Charity Freeman was absent from school picketing during the first days of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike, but she had a note from the Computer Science Teachers Association.

The Kenwood Academy High School teacher is one of ten educators nationwide chosen by the professional association to be equity fellows, and October 18, the second day of the strike, was the select group’s first face-to-face meeting in a yearlong program to help develop better computer science teaching practices. Back in Chicago, at a rally of several hundred strikers and supporters in front of Kenwood, Freeman said she felt honored by the fellowship.

“But that doesn’t make a difference if we’re teaching computer science classes that don’t have enough computers for students,” she told the crowd. “It doesn’t make a difference if, when my students are struggling, they don’t have a social worker to go to. It doesn’t make a difference if we’ve got hundreds of students for every school counselor. It doesn’t make a difference if we can only send our students to the nurse’s office on Thursday.”