Earlier in this thread @MandaJo you made comment in reference to essential services.
Schools, especially elementary and below, with students on site, really are as much of an essential service as grocery stores and hardware stores, and more of one than take-away restaurants and liquor stores. There is much evidence that adults working in those “essential” services present more risk of spread to other staff and to users of their services than there is than elementary schools do and likely than even in High Schools.
If a criteria is set that metrics are adequate to allow for take-away restaurants and liquor stores to be open, then they certainly should be adequate to allow the more essential and lower documented risks service of education to be open.
Do essential workers take on some risk? Yes. Right now I am doing many annual physicals, including lots of teens who I know have not been all that great about social distancing. Any one of them could be pre-symptomatic. Sure for the talking part we are all masked and sitting over 6 feet apart, but for the exam I am right next to them, and I do have them take down their masks and look in their throats. This is many times a day. No, an N95 is not necessary and not advised by guidelines. My surgical mask is fine. Would even an N95 make my risk zero? Also no.
I believe what I do is an essential service and that the extremely small risk I take is worth it (and given current standards likely much less risk than I take every winter).
I hope teachers appreciate how essential the service they provide is, value themselves and what they do more than they do take-away food and hardware stores, and do not demand a standard of proven almost no risk far far beyond that which other essential workers get anything like.
I am not disagreeing with any of that. But would you be doing well-child check-ups right now in Miami or Phoenix? Or would you defer those visits for the foreseeable future? If you couldn’t afford masks for your patients, would you still see them?
The type of contact students have with teachers is not really analogous to the contact people have with store workers. It’s shorter, on one hand, but on the other, it generally involves brief contact with many more people. So the exact safety requirements are different.
Teachers, right now, have no faith that the safety requirements that will make our jobs reasonably (but not perfectly) safe will be followed. They are scared masks will be optional, classes will be more crowded even than usual, hand sanitizer won’t be available, groups won’t be cohorted, etc.etc. I wouldn’t want grocery workers going back without sneeze guards or someone at the front door limiting occupancy and mandating masks.
I asked you before, and if you answered, I missed it . . .is there ANY level of community spread that you think so high, schools need to be cancelled, either to protect those in schools or just to generally reduce spread? Is there any element in the safety plans you consider non-negotiable? If I go back in the fall to 30 young adults in an room with no windows, and expect to see a total of 180 total rotating through every two days, in a city with a 15% positivity rate, is that a risk you would consider acceptable, part of being an essential worker?
I really really agree that we should keep in person school if at all possible. But I can conceive of cass where it’s not possible.
Our school district has decided to turn away from the advice of the local health authority and instead place the open/don’t open question to the parents. You know, the parents who have jobs to get to and need the free daycare; the parents of this conservative county who consistently vote to defund education. Why did the district officials do that? Because they’re afraid of getting further defunded and/or voted out of office if they don’t caress the parents’ very delicate feels.
Nobody has made any assurances to the teachers about what will happen if they are exposed. Do the teachers quarantine for 14 days? Do the students in the classroom also quarantine? Do the teachers get paid for quarantine? Will substitutes even show up KNOWING they are going into a classroom full of kids that caused another teacher to go into quarantine? Nah…screw the teachers. We don’t want to offend the parents who couldn’t be arsed to endure a single, virus-snuffing month of stay-home order. This has everything to do with money and power, and nothing to do with the kids and the oh-so-valuable teachers.
The writing is on the wall already. The school districts need to work on creating and implementing user friendly home-study programs. Problems with some people being unable to afford internet access and a computer can be solved, especially over time. Which we won’t have if we try this going back to school thing and then have to dump it and try and come up with viable home study programs. Plus, fewer kids getting shot, don’t forget that.
Yes I would be doing well exams in Miami or Phoenix right now. I certainly would not just punt them for the forseeable future. For kids under eleven the data has me convinced enough that their not wearing masks would be okay by me.
That said, yes if a standard for a specific grade and circumstance is to require masks then teachers need to be assured that they will be available. They do not need to say no go unless they get N95s (that I don’t have and should not have).
My answer remains as before: schools should likely be a Phase One item, and no way later than Phase Two.
3 feet with masks would be a minimum for HS for me and likely Middle School. Otherwise a variety of combinations of approaches would be acceptable. 30 young adults spaced at least 3 feet apart all wearing masks and teacher more than 6 feet away? (I think positivity would need to be coupled with directionality and other metrics.)
No. Phase 1 is getting past the first gate. Bars closed, large venues open with strict social distancing, encourage telework, return to work in phases … The original plan had schools in Phase Two.
Required various metrics dropping over 2 weeks. Dismissed by many because of how Trump misrepresented them, and well because if it was associated with Trump so had to be bad. Governors therefore did their own plans that didn’t need no stinkin’ gates.
Around here, the teachers do not trust the school districts at all. If the districts say they will provide protection for the teachers, the teachers assume they are lying. Because 1. They know the districts don’t have near enough money to do what’s needed, and 2. The districts have been lying to the teachers for years about other matters.
