't looking forward to doing that again.  Only to be moved a few months later, I assume, and continue to clean up the filthy school one room at a time.  

I parked the car and walked into the lobby of the school, as instructed, pulled my phone out and clocked in, then walked back to the parking lot and moved our car to the parking lot next to the new trailer.  It's a double-wide and I have the back half.  I really liked my single-wide, no sharing walls with neighbors, I found myself thinking as I walked up to the new one, while gazing at the old one.  I opened the door.

There was shit everywhere.  Shelves and drawers full of materials, boxes, papers, old textbooks.  The board still had random stuff written on it from last March.  The marker had become nearly permanent.  There were about thirty desks and chairs piled up against the walls, limiting the space that anyone could even move around in.  It has carpet.  Carpet is dirty by nature and I knew that in my single-wide no one ever did the floor, so I brought a broom and did it myself.  Bring a vacuum is more complicated.  It was filthy.  There were dead roaches and hornets everywhere.  Rocks and dust and broken crayons, ground into the carpet.  Black weird cockroach dust all over the carpet and the windowsills.  The blinds were covered in filth.  I carefully set my arms full of stuff down, not even sure where I would want to put it.  Then, I looked at the COVID "sanitation station" that we had been told would be ready and waiting as soon as we returned to the buildings.  There were two rags, a container of wipes that I wasn't sure if were for surface or human use, some half used rolls of toilet paper and a can of air freshener from Dollar Tree.  It was half empty.

I stood there in disbelief and I thought long and hard about getting back in the car and simply driving away.