"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.
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