Hello, my name is Melany Spiehs and I teach pre-school at Spring Lake elementary in beautiful South Omaha.
At 16 years old, I knew I wanted to be an educator. While participating in a human service academy at Burke High school I had the opportunity to shadow professionals working in human service careers. It was in a second-grade classroom at Conestoga elementary that I discerned a sense of peace and purpose. I was paired with a child named Dante whose face and brown eyes are still fixed in my memory. I was to be Dante’s reading and writing tutor for several weeks and he smiled as soon as I walked in the door each day. I wonder if that second-grade teacher knew that this child would teach me more about resilience and hope than I could teach him.
Fast forward to my first year as an educator in 2004. I immediately realized that educators are expected to do far more than teach reading and math. That first year I wore the hats of a caregiver, nurse, counselor, mental health consultant, IT technician, custodian, social worker and educator. As educators, we know that there is a hierarchy of needs that need to be met before a child can learn. Unfortunately, our systems in the US do not place value in meeting these needs especially for children of the global majority. Much of the responsibility for meeting the needs of children and their families is placed on schools and teachers.
Children in this country are often viewed as second class citizens and are denied basic human rights among these being the right to food and shelter, the right to play, the right to education, and freedom of thought and expression.
Reggio Emilia, a city in Northern Italy understands the importance of honoring children. Desolated by their opposition to Hitler’s fascist regime during World War II, the village chose to start their recovery by rebuilding and reimagining their school. In order to assure that future generations would not tolerate injustice they followed the guiding principles that children are capable, collaborative, communicators within their communities. This village understood that investing in this form of education is investing in long lasting freedom and democracy.
Our country is currently fighting a war for freedom and democracy and although we are still on fire, someday, out of ashes, we get to choose how we will rebuild. My hope is that, like Reggio, we will also start with education and look toward our children…children of every color, culture and zip code and practice observing and listening. I hope we will value all children’s ideas, opinions, questions and feelings. I wonder what could happen if we start viewing every child as a current explorer, scientist, mathematician, reader, writer, thinker and leader. I wonder what we could learn if we stopped suffocating our children with one right answer and started asking them more questions.
The start of this school year is full of unknowns, and many unanswered questions. Instead of greeting our students with smiles and hugs we will greet them with phone calls and video links. We will search for new ways to connect and build relationships with our students and their families. We will adapt as we always have and find new ways to meet the needs of our school community. But we will not do this alone. We will depend on the support of our fellow educators, our administrators, our families, our community, our legislators and most importantly…our students. As we start another school year that looks quite different from the usual may we remember the words of Carlina Rinaldil, President of Reggio Children in Italy, “Children are citizens of today and the great researchers of the meaning of life.”
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