Leslie-Bernard Joseph
Leslie runs Coney Island Prep, a charter school in Brooklyn. He started as a teacher and then joined CIP at its founding, first as the Dean of Students, then returning last year as its CEO. He decided to close the school early—days before the Department of Education and the large NYC charter school networks. Since then, Coney Island Prep has taken on its shoulders the responsibility of not just teaching its students at distance, but supporting their families and expanding the responsibility. At a moment when the city and state are proposing austerity measures and cuts to school budgets, their work highlights the necessity of doing more, not less, with the institutions best-positioned work closely with families and communities. They are running food trucks in the community, distributing technology to homes that need it, supporting families and alums returned abruptly from college with micro-grants—work that reminds us how narrowly we have imagined what schools can be. Leslie and his school have placed themselves explicitly on the front lines of the many American epidemics converging on their community—not just Covid, but racism, inequality and beyond—and have dug trenches for the long haul.
CIP Statement on Duel Epidemics of Coronavirus and Racism
CIP Resources on Coronavirus and Distance Learning
The week of February 24th is the week after our mid-winter recess. We’ve had a week off for school.
I’ve been following the news, because current events, of course—but also, I had traveled to Asia over the holiday break, through Wuhan airport. And in the month of February alone, I had been to Boston, Miami, Vegas and Connecticut—with the exception of Connecticut, all of them via flights. Boston had a confirmed case of coronavirus. I’m realizing many of our teachers have traveled, too.
At this point I’m thinking two things: First, travel restrictions are going to get crazy. Should I not be traveling? Should I not be flying to Boston even though I have to go for this speaking engagement?
Then I’m realizing, This is coming to New York, period. It’s not a matter of if it’s a matter of when. And when it does come, this will be the worst hit place in the country. Because of how densely populated we are and because of the subways—there’s no way we get out of this unscathed.
Then thinking about the subway it becomes, This is definitely going to hit my school. I need to start thinking about how am I informing parents? How do I tell them what is a novel coronavirus? What symptoms should you be looking for? When is it okay to not send a kid to school? How long should they be kept out of school?
And then I think of the snowball effect: When this hits, our community’s going to be hit the hardest. Poor black and brown communities are going to be hit the hardest. The communities that have the least access to strong health care, the most disparate outcomes, who are already struggling—we are going to be the ones who suffer.
And so, Thursday, February 27th, I’m starting to save and clip news articles, to start drafting the kinds of letters home that I’m going to need to send in a couple of weeks.
By the following Friday, March 6th I’m reaching out to our Chief Operating Officer, saying, “I need you to start planning for school closure. What does it look like for us to have to shut down our schools?” At this point I’m starting think what if somebody gets infected.
The night of Sunday the 8th, the letter is drafted that we’re sending out to staff and families. So by the morning of the 9th, we’re reaching out to staff saying, “Have you traveled to any of these places over break? If so, are you experiencing any of these symptoms? Have you been in contact with a confirmed case?”
And we’re sending emails to families saying, “If your kid has a fever, you can’t send them to school. If your kid is sick for any reason, don’t send them to school. We will continue to monitor the situation. We don’t have any confirmed cases within our community. We’re operating out of an abundance of caution. We will keep you posted.”
We spend all day on the ninth responding to teachers’ answers and literally sending some people home.
“Oh, I had a fever for three days last week.”
“You gotta go.”
“Oh, my girlfriend went to a conference with somebody who tested and confirmed positive.”
“You gotta go.”
It’s also the week of our leadership team retreat. We do this three-day offsite retreat every year to roll out our upcoming strategic initiatives and plan the upcoming school year. For this year’s retreat, we were continuing a long running organizational conversation on equity, how we serve our most vulnerable kids, especially our black and brown kids.
