You can always spot a teacher at a conference. It’s in the vibrant personalities and the unapologetically loud voices echoing through the lobby. It’s the armloads of “really important stuff” including laptops, oversized water bottles, a stash of snacks that could last a week, and handfuls of “fabulous freebies.” It’s the heavy backpacks and the lanyards hanging like medals around their necks.

I know this because I am one. And yet, walking these halls sans lanyard and without a schedule to keep, I was seeing teachers with fresh eyes.

I’m an English teacher, but I had no business being at the SHAPE National Health and PE Conference in Kansas City. I was there as a “plus-one,” supporting my husband as he was recognized for his work in the field. Because I wasn’t tethered to a schedule or a session, I had a rare luxury: I could simply watch. And what I saw was profound.

My husband is a health teacher, and the assumptions that follow Health and PE teachers are as tired as they are wrong. Health is seen as optional, a soft subject we can quietly cut when budgets get tight. PE teachers are assumed to be glorified referees, rolling a ball out and calling it a curriculum. But sitting in that lobby, watching these educators between presentations, at lunch, and at evening events, I saw the truth. They could not have been more wrong.

They weren’t just exchanging pleasantries; they were exchanging strategies for reaching the kids who are hardest to reach, talking about how to build confidence in kids who think they aren’t athletic, debating which standards to make sure they hit with their limited class time, and being remarkably honest about what isn’t working in their classrooms.

I saw the invisible labor, the hours spent prepping, planning, and creating powerful presentations to share with fellow educators, often late into the night. I saw teachers huddled over phones, FaceTiming and texting coworkers back home, doing their best to share every session with colleagues who couldn’t afford to be there. They were determined that no one be left behind.

And all of it, every late night, every shared resource, every FaceTime call, comes back to one thing: the students.

Health is the infrastructure of all learning. If a student isn’t physically, mentally, and socially well, they cannot analyze a sonnet, solve for x, or complete that experiment. We treat wellness as a luxury, but it is the floor upon which every other subject stands. To dismiss PE and Health is to dismiss a child’s foundation. We aren’t just cutting a class; we are shortchanging the adults they are meant to become.

Think of how many adult struggles revolve around physical health, mental health, or the inability to navigate relationships and stress. We aren’t just teaching kids to play; we are giving them the tools to survive their own adulthood, to carry wellness forward so they don’t spend decades trying to learn what they needed at twelve. This is what health and PE classes actually are.

As I listened to the brilliance in the room, my perspective sharpened into something uncomfortable. The inequity in our education system isn’t just about who gets to attend a conference. It runs much deeper.

Across this country, the resources a school has, the programs it can offer, the staff it can support, are largely determined by the neighborhood the school sits in. A child in a well-funded district gets fully staffed PE and robust health programming, updated facilities, and teachers who are regularly sent to professional development. A child across town may have none of that. The zip code a child is born into should not determine the quality of their education, and yet it does, every single day.

And then, on top of that structural inequity, we ask teachers who are already stretched thin to dig into their own pockets for the chance to grow. I met teachers who had spent months writing grants just to cover a flight. I met others who dipped into their personal savings to pay for a hotel room and a registration fee, simply because they believe in their students that much.

As a society, we claim to value education, but claiming it and funding it are two very different things. We rely on the passion of teachers to fill the fiscal gaps, and then we hand them the bill.

The educators I saw in Kansas City were incredible, not because they sacrificed their own paychecks to be there, but because of the fire they brought to their practice despite a system that often fails to invest in them. There is a sacred kind of magic that happens when teachers get together. It’s in the scribbled notes on napkins and the late-night brainstorming in hotel lobbies. It’s the collective realization that they are not alone in the struggle.

Every child deserves an educator who has been filled up by their peers. Every teacher deserves to be in the room where the magic happens, without having to pay for the door key themselves.

And when we fund that room, we aren’t just funding three days in Kansas City. We are funding everything that follows: the Zoom calls, the shared Google drives full of resources, the requests for feedback on a new lesson, the group chats that light up at 10pm with a question about what’s working. The conference is a spark. The community it builds keeps burning.

We need to fund these conferences fully. We need to treat Health and PE as the essential academic pillars they are. We need to stop asking the people most committed to our children’s futures to personally subsidize their own ability to serve them. And we need to reckon with the fact that until every school, in every neighborhood, has equal access to strong programs and supported teachers, we are not actually valuing education. We are just saying we do.

The lobby of that Kansas City hotel was full of the best kind of people. I just wish the system they work within was worthy of them.

This microblog post was a featured post in #slowchathealth’s #microblogmonth event. You can search for all of the featured posts here. Please do follow each of the outstanding contributors on social media (including, Ann Hagedorn the author of this post) and consider writing a microblog post of your own to be shared with the global audience of slowchathealth.com

Pair this post with:

Advocate Like a Physical Education Teacher by Dr. Lisa Paulson

This Is Not Your Parents’ Health Class by Andy Milne

Positive Phone Calls Home by Mike Chamberlain

The Transformation by Ann Hagedorn