“Please keep me in your prayers. I am not ready to die. There are still many things I want to do. Please pray for my kids. They are amazing kids, but I am very worried about them right now.”
-Michelle Suire, elementary school teacher, died December 22, 2020.

Navigating

Click on a face to read more about the deceased; I included obituaries when available, and, when I could not find an obituary, included information from local news.

Click the X button in the top-right corner to return to the main page, not your browser’s back button.

Purpose

This page remembers the teachers, administrators, cooks, secretaries, bus drivers, and other K-12 personnel who died during the COVID-19 pandemic after they had returned to school. As a nation and a people, we just didn’t want to make the effort and spend the money required to protect them. Sacrificed, they should not be forgotten.

Loss reverberates like an earthquake: damage is often deep, profound, and structural. It’s always present, if invisible. Grief remains for the many students and colleagues who knew these victims, and workshops cannot counsel it away.

Healthcare Inequality

Many of these people died because they were not afforded timely and responsive healthcare services. COVID-19 is a lethal disease, and anyone experiencing serious symptoms like shortness of breath should be hospitalized. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

When diagnosed with COVID-19, President Trump, who spread more misinformation about the disease than literally anyone else, was treated at Walter Reed. His personal “lawyer,” the disgraceful Rudy Giuliani, boasted that he had been hospitalized for COVID-19 only because he was so famous. And Trump’s on again, off again adviser, Chris Christie, received “precautionary” hospital admission for his own COVID-19 diagnosis. All three obtained experimental, rare, and expensive treatments unavailable to the American public.

The educators on this website–those who welcome in, teach, and care for our very children–were not granted this level of care. Not only were they not admitted for “precautionary reasons,” sometimes they were turned away altogether. Take, as just one example, Clarkster Toure, a deceased school bus driver from Texas, who had to visit the hospital three times before its staff admitted her.

Then there are those for whom hospitalization came too late, and we’re left wondering what might have happened had our leadership consistently communicated the severity of this disease. Melinda Roellig died in the ambulance en route to the hospital; Greg Williams died shortly after arriving. Tom Barnabo was sent home from the hospital to recover–and ultimately to die.

We know that COVID-19 kills people who don’t receive emergency and supportive care, and we have built a system in which people cannot be guaranteed to receive emergency and supportive care–unless they are establishment-level powerful.

This is the America we have made, and these are its many faces.

A Note on “Underlying Conditions”

A pandemic is disquieting; a thoughtless and aggressive virus can kill anyone. Rather than confront this uncomfortable truth, we fault the deceased.

We have managed to hand-wave away COVID-19 deaths: the victims are old; and when they’re not old, they’re sick; and when they’re not sick, they’re obese. There’s something wrong with them. In one shameless interview I will not link, a superintendent mentioned that the deceased teacher’s diabetes put her at a higher risk of COVID-19 complications, as if to say, don’t blame us, she was diabetic after all–that is, she was defective, broken. I wonder why the superintendent, being so knowledgeable about his staff’s health, insisted on having those most at risk for COVID-19 complications report to work. But I’m sure he and his school board know best.

In an interview which I will link, since it quotes a health department spokesperson and not a school employee, we’re told that the deceased was not a teacher (so she doesn’t really matter), that the department of health has “no indication” that she acquired the virus in school (right), that the deceased had no student contacts (so don’t worry), and that the deceased had “very significant underlying medical conditions” (it’s her fault for dying). Quite the messaging for one brief, prepared statement.

I won’t bother explaining that around half of Americans have a diagnosed/visible “underlying condition,” and that many more of us have conditions about which we are ignorant, so very few of us are “safe” from the virus. I’ll remark, instead, that these were all people, regardless of their “underlying conditions,” and the mark of a successful society is its compassion for all of its people, especially its vulnerable. Successful societies do not callously dismiss the dead and consign at-risk populations to hopeless, isolating confinement so that the “healthy” can freely participate in a culture of convenience and illusory personal freedoms. A society which does that is as sick as its citizens.

Why this page?

Because I wanted to make it and put the faces front and center alongside the obituaries. I recommend you take the time to read them and remember that these were people with families and interests and friends and real impact. The obituaries help with that. Consider donating to the charities and funds mentioned in them, too.

And I won’t take this page down; I don’t believe other such memorial sites will last.