Four phrases that I have not heard Canadian politicians say:
Covid is a hoax. (We had the benefit of seeing what happened in Italy and China).
All the experts are wrong. We never need masks or distancing because freedom. (Politicians did not assume omnipotence).
This is just the flu. (Leads to minimizing.)
Covid is a conspiracy. (But wait!!)
FWIW as a child and parent in a more snowy northern clime - the decision always seemed to me to be based on whether or not teachers could make it to the school. That has generally been the main factor of closing schools for influenza- numbers of teachers and less so students out sick.
To be fair, I don’t know what rubrics school officials use when they close schools down for snow. I wouldn’t be surprised if school officials use their own idiosyncratic “best professional” judgment calls and just pray that no one complains too much.
I’m only familiar with risk levels in the regulatory environmental realm. When your whole business is centered around suing individuals or entities for the harm they have cause to the environment, you’ve got to have some concept of allowable harm. It’s unreasonable to disallow any harm because there’s always going to be harm no matter what we do. But having a priori threshold of unacceptability is super helpful when you’re drafting and defending decisions.
I’m worried that people are pushing for schools to reopen but they aren’t thinking about the threshold which, if exceeded, should trigger schools to be closed down again. Since testing is so god-awful right now, that threshold will have to be super conservative for it to be adequately protective. But if it’s too conservative, then schools might be shut down indefinitely. It’s a hard needle to thread, no doubt.
This article discusses some alternatives and options in areas where opening is a challenge. Most articles do not.
More hellish than having the children stay at home every week?
In Melbourne.Victoria.Australia, we’ve got complete school closure, offline learning, except for kids who have no supervision at home. It was specifically set up for the children of teachers and health care workers, it benefits other dual-income “necessary” workers and sick/handicapped parents, and hasn’t been widely abused: there aren’t many kids in the schools. The schools that I know of are not offering a full academic program in-school. It’s more of a day-care supervision system.
Worldwide, there are over 500 million children who do not have Internet access and need to get back to school. For them, ignorance may be a bigger danger than Covid and education perhaps the only reliable way out of poverty. A lot of progress has been made recently about lifting families out of poverty, but Covid has caused a substantial regression.
I don’t think this has been posted here, but it seems relevant.
Overall, 44 percent of people at the camp were infected with the virus, most of whom were campers. Kids’ ages ranged from 6 to 19 years old.
Not everyone at the camp had test results available for analysis. Since some people were not tested or their test results were not reported, the number of people infected might have been underestimated, the researchers write.
[Overall, 44 percent of people at the camp were infected with the virus, most of whom were campers. Kids’ ages ranged from 6 to 19 years old. Not everyone at the camp had test results available for analysis. Since some people were not tested or their test results were not reported, the number of people infected might have been underestimated, the researchers write.] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid19-outbreak-georgia-summer-camp?fbclid=IwAR2GI9RCUqQLyyoRFBwHRaa1RO0i1cwo-Cqfss521CBTQAl1227DwWnJ0h0
Colorado has issued some rules, and has a site with additional guidance.
I’m very pleased by the transparency aspects. State law requires schools to report cases within four hours. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment will post outbreak information. If it turns out that opening schools is the wrong decision, it should become apparent.
The district where my child attends elementary school (BVSD) intends to start school with a hybrid model.
Monday: distance learning for all
Tuesday & Wednesday: Cohort A is in school, B is distance learning
Thursday & Friday: Cohort B is in school, A is distance learning
The schools will do all of the masks, distancing, cleaning type things that one expects.
Unlike last spring, distance learning will be primarily self directed, without live teacher meetings (except perhaps on Mondays, that wasn’t clear). The teachers will be available to answer questions on cohort distance days. I’m not sure exactly how that will work, other than putting a lot of demands on the teachers.
I think the risk estimate for school weather closures vary widely. In my old district in WY, the metric was whether the buses could run. Schools were closed twice in the 25 years I taught there, and snow and below-zero temps were common. Wind was a constant.The attitude seemed to be if you didn’t have four wheel drive and a good shovel, you shouldn’t be living there. Here schools close if there’s more than an inch of snow.
The district here was planning on opening schools but running an every-other-day schedule until the county health officer said that was too dangerous, so now schools will be online until November, when it’ll be evaluated again.
“Ignorance” is a socially-constructed danger. We’ve decided as a society what kids need to know at each age bracket. We can, as a society, make different deicisions, even if we keep schools closed.
