(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Teachers held us together during the worst of the pandemic. They deserve a union. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-06 As an emergency department nurse, I can tell you from firsthand experience that the last few years have been rough. I’ve written about it time and time again here. Written predictions as far back as 2020 that turned out to be distressingly accurate. And even so, everything I’ve written just… lacks something compared to what it was like in real time. Particularly with what we went through here, in my rural central Virginia community. The Charlottesville “metropolitan” area is what anchors a huge swath of the Commonwealth, both by population and by area. People come here to work, to shop, to travel… and to seek medical care. Particularly over the last twenty years, as primary care services and critical access hospitals have been systematically defunded and closed, the Charlottesville area has become responsible for heavier and heavier patient loads of people with nowhere else to go. This became critically evident during the height of the pandemic. As the healthcare systems in Southside, Southwest, and the Shenandoah Valley began to collapse under the weight of unmitigated COVID-19 spread, they looked to us- to our community- to save them. And we did… but at enormous cost. Without the people of our community and the sacrifices they made, we simply would not have been able to hold on. And though I spent several years of my life as an elementary and middle school nurse with the Albemarle County Public School district, the kinship I feel for my colleagues in public education is unlike anything I've ever felt during my twelve years as an ER Nurse. As both nurses’ and teachers’ roles in service to the community were increasingly politicized beyond our control, we stood our ground, knowing that what we were doing was the right thing to do. But the sacrifices our public school employees made; the way they dropped everything to reorganize overnight and move to remote teaching? The way they showed up for our students and families, and kept showing up even when the support promised by the Federal government never did? It's what made the difference in our most desperate times; times I still have trouble describing aloud. There's no question in my mind about it. There is also no question in my mind that this is the exact reason that teachers have become the public enemy of the Republican party. The GOP Political War machine is a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. They know exactly how much teachers do for our communities, and they know the role that our public schools play in most peoples’ hearts and minds. Great teachers and great schools make great communities, and if you want to undermine that, if you want to break things from political gain, you have to attack that idea. Not directly, but from an “angle”, to try and mask your disingenuous motive. But that means we need to give teachers the right to stand up and fight for themselves. And that means we need to give them the right to collectively bargain for themselves and their profession. This isn’t easy to do in Virginia, as we’re a “right to work” state, “right to work” having about the same bearing on reality as the phrase- okay, well, I had a vulgar joke here about anti-unionization efforts that, while totally accurate, my campaign manager says I’m not allowed to say. Alas. Needless to say it’s bad, and it makes things a lot tougher to manage here in Virginia. But tougher doesn’t mean impossible. And if the last few years have given us any indication, teachers did the impossible. They went above and beyond in a way we would never have asked them to just a few short years ago. And they did it unhesitatingly and unapologetically. They’ve always deserved a union, but never has that been more clear than now. They deserve legislators and representatives who will do the same for them. Right here in my home of Albemarle County, our public school board will soon have the opportunity to voting on whether or not to move forward on collective bargaining for our school district. Hopefully sooner rather than later. And when I tell you that our teachers, educators, and public school employees have more than earned that right, I'm not saying it as a hypothetical. I saw personally how bad things got. The human cost that was paid in communities across Virginia and across the country. It could have been so much worse here- and they made sure it wasn't. The entire premise for my campaign for the Virginia House of Delegates is predicated on the fact that, when asked to lead, follow, or get out of the way, we always lead. That even though this is a rural district, we have to be boldly progressive. We have to show other people how it’s done and how to DO it. And this should be no different. Teachers deserve unions. Thank you. 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