Voices: Utah’s children are divided. It’s up to us — the adults — to fix it.

I am not a stranger to Utah schools; I am a once-product, now perpetrator of them.

My parents moved us to the Avenues the summer before I started kindergarten at Ensign Elementary in Mrs. Rich’s class. Last I checked, my maiden name is still engraved on a plaque in the communications building at the University of Utah, recognizing excellence in forensics during my undergraduate years. For better and worse, I was shaped by local classrooms. Later, I taught in four countries across three continents, where I witnessed what education can be when prioritized and administered with dignity, curiosity and connection, rather than with politics.

At Springville Jr. High, students recently shared in an op-ed for The Salt Lake Tribune that political divisions are fracturing friendships and silencing voices.

“Each of us has had to think twice before speaking up in class,” they wrote.

But long before this headline, I saw division up close. Growing up in the upper Avenues, the great divide of my youth was Latter-day Saint versus non-LDS. At West High, it was the Extended Learning Program and International Baccalaureate program students versus everyone else. As a teacher at East High, I successfully taught students with mutual restraining orders in the same period, separated by a strip of purple duct tape. Administrators and school resource officers asked me more than once to de-escalate gang violence because they were too afraid or too disconnected to speak directly to the teenagers involved.

I watched a white student throw a Nazi salute during the peak of Andrew Tate’s online influence — only to have my students of color, the intended recipients of that hatred, step in front of me to protect that student when I saw red.

Division itself is not the problem. Our children are often more capable of handling conflict with nuance, courage and compassion than we are. The problem is us. We model fear instead of dialogue, control instead of trust. We’ve taught our children — not through lessons but through example — that disagreement should be avoided, weaponized or silenced.

I say this not as an outsider, but as both a child of this state and a veteran educator with more than 15 years of experience. I hold a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction and am finishing a doctorate in trauma-informed educational practices. I have seen classrooms abroad where belonging and collective responsibility were a birthright, not a privilege. I have seen communities embrace the messiness of disagreement without turning it into a battlefield. And I have seen children thrive when adults choose nuance, empathy and care over fear and control.

If we are serious about supporting our children, we must re-center our schools on the truth that every child’s humanity matters far more than winning a political point or being “right.” Belonging, not conformity, must be the foundation of learning. Civic education should be reclaimed as a practice in curiosity and courage, not an exercise in preaching or silencing. Adults — whether policymakers, parents or educators — must refuse to use children as pawns in culture wars. And we must invest in what works: mental health supports, multilingual programs and equity-driven systems that honor the diversity and dignity of every student, regardless of whether we love or loathe their parents.

None of this is impossible. But it requires choosing care over control and viewing our children’s futures as a shared promise we are all obligated to uphold. Radical empathy demands that we see every child — not just the ones who look like ours, worship like ours or vote like we imagine ours will — as part of our community.

Our children deserve better than this. They deserve classrooms filled with kindness, curiosity, questioning, mistakes, success, failure and growth — not the fallout of adult cowardice. These harms didn’t happen by accident, and they won’t be healed by silence or by feigned surprise over the current rubble. If we won’t show up for them, who will?

I left teaching this May, pivoting away from the classroom. My last message to my students, one I would echo to the students from Springville and across the state, was this:

“I’m so sorry. For you, I would have stayed forever, but adults are terrible. I am sorry that not every adult was fighting just as hard for you. I am deeply sorry that we — the school, the district, the state, and, sadly, now the federal government — failed you so spectacularly. You deserved better.”

Shame on all of us, because they absolutely deserve so much better. We broke it, we failed and that is precisely why we, the adults, must acknowledge what we’ve done and come together to fix it.

Lucy Cortez is a veteran educator, former instructional coach and administrator, and current doctoral candidate in trauma-informed educational practices. She has more than 15 years of teaching experience in the United States, South Korea, Russia and Argentina. She is an advocate for equitable education for migrant and marginalized students.

The Salt Lake Tribune is committed to creating a space where Utahns can share ideas, perspectives and solutions that move our state forward. We rely on your insight to do this. Find out how to share your opinion here, and email us at voices@sltrib.com.