And so the retreat was going to be in DC with a full day at the National Museum of African American History and culture. We had read Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist as a team. Some of our team members were going to Sidwell Friends. We spent a lot of time as a team observing and visiting other charter schools, but we hadn’t been asking, Forget just charter schools, what do people who have means say, “This is what an excellent education is for our kids?” Are we being as thoughtful about what our kids get and deserve?
Wednesday, in DC, the team was at the African American History Museum. I had been a couple times already, so I was preparing for the next day of the retreat, my opening session.
I’m watching the news. Private companies have been shut down and have been working from home. The NBA announced, “We are shutting down and we are canceling our season.” And for our schools as we’re saying, “Well our kids are poor and our families don’t have means and so we have to stay open so that they can have food.”
At this time, the Department of Education in the city has not closed public schools. No other major charter network has announced that they are closing schools. And it means our communities—that I know are going to be hardest hit—we are just waiting to get sick, waiting for a confirmed case before we do something about it. As opposed to saying, like anyone else who has means, “Oh, we’re going to get away from this thing and just wait it out because we can.”
There’s an entire hall in the National Museum of African American History and Culture called Making A Way Out of No Way. When you walk into the exhibit, there is an empty school desk. How did black folks educate themselves in this country, create school systems when they weren’t supposed to read, set up alternative ways of learning in school houses? How did they create paths to prosperity when they didn’t have any opportunities themselves?
And so it’s 10:15 that night, Wednesday, I ask our team to meet me in the lobby. I start the conversation saying, “We have to shut down. We need to close by the end of the week, Friday.” I had our Operations Manager already rebooking everyone’s travel home.
I said, “We’re in an impossible position. We can close schools and potentially thrust the financial hardship on our families sooner than they are ready, or we can sit and wait until this arrives at our doorstep. Both of them feel unconscionable, especially while other schools in communities with means prepare for this.
“So we are going to find another way. We’re going to do both. We are going to figure out how to take learning online. We’re going to figure out how to way to make sure that our kids can still be fed. We’re going to make a way out of no way.”
* * *
When I started out, I was not fantastic at instruction: I had fifth graders reading on a first-grade level, I didn’t know what phonemes were, how to teach phonetics or number sense to a 10 year-old who couldn’t sound out vowels.
What I was really good at was inspiring and motivating kids, holding them accountable and creating a team atmosphere where they held each other accountable. On the first day of school, kids got fake acceptance letters to the Princeton University class that would be their graduating year. They learned how to line up based on scenes from Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. Classroom cheers were revised lyrics to rap songs. Muhammad Ali was a central figure for how you carry yourself during the school day.
So kids who came into my classroom not liking to read would be part of a culture where it was just really cool to read—and they would love reading. It was okay to make mistakes and fail, and you felt supported at it. It was a classroom that you wanted to be in.
All that stuff carried us through the times where I didn’t have it all together: We’ll figure this out together.
People would come and see that in my classroom—Teach for America people or the head of the Department of Ed. And then Jake Mnookin came to see it, and he said, “I’m starting this school in Coney Island, at the bottom of Brooklyn. You should come.”
At the time, a school where I get to design the culture and the systems for an entire neighborhood is exactly what I wanted to do. But I’m living in Harlem, I’m from Queens, school’s in the Bronx, Coney Island is far as hell. I would need to completely move my entire life and I do not want to do that.
Still, I remember taking the D train down to Stillwell Avenue station, an hour and 45-minute train ride, getting off on the last stop. It was late October or November 2008, it’s already freezing cold. The wind whipping off the water is enough for you to know, I am not in New York. I’m not in the place that I just came from.
I’m not dressed appropriately for this. It feels like a barren desert wasteland. Nathan’s is the only thing open, but no one is there. The school is 10 blocks from there, and you’re just walking by an empty MCU park, minor league baseball stadium, empty parking lots, just desolate streets, public housing.
And then we’re rubbing on a dusty window, peeking in and saying, “Hey, this community center—next to this playground where Stephon Marbury grew up playing basketball—this community center that is not a real school, this is where we want to start.”
