I suspect, then, that extended family networks play a part. I’d love to see some research on that.
I think it’s a lot of making due. Yes, in many cases mom is home with the kids and dad works 15 hours a day. In others, a parent has been laid off anyway. In many, it’s not a simple thing . . .it’s one parent shifting their hours to nights and weekends and other family members helping a day or two a week or some other multi-level arrangment. And some of it is willingness to leave, say, 7th and 5th grader at home alone for all or part of the day.
But it is absolutely not true that less privileged families disproportionately push for in person school. It seems to be the opposite.
Another thought: one thing I have seen a lot of, with professional/relatively affluent parents, is that they need the school for childcare because they are working from home–it makes it worse, not better. One issue is that if you are having meetings and on calls all day, or just trying to concentrate, kids around makes it very difficult to get anything done, and kids interrupting Zoom calls is not cute anymore, it’s unprofessional. There’s also, pragmatically, internet issues. Everyone talks about poor kids not having internet, but we have a lot of professional parents who are running into a problem where having 4 people streaming at the same time is too much for what was, before, perfectly adequate internet access. And, again, having your internet skitter and jump during meetings looks unprofessional.
In New Jersey, at least 285 students and staff contracted or transmitted the virus to each other in school.
While that may not be a huge number, it only includes cases that were traced to the school. And only 89 of the districts are classroom learning only. The other districts have either a hybrid model or remote learning only.
The spread of infection in schools is also likely to be under reported since 1/3 of children who get covid will be asymptomatic. Those cases are unlikely to be reported in numbers like in the NJ state numbers.
Here in New Hampshire schools closed on March 14th and didn’t partially reopen until the week of Labor Day. Universities followed suit, and the majority also did remote-only learning from March-August too.
I began tracking covid-case demographics in May. On May 21 kids 0-9 accounted for .70% of cases and kids 10-19 accounted for 3.87%
Today kids 0-9 account for 3.65% of cases and 10-19 account for 10.05%, and that’s with only 80% of k-12 schools offering any in-person instruction at all: only a third of schools are “mostly in person” and another third hybrid according to a survey of schools this fall.
As I’ve said, I want schools to stay open safely. In my kid’s district several schools, and ultimately the district, closed mostly because too many staff were out due to quarantines. There are simply not enough adults, including substitutes, to staff schools in the presence of unchecked community spread of Covid-19.
To help solve this the district is planning to bring in “classroom monitors” which will be paid $15/hour and after “a background check and brief training” will be let loose. They won’t teach, but will monitor classrooms while quarantined teachers give lessons remotely to the kids.
I can see this working for older kids, but I’m very skeptical of it for younger grades. I’m glad the district is trying to come up with solutions, and I wish them the best of luck with this one. I don’t want to have to make the decision between home learning and in-school party time for a second grader, because I know I’ll pick the in-school party time.
The letter announcing the monitors does start out by saying, and I’ll paraphrase, “What is wrong with you people? Take this seriously. If you want schools to stay open you’ve got to wear masks and stop the gatherings. Did you want exponential growth, because you’ve got exponential growth,” so there is that.
More clashes in southern California about opening and closing schools. Some children advocacy groups in LA are suing to have LA county open some schools for younger children and disabled children. Meanwhile, in Orange County, the teachers’ union is pushing the campuses to close down due to the risk of teacher and staff infections. Based on the politics of those areas, you’d think the opposite would be happening.
The teachers are used to the fact that children get sick all the time, and that other infections are passed from children and between teachers. It’s very difficult to argue numbers against personal experience.
It was the same in Victoria.Australia. Although at a different point in the cycle. Our dispute was at the time when people were suggesting that probably children would be at low risk and would present low risk. The present dispute is after that has been confirmed.
Yes, teachers are supposed to put the interests of the children first. But if you are convinced in your heart that if you let them come to school, you will die, it is very difficult to argue the importance of education.
The difference between the Melbourne expierience and the US is that in Victoria at the time they were moving schools online, nearly everywhere that could be considered higher risk had already shut. We closed the bars and restaurants first.
The roughly 14 weeks or so of total school closure was painful for everyone, and especially teachers having to redesign their whole term plan in about two days flat, but at least we pretty much all did it together, and once we did it it was done. Trying to figure out what the rules for schools should be in the context of a bunch of wider society just getting out, mingling and spreading, sounds like a long lingering nightmare
I feel like over the next few months, especially as vaccinations roll out, the conversation is going to switch from “should schools be open?” and more to “when should schools stop allowing a remote option?” and “when should we go back to compulsory in-person public education?”
We have optional in-person learning, but at my school, at least, only about 10-15% are willing to come. They don’t feel safe. At what point do we tell them that they need to come? Some of them are doing fine; quite a few, though, are struggling. I imagine we will finish the year like this, and I admit I have some anxiety that we will end up with 50% here and 50% at home, which, from my point of view will be awful just because the way you run a virtual class is so different than an in-person class, and having half and half each class period makes it impossible to do justice to either.