“Death” is a biologically-constructed danger. The virus decides who lives and who dies, based on the behaviors we choose. If we reopen schools we’ve already made the biological decision.
Most of the people who are talking about how education can help end poverty–at least in NC–have a 100% shitty record of funding public education. Maybe we keep kids and families and staff alive right now, and when the pandemic is done, we can revisit those commitments to the institution of public education.
I guess danger figures in but I always assumed snow days were based.on the feasibility of getting most people into the school. If it’s going to take the school bus an extra three hours to do it’s route or every teacher an extra hour drive, it’s not worth it. Though I get its a possibility, I never heard the decision described as “how many kids per 100,000 will die?”.
Welcome, Dagobian.
It is a nuanced decision based on can we get kids to school without them getting hypothermia walking to school or waiting at a bus stop, will there be more than customary staff/kids/parents injured because of accidents in poor road conditions, yeah if we get them there can they get home again safely if the storm continues. Far more complicated decision for a school district to make than many realize. I was married to a 20 year school board member and listened to many a complex phone conversation at 3am.
Boo
That’s sort of how I imagined these decisions go! That is kind of why I questioned that “how many kids/100,000 will die if we open schools?” is how it goes down. You’d need some sort of bureaucracy for that! Lol! School boards are a different beast!
What will the district do for holidays, teacher inservice days, or long weekends? Will one cohort simply be behind the other cohort?
Scanning through the calendar, which the district level one has not been updated with the late start date, but the school level one has, it looks like the Tuesday/Wednesday cohort loses a “week” compared to the Thursday/Friday group, because school starts on a Wednesday (Tuesday lost) and Veterans day is on a Wednesday. Teacher workdays are all scheduled on Mondays.
They may have more detailed plans, but haven’t communicated them to the parents. Or, they assume the year will be so messed up, that an extra day off here or there hardly matters.
It’s going to be an interesting year, regardless what happens.
NHPR has reported that New Hampshire is joining Tennessee in the plan to not bother publicizing which schools suffer outbreaks. FFS. Fortunately we only have about 1% of number of cases TN does…
If the AAP’s core competency is the social, emotional and cognitive development of children, they’re doing a lousy job of articulating and enumerating the harms.
For instance, I’ve seen articles that say that mental health services for children has increased lately. The AAP doesn’t articulate by how much and why. Is the increase due to school closing? But schools are closed every year at this time, so how is this different? If it’s due to the other aspects of the pandemic, those don’t go away if schools open back up.
If these kinds of issues are the AAP’s charter, they should be more articulate about the effects on children of these various aspects of the pandemic and school openings.
More recent articles on school reopenings.
A school in Indiana reopened and closed again in . . . one day. This will be a long school year for many people. Because of the high statistical probably of infection on opening, some colleges are requiring negative tests before allowing a student to enter the campus. I don’t know if that kind of thing would work here, especially when testing is so slow in many places and might place a hardship on some parents. But school closing for two weeks repeatedly would cause hardship as well.
When the discussion on school openings started, I wondered about how voluntary it would be to both go back to school or to teach. In Sweden, it was fully coerced. Many teachers and parents complained, but they were faced with fines and punishments if they resisted. I wondered how voluntary the system would be in the US.
At least in one place at this time, even quitting a teaching job due to Covid-19 comes with a fine.
Arizona teacher who resigned over COVID-19 fears faces fine
A new study is showing that children have high viral loads, sometimes higher than adults. More study is needed to validate that these high viral loads can translate into whether the children can transmit the virus effectively. This study reinforces the German study that found high viral loads in children, but from a different methodology.
I’ve been dubious that the reason given by some studies for why there may be low levels of children transmitting the disease is because they’re lower to the ground. If there is some other reason, it would be helpful to find that out before putting people at risk.
Amid all the talk of children not having as severe symptoms and dying at a lower rate, I haven’t seen much discussion about the potential long term effects of the virus on people.
While long term damage can’t yet be researched since this is all so new, more research is being done on lingering effects. These are on adults, but since children do get the virus at varying levels, they might also suffer lingering effects or even long term damage. Covid-19 appears to behave in ways that are not completely consistent with viruses in the past.
From ‘brain fog’ to heart damage, COVID-19’s lingering problems alarm scientists
That’s kind of a weird dismissal. I thought lower lung capacity being a mitigating factor would have to do with how much breath they are exhaling not where the virus lives.