Just to make my position very clear: I absolutely support teachers/schools pushing back or refusing to open under such wishy washy bullshit plans.
Near as i can tell, these wishy washy bullshit plans are universal. Not one time have I heard a metric used to talk about what schools should or should not do. We have no special testing infrastructure. Teachers have had no input into plans, and the and we have seen are simply unfeasible. There are no bright lines, no absolutes. Its things like "Consider opening windows " when there are no windows that open, try to maintain 6 ft of distance when there is no attempt to limit class size. This is everywhere. This is why teachers are angry.
Who SHOULDN’T have in person school, in your mind? What metrics would you set to say when high schools should close? Elementary schools?
Assuming a low enough level to allow schools to open safely, are there any mitigation actions you consider to be essential to safe opening, again for littles and for bigs? Any that you would say " if you can’t have this, school isn’t safe?"
My own answer to myself:
I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. And my faith in the organizations that are supposed to tell me . . The APA, the CDC, my state Education Department, is weakened by the reasonable suspicion that they are under tremendous political pressure to say schools are safe. I base this on the fact that they said bars and gyms and movie theaters were safe, when they clearly won’t, and on their unwillingness to give clear metrics. This seems political to me.
I honestly don’t know what you are going on about @nelliebly.
There is no consensus of experts claiming that the course of this disease is homogenous across the country, or even across states. There is no consensus experts who believe that the situation in Florida is the same as the one in New York currently, or even in northeastern Illinois.
The panels of experts, from the CDC to the AAP to the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine all concur - the evidence of major harms from schools not having in-person learning is very strong, especially for the younger grades; the risks to children, especially the younger ones, are relatively small; and with exceptions as determined by health officials based on local numbers, schools should have in-person learning as the goal with various mitigation measures to make it as low risk as possible.
…and to be brutally honest, in the face of a global pandemic that is being handled atrociously by the authorities in America this is a really fucking stupid things to be held as your primary goal. The goal should be to prevent community spread of Covid-19, you can prioritise in-person learning if you like, but it can’t be to the detriment of your public health goals. You’ve got things backwards.
You’ve asked this and I have answered several times by now. Again, I place it in an early phase level of opening. For me that would mean positivity rates either under 10%, or under 20% and dropping, and hospitalization rates low and/or with plenty of capacity while flat to dropping overall. I’d be comfortable with three weeks of those as sufficient. In my view schools would be open ahead of restaurants (inclusive of take-away), salons, barbershops, and “non-essential” retail and manufacturing at any capacity.
Single items that are must haves is hard to give as different combinations of actions may be comparable. Cohorted classes with masks worn may allow for less social distancing in each classroom for example. One must-have is the emphasis on staff compliance with social distancing and mitigation measures for and between themselves.
I don’t think there is anyone who shouldn’t have in person school (other than those who would be medically excluded in normal winters). The benefits to possible risk are most overwhelming for elementary grade levels.
To be brutally honest you the goal is to things that actually deliver on preventing community spread of COVID-19, and to prevent community spread in ways that do the least harms.
Your logic would justify just keeping all humans in complete solitary confinement. No matter that there’s no food, the only goal is to stop the spread. Like all treatment decisions the goal is to pick a course that has the largest and most proven benefits and that has the least risk of serious side effects, and to avoid choices that have no proven benefits but serious risks of adverse side effects.
I appreciate this, but as MandaJo says, this is where we are as a nation. I don’t necessarily think our interim Health Director is doing anything worse than what’s being done at other levels. And you’ve got people like DSeid out there who are unintentionally misinterpreting the statements of major scientific bodies because doing so supports their own hot take.
Fortunately DSeid has (AFAICT) no power–but there are plenty of other folks like him who do. So pushing back is really important right now.
So you think the current push to open schools in the southern states is misguided? Because few of those, especially in urban areas, meet your metrics.
RE: testing infrastructure…
testing is pointless in a school situation.
There is no effective way to test, and it will simply give a false sense of security.
Unless you are testing EVERYBODY before they come on site every day, and keeping them distanced while they test and the test is close to 100% accurate it is just “security theatre”
I can well imagine, little Johnny got infected last night, comes to school today, is asymptomatic, infects 7 classmates + 3 friends from other classes and a teacher aide.
Teacher aide spreads to students in 3 other classes tomorrow and by the end of the week we have 20 infections in the school.
Those 20 kids give to 50 adults, and BOOM.
And how do you not do “contact tracing” in a pandemic environment. This is essentially how we locked it down here - by effective contact tracing and quarantining anybody that has any sort of contact with the virus
Correct mostly. I would not make broad regional edicts but many states or at least large sections of states should IMHO be at lockdown levels and schools closed as part of that layered response. Then advance stepwise and methodically, schools before hair salons, retail, and certainly bars. Schools closed without doing the rest would be of no likely benefit and of harm.
