My wife is a teacher, and through her I know a lot of other teachers. So I think I understand their point of view.
What they say is that although their job may not be riskier than any other job, why take the risk? They can do their jobs remotely.
What they say is this: if high tech companies like Facebook and Google have told their employees to work from home at least through the end of the year, then so should everybody whose job could conceivably be done remotely. Teachers put themselves in that category.
Although many jobs can be done remotely, not all jobs will be as efficient. The nature of tech work means that it’s often not much different working at home versus in the office. If someone spends most of the day working alone typing stuff into their computer, then it often doesn’t matter where they do it. But if the nature of someone’s job is to interact with other people, going online isn’t nearly as efficient. Yes, it can be done, but a lot is lost when gathering over a Zoom meeting compared to being in the same room. There’s hardly any difference in tech between working at home or in the office, but learning online is drastically different from learning in person.
Indeed, but as I can tell from personal experience, the problems of learning online do get worse when there is little or no resources for less well to do schools. The lack of resources issue will make a full opening a more risky proposition. And that, together with politicians that ignore those issues and demand full openings is a problem, that leads to the point made early about many local leaders doing the same as telling their soldiers to go over the top with just wooden rifles.
In the districts I work there has been a combination of increased homework together with remote instruction, with the teachers constantly helping the students online or by the phone. It works, but I can say that it can be much better.
The West Ada School District canceled school for Monday, citing too many teachers calling out sick to cover with substitute teachers.
In a memo from Superintendent Mary Ann Ranells sent to school district parents Friday, WASD announced classes on Monday, Oct. 19, are canceled due to the number of teachers who have already called out sick. The memo says out of 2,145 classroom teachers, 652 have already called out, leaving West Ada School District with 500 unfilled positions.
Opening schools increased R transmission rate by 24% on average across 131 countries. The study was done from Jan-July, so I don’t know if it included the US. The study didn’t account for differences in mitigation efforts such as masks and social distancing.
I received a call from my 12 year olds vice principal at noon to say that a kid in her class tested positive. Protocol here is that the entire class is quarantined for 14 days from last know exposure and switches to online for the duration.
My wife took my daughter in for a Covid test this afternoon, hopefully we will have results in 48 hours. She needs to isolate until she gets a negative result, we just need to watch ourselves unless symptoms develop in any of us.
Classrooms here for grade 7 are full days, masked except outdoors and at lunch, with up to 27 kids in a class.
I posted in one of the other threads but I should in this one too. A child in my daughter’s school cohort (12 kids) and his parent tested positive (both asymptomatic, but were exposed to a known case). The protocol for ours too is that the entire cohort switches to remote for fourteen days from last known exposure. We also have full day classes, all masked, small classroom size (right now no more than 4 kids / class, I think).
Several families in the cohort, including us, were tested, as was the teacher of the child’s class. Everyone has come up negative. I’m feeling optimistic that there was no spread.
This is the last week our district is open for in-person learning, and will be on home learning at least until January. I don’t like the decision, but it is probably the right one. Community spread and test positivity levels have been higher than the “close schools” threshold they set for some time now.
Right now they only report 33 confirmed active cases in students and staff, but of course each of those triggers a much wider quarantine. At this point 9 out 56 schools are currently closed. In some cases it is because too many staff are under quarantine to keep the school open.
At a friends school district in Alabama they reopened the elementary school but to impose social distancing rules, half the kids would sit at desks and half would sit on the floor. I havent heard yet how well this has worked out.
I wish we would. Dallas is currently at over 1000 new cases/day on average, and that average has been going up by like 100/week each week for a month. And everyone is getting together with some family for Thanksgiving. You know, just family, so it’s fine–where family is 4 or 5 or more households and Thanksgiving is a 12-hour long indoor affair. It’s like the house is on fire and we are about to pour gasoline all over that SOB, then remix everyone for three weeks, then do it again for Christmas.
I’m not even really worried about me or my school in particular: we are a magnet and most of the kids are staying home, as much to avoid their commutes as anything. So we are very distanced. Even so, we’ve had 4 out of like 25 staff members get COVID already this school year. None from work, probably–but it shows how much is in the community. The number of cases in the district are rising right with the city as a whole. I am so scared about how the holidays will plan out.
Are we even a country that could conceivably have a mature discussion about how much risk we are willing to take, and how many potential infections and deaths we are willing to endure, in order to open schools? Because if the answer really is that we are not willing to take any risk, and a single death makes keeping schools closed make sense, then we shouldn’t even bother having this discussion for a few years.
I say this as the parent of elementary school kids, but we have to be willing to take some degree of risk in order to educate a generation of kids.
Around here it isn’t a question of safety or desire, but ability. They simply aren’t able to keep schools open when too many staff are quarantined, and the track and trace crew is completely overwhelmed. Just a few cases here and there can take lots of staff out of the school, and there is nobody to replace them with.
I don’t think there’s any “we” to have a discussion. It’s like the restaurants vs schools thing. It’s pretty clear elementary schools should be the last thing closed, long after restaurants and bars. But the people that decide about bars and restaurants aren’t the people that decide about schools, and they aren’t talking to each other. So the school people have to say “given that we will have few, if any, restrictions on other public venues, and given that large inter-household gatherings are still regularly taking place, and given that mask compliance in the population at large is patchy and not enforced, THEN is it safe to open schools?”
There’s no point in talking about whether schools could theoretically be safe in some rational world. We aren’t there.
An additional wrinkle is that unless you are going to start writing truancy tickets and issuing fines and putting parents in jail, a lot of people just won’t send their kids to school. And it doesn’t matter how much logic you ply them with–they don’t believe you because so many of our institutions are clearly corrupt and unreliable on this matter. We have to live with that reality, too. Those parents aren’t anti-science cowards. They are reacting rationally.
Yeah, this is what is so frustrating. My town’s economy runs on tourism and entertainment. Every night we hear the loud music from a bar three streets away that’s throwing nightly outdoor parties. Restaurants and hotels are open, and our tourism board is encouraging people to come visit us.
Change all that–institute a real shutdown for the dangerous activities–and I’d be 100% on board with having elementary schools reopen with proper safety protocols. But that’s not how things are going.
This is what I have found. I live in Wisconsin. Bars and restaurants wide open. My schools have been virtual since March. Church too. I do very little. Still, cases are skyrocketing because of what other people are doing. We all live together.
Coincidentally, two of my kids’ teachers got Covid anyway, despite virtual schools. They have both recovered.