So Texas has never has never gotten past that first gate, not even close, and right now, we are accelerating in the wrong direction. So should we start school in distance learning mode? (Absent a miracle in the next few weeks). I myself am really ambivalent about it. I know these kids are hungry, lonely, maybe abused. I want them in school. But every day I hear about someone one or two steps from me that has it. I know schools don’t amplify, but I fear they still allow for more spread.
Manda_JO, I’d like your reaction to this particular paragraph from DSeid:
I hope teachers appreciate how essential the service they provide is, value themselves and what they do more than they do take-away food and hardware stores, and do not demand a standard of proven almost no risk far far beyond that which other essential workers get anything like.
Do you agree that teachers do not value themselves more than they do take-away food and hardware stores, that you and other teachers are demanding “a standard of proven [sic] almost no risk far far beyond what other essential workers get anything like [sic]”?
I really hope that when schools open, it turns out to be safe. Schools open, community transmission goes up and down unrelated to the schools, and rarely there is an outbreak related to schools, but by and large schools are fine and safe places.
What happens if schools open and outbreaks related to schools aren’t rare? Maybe they’re not every school, but they are frequent and undeniable. I hope that doesn’t happen; I want to see in the current evidence that such a result is extremely unlikely. We’ll be conducting experiments at thousands of locations around the country, and by October or November we should have a real good idea of whether or not opening schools was a good idea.
What happens if it turns out to be a bad idea, and we’re still 1+ years away from wide availability of a vaccine? I think it is necessary to plan for that contingency, just so we’re not stuck shifting to school from home in 1-2 weeks again.
"Teachers " is a very broad group, but I would say teachers are distrustful of the information they have been given. Most teachers I know desperately want to go back to work, but they perceive the situation as several orders of magnitude more dangerous than some of those other essential workers. They worry that 1) they are being lied to about the relative risk and 2) the promised steps to mitigate risk are either wildly unrealistic, or won’t actually be provided. They don’t feel listened to. They feel rushed.
Clearly Texas and multiple other states completely ignored all gates and criteria. Not sure if that means they should go back to general lock down until restart or at least to Phase 1.
Hate to steal your colorful, dramatic wordage, but ‘duck and cover’ is from the Cold War era, drills to practice ways to reduce injury from nuclear explosions at the hands of communism. I would know, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I was a student in 100s of those drills. I was an infant, of course, but I was in elementary school just the same. [going for a little levity with that last part].
I don’t know yet how to create links for a cite, but ‘duck and cover’ can be found on Wikipedia.
It was terrifying BTW to be constantly told you could be vaporized at any moment, without warning.
For tornadoes students go to an interior room or hallway, with the fewest windows and the most reinforcing walls. Grew up in Iowa, went through my share of tornado drills and actual tornadoes. I was too fascinated to be as terrified as I should have been.
Yes, and in elementary school in the 70s and 80s I was just at the tail end of the true duck and cover nuclear annihilation drills. The tornado drills (and occasional real events) were nearly identical. Move to the interior hall, down on the ground on our knees with heads down and our hands clasped over our necks. Probably the right move if broken glass will be flying around the exterior classrooms, but is it worth the virus transmission risk just to practice? Maybe, everybody is still and quiet.
…right, where they duck down against the wall and cover their necks with their hands. Yeah, the phrase dates back to the cold war, but it’s sometimes used to talk about tornado drills. But I appreciate the momentary distraction from the pandemic that correcting your correction has afforded!
Meanwhile, NCAE’s petition has gone live, and I met with our central office team today andw ith our school board tomorrow. And the governor is announcing plans regarding schools tomorrow. Busy busy.
I think your schooling era appropriated my era’s label. For tornados we just went out into the halls and milled around. No ducking or covering. For threats of nuclear annihilation we ‘ducked’ under our desks, using them to ‘cover’ us. What wood over our heads was supposed to against radiation they never told us.
I think in times of great anxiety and fear it made adults feel better to be doing something, anything.
The Wiki article on Duck and Cover is pretty interesting. It maintains that the “duck and cover” directions were designed for folks who were a good distance away from the epicenter of a nuclear bomb explosion, and that it was designed to protect against two things mainly: first, the shrapnel caused by the shockwave (so, like, broken glass from windows); and second, from the terrible burns caused by the intense light-wave radiation (UV, visible, and infrared). Even a newspaper could partially protect you from the latter.
The higher the grade the more rigorous the levels of mitigation need to be. A High School (and likely a Middle School) in which staff are sloppy and loose about their own mask and distance behaviors, and in which students are crowded and not face covering, is a recipe for a flare. Israel showed that. Opening elementary schools can be done safely with reasonable efforts. Above that can be done well but can also be done not well easily. Prioritizing getting kids in includes prioritizing having the resources to do it appropriately for the grade and circumstance of the region.
That is my read, as well. And we are so far from any sort of systemic, workable plan. It’s like, we are a Broadway Troupe who has been given an incomplete script that we’ve been told will be revised quite a bit, but told to be ready for opening night in 4 weeks. And the budget is unknown, but probably peanuts.
Teachers have good reason to be afraid. It’s not that we aren’t willing to take risks or don’t seen ourselves as essential, but that we think we are being thrown into the fire with no preparation because our leadership has been fucking around for the summer worrying about optics.