I don’t live for advocacy, and I don’t work in education.

But I have one.

Yet, even if I didn’t, I would still be able to tell you that the current state of public education in Hillsborough County is effing scary as hell.

Addison Davis, current superintendent for Hillsborough County Public Schools, you say, and I quote,

“We are taking great care to make these decisions in a way that protects the classroom experience for our students and minimizes the impact on our teaching staff.”

Do you know who best knows how to protect the classroom experience?

The ones inside of it. The teachers.

And they are telling you that you’re going about this ALL wrong.

So why won’t you listen?

You state that you aim to minimize the impact on teaching staff, but explain to me how not filling 424 vacant positions for the 2020-21 school year AND eliminating 333 ADDITIONAL jobs currently filled is minimizing any sort of impact on teaching staff?

And I have to wonder where your commonsense is? And I mean that in the least unkind way possible. I know your job isn’t easy; I can only imagine the stress and pressures you are under, but there are a lot of us, parents, teachers, and students, who feel lots of stress and pressures too, but we don’t get paid what you do.

Hillsborough County should thank its lucky stars is has so freakin many residents who care so god damn much about the county’s public education system -- who make next to nothing working for it, or make nothing at all fighting for it -- who are willing to lose our ever-loving minds in the name of advocating that this shiitake gets done (and continues to get done) right.

And for gosh sakes, in the name of our kids!

It’s a shame that the young people you serve and the teachers who regularly serve up to them academic, life, and moral lessons and support, feel so dejected by and dissatisfied with you and the entire school board.

I urge you,

beg you,

implore you to reevaluate your recent decision to basically say to hell with 757 humans that our kids need.

That my kids need.

As a parent, I’m ashamed of you and this school board.

As a human, well, same.

We’re living in a freakin pandemic plagued world Mr. Davis and what your students, families, and teachers need now more than ever is your support, as evidenced by your willingness to stop the cutting those in the classroom, figuring out the funding, and listening to and mandating positive change that is wanted by your employees, students, and families like less testing and more “what do you see working in classroom and how can I help it work better for you?”

There’s what’s right during a pandemic, and there’s what’s right just cause it’s right no matter what the state of the world is.

Y’all are just plain wrong.

Pandemic or no pandemic.

And,

if you can’t see that,

you need a teacher to school you on moral decency and common sense.

Oh, wait. That teacher probably got let go already.

Dang, it.