LETTER: Don’t bash teachers unions over the pandemic

The Sunday commentary by Robert Fellner (“Teaches unions exposed”) was beyond the pale from an organization (the Nevada Policy Research Institute) that proudly touts defunding public schools in its promotion of school choice, which would result in a lowered tax base and the resegregation of public schools. These are not the people who should be listened to in this crisis. Rather, we should be listening to teachers and parents, getting them vaccinated as fast as we can and, yes, trying to fix the ventilation systems.

I spent a career working in an urban school. The school was overcrowded with nearly twice the number of students as it was designed for and with no windows to ventilate the classrooms. Faculty and students would all be sick with respiratory illnesses within two weeks of returning to the building in the fall.

You can’t fix that kind of structural shoddiness in the schools in this country in the middle of the pandemic and in a crush to return to normal. Nor can you bring in enough HEPA filters to make it passable. They make noise and people can’t hear each other talk when they are appropriately spaced six feet apart.

This virus didn’t expose the teachers unions. It instead exposed years of neglect and abuse of one of our most important functions — to educate our children. It’s been years of colluding with contractors building our schools as cheaply as they can, not funding this crucial enterprise sufficiently year after year and blaming teachers, unions and administrators for not doing a good job while trying to do this on the cheap.

No, we need to realize that we got the mess that we deserve, given our neglect, and we must start fixing the mess we made, not use this moment to bash the teachers unions.

We need to be educated. And it will cost more than if we had built good buildings in the first place.