I’m making this decision at the time of a national movement around hope and change. It felt so close to the city and so foreign and so much in need of hope. And in that moment, I thought, This doesn’t feel like New York. The need is palpable. This is where I have to be.
We were building everything from scratch. With 11 people for 90 kids, everything was a challenge, and everything was an opportunity.
Everybody was completely invested in what we were building, the mission and each other. You were in that building at 6:30 in the morning because kids were there—we were letting them in by seven—and everybody was still there at 7:00 PM. That time is reminiscent of now.
There was this idea that we were creating the world the way it was supposed to be and if something didn’t work, there wasn’t anybody else who was going to come fix it for us. So we had to figure it out together.
This is a district where, the year before, a quarter of black eighth graders were proficient in reading and math. We had 318 or 375 applicants for 90 seats in our first year—for a school that did not exist in a building that was not real. People were saying, “I don’t know what the fuck this thing is, but I would rather take a risk on this place that does not have a building, than send them to these failing public schools.”
Fall 2011, we outgrow our community center space, and we are at the height of co-location battles—city charter schools and public schools sharing space. Our first hearing still goes down in lore at the DOE as one of the worst, if not the worst, public hearing ever because somebody definitely got punched in the face. Literally. Police broke it up, somebody got punched in the face. So anytime I spoke with parents, I would start by owning mistakes that we had made as a school and told them that we were committed to doing things better.
We started with 90 5th graders and added 90 more each year. Fall 2013 is when those fifth graders became ninth graders, so we opened the high school. Then the following year also opened a kindergarten and first grade. Our first class of kindergarteners, they look different than any other kids we’ve seen before going through our school. They are in some places on par with and in some places five, six, seven, eight test score points above Uncommon Schools and Achievement First—and they serve tens of thousands of kids and are decades old.
So our schools are changing because now our middle school has gone from taking in kids who come from everywhere—years and grade levels behind—to now having an entire incoming class of kids who are reading at or in many cases above grade level.
And it’s helpful in leading the school through this time to be able to say, “This is who we are as a school, and this is what it means for us to support this community.”
* * *
What does this all look like in our community? I’ll give you a personal example before I talk about kids and families.
So my grandfather turned 103 this week. I have my aunt who has been on lupus since her teens, she is 50, 51, and she has a host of continued health issues. She has a trach[eotomy] in her throat. And then another aunt who overcame leukemia last year.
All of them are of course immunocompromised, and it was the kind of house where on a regular day my aunts would be wearing masks. I would need to wash my hands before I hugged them. There are specific fridges where I can get specific water bottles for specific people.
Now, we can’t have home health-aids come in because we’re afraid that they will bring the virus into the home.
And my mom is a nurse in a veteran’s hospital—my mom literally works in infection control. Her job is to train and prepare and track and make sure that people have the right resources and are wearing rubber gloves and masks correctly and tracking where the virus is going. So she has to come home through the back door, go directly into the basement, put her clothes in the washer, take a shower, and then, after however long a shift, suit up again to come help my grandfather bathe, my aunts take care of each other.
Then she can’t stay there to talk to them—she’s minimizing contact as much as possible. When I call home, I have to call twice because they won’t pass the cell phone between each other. And of course I can’t go home because I’m coming from the city.
At school, there is a family that is the Brady Bunch: Both parents, second marriage, and together they now have seven kids. The seventh is maybe four months old now, their only joint child together. Their six other kids attend Coney Island Prep schools. Mom’s a social worker. Dad was in the navy, and he’s in school. But mama definitely works from home now, with seven kids at home at the same time and a four month-old. The sense I get from dad is that he is considering going back on active duty for there to be more income. He’s doing the cost benefit analysis of whether he should be home to take care of the kids or whether they need the money. He shows up to our high school everyday with a Coney Island Prep bag to collect enough breakfast, lunch and snacks for the entire family.
