“I guess you wouldn’t ask for a hug or a high five if you really didn’t need it,” she said.
And for Mrs. Barros in Tulsa, the job looks like this: grading assignments on Sundays, spending her scheduling periods in meetings with families whose kids are struggling, and supervising a new teacher, in part to supplement her relatively low teacher salary in Oklahoma.
She hopes she got through the worst of her exhaustion — when she was sick with Covid for seven days of school in January, racked with guilt, waking up every morning to record a video lesson so her students wouldn’t get left behind.
Now the end of the school year feels within reach. Next fall, she won’t be as in the dark about where her students are, academically and emotionally, as she was this year.
Other challenges don’t go away. Mrs. Barros does not have adequate staff support, even in a normal year, and helps with translation for the school Spanish-speaking families as one of the few bilingual employees. Her school also serves a disproportionately high percentage of students with disabilities. With no other teachers or assistants in the room to help, it’s Mrs. Barros who slides a pillow under the foot of a student with autism to soften the sound of his tapping foot, and Mrs. Barros who pulls aside a student with dyslexia to bother passages to be read aloud.
After being back together in the schoolhouse for months, she has seen her students make real progress: they read full chapter books, build friendships with classmates. But they are still dealing with the effects of the Covid years. A wider network of support is needed to really give her students what they need, says Ms Barros. For her, that means more investment in Tulsa’s poor neighborhoods, stronger ties between schools and families, and more counselors and therapists.
“We’ve never seen it right,” she said. Pre-pandemic, many of the students with disabilities and students of color at her school were “already so understaffed”.
“I feel like I’m a piece of the puzzle, and I see myself as a piece of the puzzle,” said Ms Barros. “And sometimes it’s as if, damnsome of those pieces take a long time to get here.”