An ex-teacher and disability advocate reflects on the failings of our COVID-19 response in schools

Lewis Noonan is a Melbourne-based disability justice advocate in their early 30s and part of the Cleaner Air Collective. Below, they write about leaving the teaching profession due to burnout and reflect on how the COVID-19 pandemic has placed increased stress on an already fragile school system.

Lewis Noonan writes: 

One of the most important lessons for me in my teacher education was understanding the importance of having a safe environment with mutual respect where students’ basic needs are met. The environment needs to be safe in both the physical and psychological sense. 

Children and teenagers are humans whose needs and views matter. They do not sit down in class and automatically switch into some sort of “learning mode” where they quietly sit still and absorb everything you tell them. They’re not machines. A hungry student may find it hard to focus on anything other than counting the minutes until lunch time.

It shouldn’t need to be said, but sick students won’t be able to focus on learning either. They may struggle to concentrate, and then be more likely to disrupt the class. It’s best if sick students stay home for two reasons: because they need to rest and recover, and because it stops them passing on their illness to their classmates and teachers. 

Demanding perfect school attendance even when students are sick is illogical – unless your plan is mass infection. Many students already experience poor mental health from the pressures of school and constant waves of COVID infections won’t help. Students are humans too, whose health and wellbeing needs to be valued.

Teacher shortages

I’ve heard in the news that there is a massive teacher shortage in my state. I stopped working as a secondary school teacher due to burnout after only two years of full-time work. 

The workload on teachers is huge and all the worry about students falling behind only adds to the pressure. The reality is that teaching isn’t easily done as a part-time job due to timetabling.

I’m certainly not willing to return to teaching because of the pandemic no one wants to talk about. One sick student is enough to infect the entire class, including the teacher. 

It’s bizarre that the unions haven’t been more active in campaigning for safer working conditions when it comes to COVID-19. I know the Australian Education Union is calling on the Andrews Government to address the teacher shortage, and well as the Federal Government to fully fund public schools. Those are both important campaigns. Yet I haven’t seen them calling on state governments to fund cleaner air in schools or to provide respirators for students and staff. 

Teachers like me are leaving the industry because of burnout. I imagine many more teachers will be leaving due to the impact of Long COVID on their health and ability to work. The union’s silence on COVID-19 is strange when we know one in 10 infections leads to long-term health conditions that impact on your quality of life. I hate to think about how many COVID-19 infections most teachers would have had by now. 

It’s strange that both major parties have adopted a mass-infection policy, at a time when they like to complain that healthcare, aged care and NDIS are too expensive. Many people are already living with Long COVID and they’re not currently eligible for the NDIS currently. 

If the Government is already complaining about the cost of the NDIS, how does it make sense to keep letting people be infected and disabled by a preventable illness?  As we are seeing in the UK with the structural collapse of schools due to the use of cheap and poor quality building materials, the cost of preventing disasters is much less than the cost of dealing with their financial and human impacts. 

Admitting mistakes 

The fact that all students were sent back to school during the first Omicron wave in early 2022 demonstrates that federal and state governments’ priorities were on business as usual and not on the health and wellbeing of students, teachers and the broader school community. 

Parents and caregivers who said that schools weren’t safe for their kids were often labelled as “anxious”, “hypochondriac” or “irrational”. There’s an unfortunate tendency to label people whose views we don’t understand as being mentally ill. Then we can justify not listening to what they have to say. 

Fears around children “falling behind” or experiencing “learning loss” have been weaponised by the government and much of the mainstream media to distract from the fact that schools are major sources of transmission. 

Yet the same people who talk of children falling behind conveniently forgot to mention how children with severe long COVID are going to fall far behind their classmates if they aren’t well enough to focus or even get out of bed.

As a former teacher, I believe in the importance of modelling the behaviours you hope to see from others. If I made a mistake when writing on the board I would acknowledge it, correct it and move on to teaching the next thing. It’s important to me that my students know it’s okay to make mistakes and to take responsibility for them.

I want to tell the government officials who said that classrooms were safe that it is brave to admit you gave the wrong advice. Parents and caregivers are going to learn one way or another that repeated COVID-19 infections have harmed their children’s health. 

It’s never too late to take responsibility for past decisions, and act to fix them. Now is the second-best time to do everything you can to reduce COVID-19 transmission in schools (with the best being yesterday). 

Cognitive dissonance

I think that some people are committed to believing the myth that COVID-19 is mild at any cost, because it was easier for some than to realise the ramifications of letting themselves get infected multiple times. 

The two ways to resolve cognitive dissonance are to change attitudes and beliefs or to change behaviour. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of people change their attitudes and beliefs by convincing themselves COVID-19 is mild. The science on COVID-19 hasn’t changed much- for those who have been paying attention.

Governments and much of the media choose to pathologise people calling for increased COVID mitigations as “anxious” to discredit them. This approach continues today. I suspect this approach was adopted because it was easier to label people who acknowledge reality, rather than invest in air purifiers and provide respirators for students and staff to make schools safe for everyone to attend.

The precautionary principle

To be clear, it is a normal response to be anxious about the effect of children catching a spreading a novel disease. COVID-19 has been around for less than four years and there is plenty we do not know about the virus. 

We are not irrational for not wanting to get infected. A key element of survival is the ability to recognise threats and adapt to change. It is sensible to presume that a previously unknown disease could cause both short-term and long-term harm. It’s called the precautionary principle.

Also see this article on the impact of COVID-19 on children and young people