I agree with this: schools should be opening before luxury businesses like salons and bars. I’m fighting so hard for schools because that’s the piece I have the most control over, but I 100% think that the other stuff should be shut down.
NY/NJ/CT are using a somewhat similar methodology to determine high risk states. Thirty-one states are currently in the high-risk category including California, Texas and Florida. These three states comprise `25% of the US population.
Of the top ten highest population states, only 4 states are not on the high-risk list.
It is ludicrous to open schools in most of the country at the present time. Some parents, in desperation due to jobs, need school to be re-opened and I feel for them. I haven’t spoken to a single parent who is okay with the current plan to use our schools as experimental test cases.
The ire should be directed at the federal government and not aimed at students and teachers.
Our school district (in CA) initially planned to have 2 days of school in-person and 2 days remotely. This sounded great theoretically but, as Manda Jo said, there were no concrete plans. Everything was “if feasible”, there would be 6 feet of separation between students, “where practical” outdoor air etc. It was useless since the schools here don’t have the space to support that level of distancing. The district was unable to answer the question of what criteria would be used to shut down (and re-open) a school, what criteria would be used to move to online only for the district etc. They stated that a Covid-postive child or teacher would not be required to be disclosed to anyone else. They did not have a plan on how to handle drama, PE, orchestra, choir etc. These are significant subjects which many students need as much as they need academic subjects.
…you are hedging your bets here. You can’t have it both ways. Its a pandemic. And in America it is out of control. It got out of control because the Federal government abdicated responsibility, because you didn’t lock down properly, because you didn’t set up a proper test and trace regime.
You didn’t do the work so you can open up again properly. But you want to open up again anyway. You’ve got multiple teachers telling you that the there are giant holes on the plan to open up and nobody, including you have got answers for them.
But you want to open up anyway.
My logic is to implement a plan that works. Before the pandemic hit hard you were arguing for an approach like Sweden while I advocated for the approach NZ took. And our approach means students are now safely in schools, no social distancing, no masks. Nobody, even those in managed isolation at the borders, are in “solitary confinement.” Apart from the lack of international travel we are about a free as you possibly could be. So this is a strawman argument from you. I don’t want solitary confinement. I think the Federal Government should be working towards coordinating a 2 month shutdown by the States to bring the curve down.
You keep talking about evidence. The evidence is clear. Lock down hard. Bring the curve down. Pay people to stay home. Keep the supermarkets, hospitals, pharmacies, service stations open. How long do you do it for? Two months. You won’t be able to eliminate the virus like we have here, thats obvious. But you can bring that curve down dramatically.
While you are doing that you ramp up your testing and tracing. you reinforce the hospitals with PPE and whatever else they need. THEN you can start to look at opening things up. But its chaos out there now. Whack-a-mole. You stamp out an outbreak here, but another one starts over there.
This isn’t a doctors surgery, so your choice of analogy doesn’t work. If you want to argue that your solution has the “least risk of serious side effect” then you need to be able to quantify that degree of risk. Because you are balancing the lives of those who have to go into work at schools, along with everyone they know and interact with, with your “side effects”. And those “side effects” being no in-person schooling.
When you put those two things side-by-side, lives of thousands of teachers, catering staff, janitors and their families, vs in-person schooling, I don’t understand how you would side with the “in person schooling” side of the ledger. You actually have to reduce it to an analogy to make it look good. And that terrifies me.
If you really think the schools need to open up (and the way things are going it seems to be inevitable) then the very least you can do is to listen to the voices who are saying that none of the plans are not safe. How do we address each of the concerns here? That’s where the discussion should be.
Well, our district finally reached a decision. Although we all thought we would wind up with a hybrid model much like CPS, our district decision makers settled on Remote Learning Only for at least the first quarter of the upcoming school year. The situation will be reevaluated at that time.
What swayed them is the fact that COVID-19 numbers are on the upswing. Also, groups that have resumed function, even sports that have no fans, are showing a spike in numbers. It convinced them that this is the safest course of action right now.
All teachers, however, will report to work on school days and do remote learning from their classrooms instead of doing it from home like they did last spring. I think it’s a good idea because there will be more cohesiveness and far more administrative control that way.
Well, except for the people that quit because they won’t have childcare, the people that quit because they don’t feel safe, and the spikes that will occur because it probably isn’t safe.
Why would spikes occur with teachers teaching from their empty classrooms? I don’t really see the point but it’s not a super spreader type concern.
I don’t think it’s any more dangerous than any other office, but it’s not less dangerous. If we are still in a "employees should be allowed to work from home when feasible " place, that should include teachers.
Like I said, I don’t see the point. Unless you’re in an area where many teachers don’t have good enough internet access from home.