As a teacher for 2nd grade bilingual at John Martinez School in New Haven, Jennifer Gonzalez doesn’t get many questions about anti-racism from her students. She does, however, often have to answer questions from her kids about why their families were exposed to COVID.

“They’ll just say how sad they were or scared that someone at home was sick over the summer and that they were sad that they couldn’t see their friends. That’s just how they frame their feelings in that situation.” She relates. “Sesame street had lots of good activities in Spanish for my kids. So just having those activities and that time together helped them a lot.”

Given that all of her students are English learner students, Gonzalez has long prioritized having activities such as these available in Spanish. Since before the pandemic Gonzalez has advocated for broader district attention to implementing support programs for English learner students, programs that include the students’ families.

“A lot of the work that we were advocating the district to push for—they put it on the back burner. But now that people have settled… they’ve started to work on it again because some of us teachers have been vocal about it.” This renewed effort, however, has brought with it new priorities. Many initiatives to support English learner students now center around providing resources for parents on how to connect their kids to class, or ensuring kids receive paper materials in Spanish if they can’t access quality wifi everyday. 

Despite these difficulties, Gonzalez has also noticed a stronger interest from parents in the classroom and curriculum.

Going forward, Gonzalez hopes to take advantage of this engagement to create more opportunities for families to participate in the education of their children. She’s already started with one: parents and their kids can send videos of themselves performing a dance taught by Gonzalez as part of celebrating Hispanic Heritage month. 

“Now more than ever we have to include the parents.”