One kid, there is an active ACS case—a child services case—against his mom. We were in between, saying, “Yes, we will comply ACS—we will give you whatever information you need—because you are a state agency.” And we’re still supporting mom because the kid is still hers, and we want to make sure that we’re still giving them support that they need. The city was actively taking mom to court the week of March 9th. That kid is now with that parent all day.
I think of another single mom with a daughter who is a high school senior with special needs. She was worried about graduating on time, graduating with a Regents diploma, but she just has one class she needs to pass. We pushed her and said, “Even though mom, you think her special needs are limiting her and that she’s not ready for college, she can do it.” And now she’s home, not getting the kind of support and counseling that she needs regularly.
Kids come with parents, they don’t come out of nowhere. We spend lots of time in schools supporting kids through learning gaps and with social emotional needs and helping them manage challenges. And we know we provide a sense of structure and normalcy and consistency for lots of kids. We are sending kids back into an environment where they might not have that. And so we need to both help the kid and help the family. Even if they were going back into a structure that was perfect, those parents are being asked to now either not work at all and have lost income or work remotely from home and be educators at the same time.
People with privilege are struggling through that. There was a Shonda Rhimes tweet “It’s been one day of homeschooling: Teachers deserve to get paid a billion dollars.” There are other social media posts, “Three days into homeschooling my kids, and I hired a new assistant principal. It’s a belt.” People are seriously like, “I just reported all of my kids for bullying me.”
It’s hard as hell and it was hard before. And so to do nothing for families when we know they are going to be struggling, it makes no sense and it’s unconscionable.
We have meals covered. A food vendor said, “You can serve as many meals as you want out of your high school every single day. And if you give us 48 hours warning, we can meet any demand.” This will be federally reimbursable through our child nutrition program. So we already know that a thousand families are going to pick up our meals, and whatever adults take the meals that are not reimbursable, we can foot the cost for that. We can afford to do that.
We partner with an organization to send a food truck around to three locations in our neighborhood, including the public housing area where we have the most students. Literally, on the first day, with very little outreach, just a text message blast, we served a hundred meals in 45 minutes. For online instruction, we’re saying to teachers, “Here’s what you need to do. You need to create a lesson, a mini lesson, a video and instruction. They need to see you on the video so that there’s some sense of comfort and normalcy. Make it interesting, make it engaging.”
It is absurd how good our people have gotten in a very short period of time. And so I’m seeing third grade science lessons about what is a trait. And sixth grade global history lessons on the rise of Christianity with rotating globes and maps and images. I’m seeing art teachers teaching kids how to make papier mache out of household materials, just straight up paper, water and flour: “Today, we are just going to make our clay, I need you to let it sit overnight. Tomorrow, we are going to make our mold.” French teachers have become cartoonists. PE teachers are doing HIIT lessons. Principals and leaders are taking turns rotating and doing bedtime stories for kids in lower elementary. Crazy, ridiculous stuff that teachers are doing.
We were also telling campuses, “Tell us how many Chromebooks you have that are operational. Tell us how many you think you need.” Three or four of us would stay at the high school campus, getting everything up and running, testing Chromebooks and laptops to make sure that every one was functioning before we send kids home.
We started laptop distribution on Monday morning, the 23rd at 11:00 AM. That day it is 40 degrees and hailing sideways. And by 9:45 AM, the line is around the block for the high school. Cars are double parked on both sides of the street.
We are trying to get family members in a certain number at a time—to have some sort of social distancing. We’re only letting people in 15 people in the gym at a time. It’s so cold that we have to break that. And we’re saying, “Look, we’re going to let people into 10 classrooms at a time, 10 people in every classroom on different floors.” You’re waiting there for 20 minutes before we can release you into the gym. From the gym, you go to our cafeteria where we’ve taken our independent reading books and laid them all out on the table, and say, “Take whatever you need home with you. And grab whatever food and meals you want.”
