Seeing comments/memes belittling the fatigue, stress and anxiety teachers and school staff are feeling. Many comments like, ‘quit if you don’t like it’ or ‘grocery store workers kept working while you were at home being paid to do nothing’ or ‘good thing they aren’t nurses’ 1/

First of all, kudos and endless gratitude to everyone who worked during the lockdown, for being ‘out there’ and providing essential services. Thank you! 2/

Even though teachers worked from home for the last 3 months of last school year, they were working too. They had to turn on a dime to figure out an entirely new way of doing their job, which many teachers found exhausting and taking up all day and every evening. 3/

Many teachers had an anxious summer, not knowing what/where they would teach or how it would work. They went in to physically rearrange their classrooms to attempt to get distance between the kids, even as class sizes grew and grew. 4/

Many admin. and school staff put in a lot of hours over the summer trying to get ready for a year with constantly shifting requirements, knowing that in a school, it would be impossible to maintain the health measures expected for everyone else. 5/

Everyone wanted to go back to school, but safely. During lockdowns, grocery stores had a limit to how many could come inside, and everyone else had to wait outside. Some stores allowed a TOTAL number of customers in the store that is less than teachers have in one classroom. 6/

It was easy to distance and avoid others in stores, plus most people would be there for maybe 20 minutes. If they had all the people in the store, plus more hanging out in one aisle for six hours, maybe it would seem different? 7/

People in other stores and even in hospitals had a right to limit the number of people in a given space and insist on distancing. Again, so grateful for all these people. 8/

The anxiety in schools is from being told that the same health measures we are reminded of daily for the rest of society cannot happen in schools. No ‘limiting’ gatherings and the distancing is usually impossible. Please stop belittling and downplaying this valid anxiety /x