As

many teachers express fear and concern about returning to the classroom this
fall, one Florida educator is using an unusual method to get her point across.

Whitney Reddick, a 33-year-old special education teacher in Jacksonville, Fla., made
headlines last week when she wrote her own mock obituary and posted it to
Facebook in protest of the Duval County Public Schools’ reopening amid the
coronavirus pandemic.

“With profound sadness, I announce the passing of Whitney Leigh Reddick. A loving
and devoted teacher, mother, daughter, wife, aunt and friend to all whose lives she
touched, on August 7th, 2020,” wrote Reddick. “She left us while alone in isolation
and on a ventilator at a Duval County hospital in Jacksonville, Florida. She was in her
33rd year.”

While the idea of writing her own obituary felt “morbid,” Reddick tells Yahoo Life
that after speaking in person at a board meeting, she felt the need to make a
statement in a new way.

“There was a board meeting this past Tuesday that you could go to and give a public
comment, and I thought ‘what would I say?’ The last time I went, I definitely said
what I felt. I was reading the news Monday night, and I couldn’t sleep, and I saw this
article about some teachers in a state up north that had written their obituaries and
sent them to their governor,” says Reddick. “I was taken aback and just thought
‘wow, that’s a lot.’”

But the teachers’ message strongly resonated with Reddick.