The other thing that we want to figure out is, what about families who aren’t going to be able to pay for food, childcare, all of this other stuff. Can we do micro grants for them? How much can we afford?
So we’ve said if you’re a family who is housing insecure, period, automatically you’re getting a micro grant, no questions asked. After that, it’s, “Are you a family that serves multiple kids across our schools?” “Do your students have special needs?” All those other risk factors.
When it’s all said and done, two-thirds of the families that are going to get microgrants are housing insecure. 55% of them have more than one kid across all of our schools. 100% have three or more risk factors: academic risk and special needs, you know, 50 million things that can be tough for a kid. Those are the families we’ve prioritized.
We also asked, “What can we do for our alums who are being returned home?” We told our kids, “Hey, we’re going to be with you through college.” Our kids were persisting through college at rates, far exceeding their low-income peers at 80% and now they are more likely to feel, Man, like I’m not cutting it, or struggling academically.
These are kids who weren’t going to have the best laptops and are now going to be asked, “Hey find storage, move back home already.” When for so many of these kids, the win of going to college was getting away from home and now they’re going right back into the place where it’s actually too hard to concentrate.
My experience personally in boarding school and in college was, “Oh, man. I feel really guilty because I’m not thinking about all of the struggles and hardships at home. But I’m also really lucky and I’m able to thrive because I’m not thinking about all the struggles and hardships at home.”
And again, you’re sending people back into an environment where they don’t have money.
Poverty is based on both policy choices and lack of money. As a country, so many of the things that we do are work arounds, right? Charter schools are a solution to segregated schools, redlining, segregated communities and lack of resources. Job creation programs and worker programs, those are solutions to people having substandard education and all these other things, a lack of having basic income and healthcare costing too much.
The real solutions are policy changes. Absent that, we said, “People are going to struggle. Let’s just give them money.”
Our board chairs said, “I got you on the micro grants. I’ll do 10k personally.” We’re like, “Great done. We have enough to get us started.”
We got our biggest donation last weekend. It was for families. One donor saying, “Hey, tell us about all your needs. Tell us about everything you’re doing.” And they just kept asking more questions. “Wait. How are you doing this? If you were to pay for internet, how much would it cost and how long would that serve them?” The single largest gift we’ve gotten is because someone said, “Yes, people are going to struggle, and you need to do something more than just giving kids, I don’t know, 70 minutes of video to watch every single day.” 100,000 dollars from one couple, “Here’s 100,000 go out and match.” It is incredible for us.
Then, we’ve asked Robin Hood and another foundation for another 90,000 to prepare us for the long haul—Robin Hood gave us 30,000. I think we’re going to be able to give some families between 400 dollars and 2000.
We are now preparing for waves two or three. The second wave is: We don’t expect to be open for the entire rest of the school year. We planned for two weeks’ closure. I think we knew by the end of the first week that this is going to be longer than two weeks. So we’ve created a case management system called Touch Points. We’ve basically taken every single one of our kids and we said based on their risk factors—your academic need, whether you’re housing insecure, your income levels, whether you are a special-needs student, you have mandated counseling services— everybody is assigned reaching out to a household. Some kids the videos and instruction is enough—they get a weekly check in—other kids we check in literally daily.
We are touching on your academic and social emotional needs and how your family is doing and what you're experiencing day to day, “Do you need food? Do you plan to come in for meal service? Do you need internet access? Do you need technology?”
The third wave is: School is going to look different when we get back in the fall. There’s not going to be a vaccine and nobody’s giving us guidance about, “Hey, you might not be able to use a lunchroom or have gym classes.” Or people are going to get reinfected, and you could be losing staff members and kids for two weeks at a time. Or it may become common and standard procedure now for you to take everybody’s temperature when they enter the school building. We haven’t figured out the supply chain yet, but how much hand sanitizer are we going to need as an organization at scale by fall.
