It is discouraging that there is a loud group of parents (and some teachers) that are insisting upon f2f instruction in my district. They find some medical “expert” that says children should be in school, and they won’t hear of anything else. But their strident insistence upon f2f school will not win out in my area, as it is surging. And it’s not a small town.
Public health concerns outweigh all, and public health must consider the community. The community isn’t just children in school. They are not more important than the rest of the community.
This week and next we will find out (in my district and the surrounding ones) which way school will go. I predict it will be fulltime online, as it should be. The virus is not controlled in my area.
Doctors, nurses, cna’s have pledged to save lives, like firefighters. And STILL it should be seen as an outrage that theyre not given the proper equipment to do their job.
Grocery store employees and all other essential workers, should have special protection. Otherwise “essential” becomes novlang for “expandable”.
All in all, kids want to go back to school, teachers want to go back to school, parents want schools to be open - the issue isnt what we want but what we can do to make that happen and if it’s even possible.
I dont think we need to wait till there are zero risks but there should be careful calibration according to different risk levels. I dont know what that is but what is a community willing to take - 3 teacher deaths? One child? A dozen*? Community spread through kids so that many parents or grandparents die? Debilitating consequences for a dozen kids? A thousand? Half an elementary school’s teachers infected? Those aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re real, current dilemma for K12.
What do you do to ensure child abuse doesn’t go undetected? How do you ensure all kids have one proper meal a day if the school cafeteria isn’t open as part of a school day -can the cafeteria be open in shifts at 50% capacity? Who will work there, in what conditions?
I really think there can only be answers based on local conditions and parents’ risk tolerance. I dont see how country-wide can apply. The situation in LA isn’t the situation in Walla-Walla.
Schools could re open but its going to cost a lot of money.
Are we willing to invest? Can schools get bailout money on the scale of various industries (or all of them ?)
This virus (and its future siblings) is to the 2020s what AlQaida was to the post 2001 world. What do we do about it?
(* I think that among the tens of thousand dead in NYC in the Spring, there were a dozen children. So, statistically insignificant, but an unbearable loss for their families and communities.)
I think that it could be practically possible for schools to open face to face safely if everyone fully complies with the measures that the epidemiologists have recommended.
I work in a hospital with a large paediatric section which hasn’t stopped running since the pandemic hit in March and they have controlled the virus pretty well. But that is because everyone is militant in hygiene habits.
That is the issue. People are whining and flouting compliance with the mildest of rules and personal discomforts. I have worn a mask 8 hours a day, celebrated my birthday by zoom party, only socialised during lunch breaks in socially distanced staff areas. That is what Is required to keep a f2f business open. If you don’t want to follow those measures, the business shuts.
The issue of “what about childcare”? came up at the school district meeting. The response was basically that the school district is responsible for education, not childcare, so figure it out.
Our district will have no plans revealed until beginning of August.
I think in many of these discussions we act like we can have zero deaths and no covid exposure if we keep schools shut down. With schools not in session, many of the younger students will be in day care settings. What about the exposure of students and teachers there? Those kids are still going home to possibly compromised family members.
Many states have reopened in various degrees. Way more parents are working outside the home again. I don’t think the same number of parents are going to have the luxury of working from home in the Fall. Day cares and summer camps are open. We are hearing in the news about the problems but not the successes. Our Y camps have been open since the beginning of June. 7 weeks later our community cases, positivity rate, hospitalizations, and deaths continue to trend down. No camp covid clusters.
I firmly believe that schools need to mandate mask wearing, have adequate ppe for staff, proper sanitizing, proper ventilation and distancing. Economically that is a challenge for some districts so redirect funds to those schools. It’s going to be expensive but education is essential. If the gov can bail out businesses, they can help the schools. I think the unions all or nothing demands for an entire state are ridiculous.
And it’s not just healthcare and public safety workers that have been working this whole time. What about all the folks in manufacturing plants supplying PPEs, toilet paper, trash bags, house cleaning supplies? The utility workers? I’ve read articles that 70% of the work force was considered essential. Disproportionately impacting lower income families who couldn’t work from home.
Kids die every year from all kinds of things - violence, disease, accidents. Schools all over country have a process in place when tragedy strikes and a student or teacher dies. In our circle, we had two childhood cancer deaths, a suicide, and a fatal car accident. D’s first year of college there were four student deaths - an athlete with an unknown congenital heart problem that died walking home from post workout, a cancer death, and two suicides. My point is that we never have a zero beta for deaths. We need to stop making policy decisions based on that unrealistic assumption.
There is no easy answer but it seems to me that some districts have basically given up and aren’t even trying to get kids back in the classroom. That’s unacceptable.
Healthcare workers have pledged to save lives. But, not at the expense of their own.
I agree wholeheartedly there should be a careful calibration according to different risk levels. Only areas with controlled growth (R naught less than 1.0, strong tracking & tracing in place) should consider f2f. Masks for students (in addition to teachers) is a must. It’s completely irresponsible to send kids to school without a mask mandate for all. (Excepting a subset of extreme special needs students who cannot tolerate a mask)
I guess my point is, there will never be a 0% risk. Covid-19 is here to stay. Education is essential and the goal should be f2f, WHEN the risk within that community is controlled. There should be clearly defined thresholds of spread within a community for opening and closing f2f. But waiting for ZERO cases in a county for two weeks before opening is not a reasonable expectation.
