change – Apt. 11d

When the pandemic first hit, I sat at my computer for 12 hours a day writing blog posts, tweets, and drafts of op-eds for the editors at the top newspapers and journals. Because schools and kids are my thing, I focused on how the school closures were going to really screw up kids and derail the public education system. I have a track record of writing for some big name publications, so I assumed that an editor at one of those publications would bite.

But none did. I couldn’t find a larger audience for my op-eds. Almost all the editors ignored me. One told me that he liked my piece, but schools were less important than other issues at that time. I did publish one piece in USA Today about how special education kids would suffer without services, but that was it. At that time, anyone who worried about the impact of school closures were labeled “anti-teacher.”