Normal Doesn’t Cut It
The pandemic has raged on for over a year now and the toll it’s taken is visible. Hospital ICU still overrun with sick patients, so many people mourning the deaths of their loved ones, deteriorating mental health of students, the list can go on for a while. And for a lot of people, they want out. They just want things to be “normal” again.
But from an education standpoint, going back to “normal” just doesn’t cut it for me.
In high school, I knew some brothers. I ended up getting close to one of them since he was just a grade above me and we played trumpet together in jazz band. He was such a kind, intelligent, talented, and fun guy to be around. I have such great memories with him. However, I never really saw him outside of the school.
This was because, on a normal school day, my total travel time to get to school and back was 30 minutes. Not bad at all. But for my friend and his brothers, their travel time was I want to say over two or close to two hours. Every week, these guys would spend about 10 hours just to get to school and back whereas I would spend about 2.5 hours.
And the reason for this was because where my friend lived, their education system was just not it. By the end of middle school, my friend’s older brother had already finished their school district’s high school math curriculum. Imagine that, finishing middle school and realizing that there was nowhere higher for you to go. So to resolve that, their family transferred all of them to my school district so they could actually continue their studies.
And some people might use this case as a way to show that hard work is how you further in life or how nice and good my school district is. But I HATE that so much. I consider my friend and his brothers incredibly lucky. Because for every one of them, how many more students who live in more wild or rural areas are stuck with nowhere to go? How many students are stuck in a district that just can’t properly serve its students?
I’ll tell you right now that there are a lot of rural students in the United States, probably more than you think. Go ahead and look it up. I can wait since I’m just text on a piece of screen here. If you’re feeling lazy, here. But time and time again in my experience, these students get overlooked. And I hear the arguments, they’re just so far away and spread apart from everyone and everything else. The number of resources it would take to get to and help those students could be used to help many more urban and suburban students.
But these are still students. These are still the ones we say will be our future voters, leaders, innovators, change-makers. However, I fear that when we say students will be in those roles, we only mean a certain subset of them. I believe that all students deserve easy access to a solid education. So why would we make those who have less, work more to get what they deserve?
When people say they want things to go to normal, they don’t necessarily think of the fact that it means we also include the shitty things as well. They don’t think about the fact that many students and their families will have to travel much further distances and spend more time and money on gasoline just to get to a physical building. And I’m not blaming anyone per se. I know that rural students are often not thought of or talked about. But going back to normal means that we would leave it that way and I want it to change.
So please, remember the rural students.