Life is not without risk. That being said, we can be wise about reducing risks. Teachers can wear masks, they can use hand sanitizer which btw are both readily available in bulk. I’d bet money parents will donate these items if asked. Buying and installing ventilators which don’t recirculate bad air is difficult but worth exploring.
Many people are at risk. Actually, is anyone NOT at risk? Even people who both work from home like me and my spouse go food shopping on occasion and get gas.
We cannot expect the world to stop until we have a vaccine. There are very few cases of young kids with Covid.
My dad was on a flight crew prior to working underground. A stickler for safety and doing things the right way. I lost count of stories about unsafe working conditions and violations that were overlooked. OSHA can’t be everywhere and catch everything. Not saying it’s right, just the way it is. Just like the FDA and other agencies.
Exactly. That’s the dilemma. The only zero risk strategy is for everyone stay home. How does that work? Eventually you have to work to get paid, unless it’s UBI for everyone and that has consequences too.
I wish I could stay home till there was a vaccine but don’t think my patients that want to come in would love that idea. Now people are coming in with test results in hand. Kids are testing positive in summer classes. I had to wait for a negative result so I could see the teacher of this class. She had to email me the result or I wouldn’t see her. It’s stressing everyone out, trust me.
As far as teachers unions. I was a union rep about 10 years ago(maybe earlier) I am part of OPEIU. Medical division. I even negotiated contracts for workers to get better benefits. I am not a lawyer.
We had the teachers union come and talk to us. I am not rah, rah union. My sister is a rep for mail carriers. She is… Lol…
Anyway, Maybe it’s a Chicago thing but the head of the teachers union, who was on national TV back then, never once talked about the children in these closed meetings. It wasn’t about getting books or materials. What you see on TV is not the whole reality. Talk it with a grain of salt is all I can say.
It’s not that we should all stay home. It’s about doing things smartly in the face of highly contagious virus. Life won’t be normal for a while. Short-term sacrifices are necessary for the longer term. If a task can be accomplished remotely, even if not optimally, why risk someone’s life and help the virus propagate? We know, from experiences in many countries including our own, social distancing and wearing masks work. But we also know for certain some people among us are incapable of, unwilling to be, or don’t believe in following these simple rules that help contain the virus. These people, unfortunately, are present everywhere and they’ll be in schools too.
I think the problem is that K-12 needs money and time to plan for remote learning. Many districts don’t have the budget and teachers weren’t asked to plan for remote classes so didn’t use their time this summer to get ready for that. I didn’t see a push anywhere for K-12 back in June to start working on this because none of us thought the virus would still be spiking now. Back in June, we still saw stories about how the curve would lower by end of summer and then maybe spike during flu season again. This is the info schools were using when they started planning for K-12 and, now that things haven’t gone that way, they are caught flat footed. A few districts (some in CA and other states) have decided to push off the school year for a month to try to get a grip on how remote would look.
No news here yet. We think we will see a plan via email today but won’t be voted on until Thursday.
Interesting read in the The Atlantic. Schools that will return to campus are setting up to blame the students for outbreaks.
According to a soon-to-be-published study led by Yale and Harvard researchers, outbreak control would require testing all students every two or three days—a tall order when the federal government is blocking the funding needed to do so.
It’s a pandemic. Teachers should not be expected to risk their lives - their job can be done remotely. It may cause issues for many families, but it can be done. In some areas, maybe going f2f is practical - in others, not so much.
Comparing covid deaths to accidents, cancer, suicide - come on, it makes no sense.
It’s a complex issue for sure, but people being stupid and refusing to follow basic instructions has made it so much worse.
Some schools actually are testing twice a week. I’ll be curious to see if it works. They have the tests and the lab capacity all set up. There have been a few posts here worried about how schools will live up to their testing goals but many schools aren’t depending on the same batch of tests or labs that the community is. They have their own systems.
If we have to shut down schools, then let’s at least be honest about it and shut them down completely, not pretend some type of online education is a substitute. Other countries do not pretend online education is appropriate.
Even the students here at the nation’s top colleges, who are among the most highly motivated, capable and mature in their cohort, found online education to be a disaster, so can we stop pretending it is going to work for the younger, less motivated and academically diverse K12 set? Schools can shut down for 3 or 6 or 9 months, and we can acknowledge the loss that will occur, and parents can make childcare arrangements.
Smaller schools like Colby can implement twice a week testing. Not so much at the larger schools.
It could add up this fall to 85,000 tests for Colby at a cost of as much as $2.5 million.
“The goal is to have a large supply of tests out there,” said Greg Hartman, chief operating officer and senior vice president of Texas A&M’s health science center. In a perfect world, he said, the system would test everyone regularly. “But it’s super-expensive, obviously. Too expensive to do that across the board.” Hartman said Curative’s charge is $150 per test. That adds up to $2.25 million per month.