Holding.

I'm reading "How San Francisco Renamed Its Schools" in The New Yorker. Isaac Chotiner interviews the head of the San Francisco Board of Education, Gabriela López, whose evasive style of speech would be comical if it weren't so sad:

The mayor of the city, London Breed, released a statement saying, “What I cannot understand is why the school board is advancing a plan of all these schools renamed by April when there isn’t a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then.” What’s your response to that? 

I know that when it comes to schools, any opportunity to cause further division is what the mayor has contributed to. And it’s unfortunate because we need to be clear about where we are in this process. What she’s talking about as far as reopening schools, that is what we’re working on every single day. The fact that people are pointing to “We don’t have a plan”—that’s completely false. 

I read that you said, “They are learning more about their families and their culture spending more time with each other. They’re just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure. And the loss is a comparison to a time when we were in a different space.” Do you want to expand on that? 

I do, because that’s directly connected to work that I’ve done in my own classroom. I understand that distance learning is not at all where we want to be. I think everybody can agree with that. The work that I do in my own classroom directly connects with family involvement. When I was a teacher, I visited every single student’s home. We collaborated, we worked together, we brought in each other’s cultures in this work, because I have the understanding that part of a student’s growth is the incorporation of their broader outside community. And that includes their family. So what I was trying to point to was this opportunity that we have right now, that students are learning more about their own cultures, spending time with their families, but it’s not to diminish that it’s during a time where there’s a lot of struggle. And it’s also to show that the school district has provided so many resources to really contribute to the parent-as-teacher model, so that they’re not feeling like they’re alone during this time. So that’s why, in a broader sense, our biggest priority is reopening schools and distance learning, because we have the understanding that not everybody wants to go back to in-person learning. And so we need to hold the learning that’s happening at home just as much as we’re holding the learning that’s happening in our school places. 

Holding?! 

What do you mean by holding? 

Holding is supporting, providing resources, professional development for our families, sending home materials, hands-on kits. When this all started, part of my work had been in actual workshops for our families to navigate the platform.

Later in the interview, López uses the word "holding" in this idiomatic way once again: "Some of the things that we’re challenging right now have been worked on for years with boards prior—we’re just holding it, and it’s our time to acknowledge it and make sure that we see it through."

Have you ever noticed this usage? It seemed completely strange to me, and the New Yorker interviewer manifested confusion. I looked it up in Urban Dictionary, but there was no definition that fit. "Holding" does have an entry, but only in the sense of possessing drugs (or money).