Lori Falce: Teachers need sick days, too

My friend was alone in her house.

Her husband and daughters had taken refuge elsewhere because she hadn’t only tested positive for covid-19 — she was clearly sick with it. She couldn’t taste or smell anything. She coughed and coughed and felt kitten-like weakness. She was scared for herself and her family.

And though she was home and though she was ill, she was also working. A teacher, she wasn’t in the classroom. But while she was sick with a disease that has killed more than 250,000 Americans, she spent every day preparing the lessons that her substitute would give her students.

“Stop working! You’re sick!” our group chat told her.

“I would agree,” she said. “But this is what teachers have done forever.”

One could assume that she was a martyr. A lone soul choosing to suffer dramatically. We all know people like that. But she’s not. She’s just a dedicated educator who cares deeply about the job she does. Even when she’s sick as a dog.

And she’s not alone.

NBC recently shared the story of Stephany Hume, a Garland, Texas, a reading teacher who has survived cancer twice and recently needed unexpected surgery.

But she also had students she was committed to teaching. So she did. From the hospital via video conferencing.

Facebook shares and earnest television comments focus on the selflessness of Hume’s actions. And they are heartwarming. They are also blood-chilling.

Teaching is a necessary job. It is important, and it is critical that people like Hume and my friend treat education like the precious gift it is.

But we have to treat teachers with the same respect.

A teacher’s calling to impart knowledge shouldn’t come with a requirement that they do so when they aren’t allowed to leave a hospital or too sick to be permitted in a school building. Even if those aren’t the specific demands of a school district or a parochial school, teachers have long been expected to make sacrifices for their students that are not expected of other professions.

Doctors aren’t expected to provide insulin from their own stock. Soldiers aren’t assumed to provide their own guns. But while the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities puts average out-of-pocket spending by teachers for classroom supplies at between $500 and $1,000, teachers are only allowed to deduct $250 of that on their taxes. In February, a guidance counselor at Sto-Rox School District pleaded with the public via Twitter to donate paper because with months left in the calendar, the schools were out of their most basic supply.

I thought that I appreciated education before. I covered my first school board meeting when I was 16 years old and have spent years observing both the on-the-ground work of educators and the round-the-table discussions by boards about how to pay for it.

But shepherding my kid through the end of sixth grade and into the first half of seventh all day every day has brought me to my knees. I don’t know how I would do it with 25 or 50 or 100 in my care.

It very well might do me in. But apparently, I’d have to prepare a lesson plan for a sub before I could die.