My title comes from the book, Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss. In case you haven’t read the book or seen the movie I’ll briefly summarize. Horton is an elephant who upon hearing a voice calling for help discovers a town of people called Whos living on a small speck of dust. He carefully protects the Whos from the other jungle animals by carrying it around on top of a clover. The Whos desperately call out from their tiny town “We are here! We are here! We are here!” and yet no can hear them until one little boy finally adds his voice. One great “Yop!” Finally the jungle animals realize that yes, truly there are people living on that speck. Horton becomes a hero.
So what does this have to do with public education? The parallels are probably pretty easy to spot. The Whos are our children, just trying to live their lives and make their way in the world. I suppose even the teachers are Whos because so often we go unheard in our quest for justice. As we face this huge budget crisis I am watching everything our community has built crumble, just as the town crumbled around the Whos. Our foreign language programs, decades old, eliminated. Full day kindergarten, fought for and envied in many districts, slashed. Our ESL program, serving upwards of 15 different languages, cut. And classroom teachers forced to take on 5-10 more students in classrooms where extremely diverse needs are already almost impossible to meet.
Who are the jungle animals? They are not difficult to pick out. Politicians, district CEO, nay Sayers in our own communities who know nothing of the workings of classrooms and schools. They make their decisions and call for measures that are seemingly unaware of the little people, the invisible ones, just trying to hold it all together.
Yesterday afternoon I marched with 4000 teachers, students, parents and community members demanding to be heard. We stopped traffic and refused to be ignored as we encircled City Hall and then marched back to CPS headquarters. It was invigorating and hopeful and yet the news coverage was minimal. Were we heard? Does anyone hear us?
Who is our Horton? But more importantly as we shout “We are here! We are here! We are here!” who is our missing voice?
