Anita Rivera

This interview took place on September 21, 2021 and was recorded remotely via Zoom. Anita Rivera is an English, ESL, and AVID educator at Fox Lane High School in Bedford, NY. In this interview, Anita shared about returning to fully in-person teaching on September 1st. She has several English Language Arts Classes and AVID students. She talked about the ways in which she has integrated new technologies into her classroom, and expressed some concerns about screen-time, while also appreciating some aspects of having more digital tools, both for her and her students' sake. Equity issues came up several times in the conversation, as she teaches in a diverse school district and has many students and parents who are not English speakers. Anita discussed the parent-teacher conferences held in-person at the school this year, and how both the physical location and COVID precautions (only one person, no child care provided) would disadvantage certain community members who needed the other parent, a child to come with them to translate, or child care for younger kids. She also described an incident with Spanish-speaking students and a white teacher who told them they couldn't speak Spanish in the classroom. She talked about speaking up for her students and teaching them to do the same for each other. Anita shared about how decisions were made in her school district and the contrast between last year, when they had explicitly been creating task forces and asking for teacher feedback, and this year, in which decisions were made with little to no input from teachers. She described her school's overall embrace of vaccinations and masking and also shared some conversations she had with a class about vaccinations.