Teacher Appreciation Week: May 2-6

Teaching is a Work of Heart

Has there been a more important time to appreciate our teachers? May 2-6 is Teacher Appreciation Week. Following an 18-month pandemic shutdown, teaching and learning from home, wildfires, winter freezes and the rest, we all thought getting back into our schools would make everything better.

In many ways it has. Our teachers and students have celebrated a year of being able to see each other and interact in person. Our staff have been able to collaborate together and be together again as communities. Many of our students have again had the comfort of trusted adults available to them.

But the pandemic and shutdown, combined with deep political unrest at home and war abroad, has left widespread trauma in its wake — with our students, with our families, and with our David Douglas staff. And though the shutdown ended, COVID-19 did not. Cases continued throughout this school year, adding the challenge of daily contact tracing, notifications, staff shortages and, until recently, masking enforcement.

In no prior year have teachers felt the stresses of being educators so intensely. This goes for all David Douglas staff, but our teachers are truly heroes for holding onto our kids, refusing the let them go, but instead raising them up. The individual, emotional investment in doing that day after day is a lot.

The national theme for Teacher Appreciation Week this year has never been more true: ‘Teaching is a Work of Heart.”

A special thank you also goes out to a group of people who rarely receive much appreciation, but without whom we could not have reopened this year – Substitute Teachers! Our District dealt with severe staffing shortages throughout this year, as well as sub shortages. But without the substitute teachers who were available, we would have been sunk.

To all those District staff who filled in for understaffed classrooms, and for all those substitute teachers out there who spent this year bouncing from classroom to classroom, THANK YOU!