I haven’t really heard any discussion of this in the national conversation: it seems to be generally characterized as a conflict between parents who want to send their kids to school but can’t, and schools that want to stay at 100% remote. No one seems to be talking about “remote optional”, even though that seems to be a pretty common situation. All of Texas except maybe El Paso is “remote optional”. Reports on schools never seem to talk about how many are actually attending–just open or closed.
I feel like we will likely stay remote optional with more and more kids coming back, and then return to compulsory education next fall. But that assumes vaccines are available for students by then.
I worry that remote learning will become the norm for years to come, and we will be forced to do both in-school and online learning at the same time, which is a hell of a lot more difficult.
If I’m understanding you correctly, that’s already happening. California has proposed legislation to compel in school attendance when the case rates are low enough in the area.
From what I understand of this, schools will be compelled to reopen with in-person learning if the area’s rate of infection goes to yellow or orange (CA defines this).
It’s not clear how they would compel this. If the districts don’t have enough personnel, teachers, staff and admin. who could do the job safely, how would they compel them to open?
I am talking about compelling parents and students, not schools. In a lot of places where schools are open, there is a remote option available even when schools are open–and lots of people are taking it. In my school, every single kid COULD come 5 days a week, if they wanted–but only 10% are. I know remote schooling is being offered as an option all over Texas. I don’t know where else this is true because for some reason that nuance is just lost to people who aren’t personally involved and it’s not covered in the news–just “schools open” or “schools closed”. But when I talk to teachers around the country, it seems like “some here, some at home” is pretty normal.
I just feel like the next phase is going to be “when do we start sending people to truancy court if they don’t send their kids to school?” and “for how long must districts offer remote options?”. A mix of remote and in person is really, really difficult logistically, and many of the kids/families that opt for remote would be the ones least suited for it. On the other hand, if people are in fear of their lives (even if it grows less valid), is it really appropriate to tell them to send their kid or go to jail?
Ah OK. I’m guessing the answer to that question would be when every student and teacher and staff that are being compelled to be in in-person school have access to the vaccine. Bill Gates seems to believe that schools will be back to normal in fall 2021. The estimate is that most people will have access to the vaccine by June 2021. I’m thinking that schools will require the vaccine for in-school attendance.
I think he means the school year beginning in the fall since he’s said in other places that the fall 2021 school year might be normal.
But if vaccine compliance is low, even vaccinated people may be skittish. And then there are people who don’t want to vaccinate. Do we provide remote options? When do we say, enough is enough?
Do you mean vaccine compliance in the general public being low? I’m assuming that vaccines will be required to attend in-person school. In that environment, I don’t see why vaccinated people would be skittish. Everyone around them would also be vaccinated.
As for those people who don’t want to be vaccinated, that would be the same population that refuses to vaccinate now for other diseases like measles. They’d have to fall under the immunization exemptions. The medical exemption would be harder to fall under since sick children are the very ones who should be vaccinated. If they’re so sick they can’t get vaccinated, they probably can’t go to school. For those people using the religious exemption, they’d probably be homeschooled as they are now.
Looking at this article, compliance rates in the random schools in the article from California, compliance rates are in the 90% range. That’s probably enough for herd immunity.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see the need for remote learning* if vaccination rates are in this range.
*except for those students who were doing remote learning before covid or have another reason for it.
Some experts are saying that the new variant of the coronavirus in the UK is spreading faster in children. They’re just looking at the data and trying to account for why more children have gotten this strain than the other strain, even accounting for schools staying open. But they don’t have a proven reason yet.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-variant-children-idUSKBN28V2F5
They’re not saying that children are targeted specifically but more that children don’t have an advantage over adults that the old mutation seems to have given.
Today Colorado moved teachers and other education staff into the “1B” vaccination group. That is the group that comes immediately after high-risk health care workers and long-term care facilities. Hopefully this will go a long way towards allowing schools to stay open.
Yesterday, there was an article with a quote from a person in a hospital in the UK saying that the wards were full of children. That prompted this article.
This article reiterates that the severity of illness of the new variant isn’t different than the old variant. Children are not getting sicker from this variant than they were from the old one.
I’m not sure if this affects the article I posted on Dec. 22 which says that more children are getting infected. But that says that more people are getting infected, so children are among them, and children are not immune from this.
In California, Governor Newsom announced a new plan to get children back to school in the Spring (if the case rates go down in the communities).
40% of Chicago teachers and staff did not show up for work after the holiday break. School administration says that the union is pressuring them to stay at home. The school administration sent out emails to the teachers and staff who did not show up, letting them know that their absence is unexcused. They say that there will be receiving “progressive discipline”. (That almost doesn’t sound like increasing punishment. Almost.)
In a survey of teachers and principals, most voted that school shouldn’t start in Jan/Feb.
In the meantime, in the UK where schools were forced to open during the pandemic, local authorities are saying the rates of Covid among teachers is up to 333% above the average