Nobody knows what they’re doing. Everybody’s figuring this out together as they go along. A nonprofit organization that advocates for charter schools has taken upon itself to organize weekly webinars with the New York State and the New York City education departments. On those calls, all of the questions—what about this, what about this, what about this, what about this—the answers were polite, well intentioned, “These are all good questions. We are figuring this out with you for now. Please just document everything that you’re doing, and please make your best, best faith effort. We will get back to you on that. The state is working on guidance.”
The call that I had directly before you was with our state authorizer, and they asked, “What questions do you have remaining?”
And I said, “What happens in the fall when kids might need to be gone for two weeks or staff may need to be gone? How do you define enrollment when a parent has a reasonable fear—I shouldn’t send my kids to school because there’s no vaccine—and we still want to provide home instruction and distance learning for that student? Can we count them towards our enrollment? Because if I can’t, then I can’t pay staff. And if I can’t pay staff, I don’t have teachers to check up on these kids and teach.”
Oh, and by the way, we’re about to enter a global recession that is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The economy is completely destroyed and schools are losing funding.
And there’s a limit to how much you can cut before it impacts the resources and materials that you put in front of kids. Right? Have you accounted for the fact that when we get back, we’re going to need to send a lot more kids home with Chromebooks? Have you accounted for the unprecedented spending we’re going to need to make as an organization on Purell and Clorox wipes? What kind of fundraising am I going to need to do to put in Cisco systems and video conferencing in every single classroom for us to make instruction live? So we can teach the kids who do come to school and teach the kids who don’t at the same time.
We don’t know if we’re going to get back, and then when we do get back it’s going to look different. We’re looking at adding 10 to 15 days to our school calendar next year. And not just so we’re ready for standard testing. We’ve got to make up for kids who are already behind academically losing a quarter of the school year.
And kids of means are getting different kind of real-world exposure—they’re continuing to learn. My board chair, his kids are in a stock competition for math, right? They’re learning new skills: “All right, we’re taking skateboarding for PE, and we’re doing rock climbing.” “We’re doing group science projects,” cause their parents have the education and the means to do that and the flexibility to not work as much. Whereas I might have a family of six in a shelter or like families of four and five in one-bedroom apartments—it’s three kids competing over one Chromebook. That’s the fun stuff we’ve got to figure out.
I can’t compete with the Harlem Childrens Zone, Uncommon Schools and Achievement First. If I want to put up technology in every single classroom by the mid-end of August, who’s going to pay for that? I’ve got to figure out how to do this on my own.
So I say, “Let’s do the right thing.”
We’re a transformational school, and we’re trying to transform schools. I love that it is my job to think through this.
* * *
The trip to Boston in early March was to speak at a Kennedy School class on philanthropy and social movements.
I was talking about good philanthropy and good partnerships and bad philanthropy and bad partnerships, I think I was saying something along the lines of: “If it isn’t good for our kids and families and if people are asking us to do things that we don’t feel are right, then we will say no.”
One of the questions I got at the end—it was the best question and the hardest one—was, “How do you scale the kinds of privilege and access that you have for other organizations that don’t have the same kind of networks and opportunities and pedigree.
“You went to Princeton and Stanford Law and worked at Skadden and McKinsey and so you and your board and your networks are different. You’re put in rooms where you can ask for more money than other people. And so it may be easier for you to say no. Whereas just a random community organization in rural America may not have that opportunity to say no. They may have to accept money and funds and philanthropic dollars with strings attached that really don’t align with their values.”
The question comes up a lot today.
We talk a lot within our school about the principles for how we are leading at this time. The answer is that we may be the most privileged institution within our district and within Coney Island.
We are a 20-plus million-dollar institution with relatively stable funding and Ivy League educated folks in its C-suite, leading its schools, and on its boards. We have a different level of access to some major donors and major corporations in our country, and we have a responsibility to use our privilege and access for people who should have the same resources.
We feel like we have privilege. And we have to lead from it.
The challenge that I’m struggling with is that I grew up in and was educated in the language of Western ideals, and I can’t use that language to define what’s needed next.
