‘A wake up call.’ Nearly 50 Ky. educators dead from COVID. The void they leave behind.
Joannie Bartley had “the true heart of a teacher,” someone who was battling MS, but still showed up to teach sixth grade in the Jenkins Independent district every day. She died of COVID-19 on Sept. 20.
The Lee County schools have lost three employees to COVID: custodian Bill Bailey, counselor Rhonda Estes and Heather Antle, an instructional assistant. Lee County has just three public schools.
Shelby County lost Matt Cockrell, an art teachers who’d just gotten married in June; Caverna Independent’s Amanda Nutt died in September, one year after being named Hart County Teacher of the Year. The 48th loss of a K-12 educator, according to a database run by a teachers group 120 Strong, was beloved Johnson County football coach Jim Matney.
The database is being compiled by Henry Clay High School teacher Jennifer Bolander on the 120 United Facebook page. 120 United is a teacher group affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers that organized our of General Assembly protests over teacher pensions. Shortly after Bolander’s interview this week, another instructional aide, Kimberly Williamson of Pike County, died, taking the database total to 49 K-12 educators. The 120 Strong list includes two of their members who worked in higher education, raising the overall total to 51.
“It occurred to me one day that no one was writing these down,” Bolander said. “I’ve essentially been in school since I was 5 years old, and I can think of two teachers passing, one of cancer. The fact we’re at 50 in 18 months is huge and it needed to be documented.”
Fifty out of the 8,700 people Kentucky has lost to COVID may not seem like that much. Other sectors — factories, fast food, and other frontline work has surely been just as decimated. But educators — teachers, aides, bus drivers, cafeteria workers — leave larger than usual holes behind, mourned not just by friends and families, but by entire schools full of children and colleagues. Schools and the people who work in them have taken center stage in this pandemic; when school was remote last year, we realized how much we need them, how hard their jobs are, how important they are to our kids.
Shericka Smith oversees social work, mental health and extended school services for Fayette County Schools, as well as being the crisis team coordinator to send counselors to a school like Winburn Middle School after it lost a teacher to COVID last year. Smith said that while kids are resilient, they’ve had to process a lot of trauma in the past 18 months, including many who’ve lost family and friends to the disease, in addition to educators.
“We have to come together and process it every single time and teach them to recognize their feelings,” Smith said. For schools, that means helping kids with protective factors like routines, extracurricular activities and academic support to make school a success. “It will still be hard to heal, but they will have the tools to deal with it better,” she said.
Complicating factors
Bolander noted that some of these deaths happened before there was a vaccination, but many came after.
“I’m just hoping this is a wake up call that what we are doing is dangerous and if you’re not vaccinated, it’s even worse,” she said. Teachers can fall prey to the same misinformation that keeps other people from getting vaccinated.
The complicating factor is that we don’t know how many of these deaths could have been prevented. School personnel were put in line just after healthcare workers to receive a vaccine, but no one tracked how many educators received them. (One known exception is Bartley, whose family said she had received both shots.) Kentucky chose not to implement a vaccine mandate either.
These numbers add to this state’s grief and trauma from the past 18 months, and they are having another effect: dissuading people from joining desperate school systems, who can’t find enough substitute teachers, bus drivers or cafeteria workers. Fayette County’s bus drivers were hit with COVID early in the pandemic, and the district is still so strapped for drivers that numerous routes are canceled each day.
The new teacher pipeline, already down, will surely be diminished as well.
Districts used to depend on retired teachers as subs. “If you’re older there’s no way you’d go into a petri dish like a school and that has hurt us,” said Nema Brewer, one of the founders of 120 Strong. “Let’s be honest, people can go anywhere and get better pay and not be in a petri dish. We’re surviving and surviving is no way to grow or improve.”
Public education is both a victim and savior of COVID-19. Schools and educators do put themselves at risk every day to give our kids what they need most — in school instruction and activities. Fifty is too many of them to lose. We should pay them more, appreciate them more, support them with mask wearing and vaccinations. And most of all, every once in a while, just say thank you.
This story was originally published October 1, 2021 at 8:34 AM.