The idea of a social contract stems from this understanding that, as humans, we need and rely and depend on a community, but also there’s some inherent competition and distrust. And so the social contract is about what are we willing to do for each other, together, so that we can have this mutual benefit.
The social contract in America is broken. This country has developed and has grown and become this massive, incredible empire, because—as progressive as it can be—it was almost strategically unwilling to define everybody into that social contract.
So this is a nation of prosperity, when you exclude slaves.
It is a nation of prosperity, when you exclude women.
It is a nation of prosperity when you exclude the laborers at the beginning of the industrial revolution or child laborers.
Each time we redefine who gets to be in the social contract, we’re saying that those people can now become “American” because we have only defined “American” within the construct of success. Somebody always needs to be outside of that social construct for us to feel good about who we are as a country. Period. Full stop.
Capitalism has done an incredible job of coopting the language of individualism and prosperity. Our government and our national consciousness have now been about prosperity and growth and winning and success and not about sacrifice and citizenship and a community. For someone to win, somebody has to lose.
Does our philosophical understanding of who we are as a people and of our values, do they work together? Within our American context, these in incredible conflict.
Thoreau’s individualism—the rugged frontier—this idea that here you can define yourself for yourself. These are core American ideals that feel in conflict with the idea that we are a democratic community: that citizens act for a greater, common good. Plurality and diversity and tolerance in the same breath as individualism and freedom at all costs—they just don’t work together.
And neither of them work when you layer on the lens of race, class, sexual orientation, environmental justice, indigenous people—and just basic rights.
None of us are able to speak a language that makes sense for us. That allows us to figure out a common problem like, Hey, our economy is ravaged and none of us have the kind of opportunity that we should. The only way is for us to come together and redefine what it means to be in this country. We just don’t have the language—on this side of the globe and in a country with this amount of money—to figure out what it means to do the right thing.
This is what planets and environments do when problems don’t get solved. We get new crazy viruses. And there’ll be different ones after this one.
I’m even more frustrated that the rhetoric in the news has been, This virus kills everybody. It doesn’t know race. It doesn’t know class. It just comes after everyone.
That would be true. But we’ve set up our system in our country so that we protect some people and other people are expendable.
Suddenly if you work at Target or you work at the grocery store making minimum wage, you are an essential worker. We say they are brave, but we treat brave people like shit. So public health workers, nurses, and doctors on the front lines wear trash bags over their scrubs and rich folks they can get tested by mail by private companies.
There’s going to be a lot of suffering right now. And suffering creates the opportunity for compassion.
In moments like these, compassionate listening hopefully creates the opportunity for us to do something different. And the fact that this will go on longer than we expected, that will hopefully create the political will for us to do something different in this country.
This is coming against a wave of global nationalism, right? So we have Trump, the UK has Boris Johnson, Brazil has Bolsonaro. The planet was trending towards this unconscionable place that was just going to destroy us. This might force us back into saying, “Our politics weren’t working—the way we viewed the world wasn’t working.” And get us hopefully back on a better path.
For me personally, I get to be in the right seat at the right place at the right time.
The thing within my control—this small district, these one thousand families, these discrete public housing projects—I get to leverage all of my privilege, channel resources directly there and lessen the suffering for those folks. At a scale that I wasn’t allowed to or able to do before.
I get to reimagine school more quickly. Things that people once said, “Oh, we can’t ever do that.”
Now we get to say, “Fuck that. Every kid should get a laptop and we’re sending those laptops home.”
No longer are there questions like, “Oh, the laptops are going to break.” “I don’t know if we can afford it.” “We don’t have to teach typing in schools.” It’s happening. Period, full stop.
Crises reveal character and hopefully this reveals the brokenness of who we have been as a country, as a globe and in our politics.
When the right leaders take advantage of this, it’s going to be great.
CIP Statement on Duel Epidemics of Coronavirus and Racism