Should schools be closed?

The schools do need to be closed. Petri dishes. Now it is time for parents to be responsible.

To lessen the spread of this virus since they failed to have adequate testing, and to have them completely decontaminated, or it's unsafe and it could be a severe risk again.

spreading it around town when out of school.

Parents should step up on this but some (too many) don't. Others can't because they are at work.

I heard of one dumb woman who let her daughter hold a big slumber party for friends since they could get up late without school. Others are pooling child care with one person taking in several children for working parents, which reproduces the same conditions as schools.

I sympathize with parents who must work. They need child care and cannot send kids to grandparents. I heard that some teachers are watching kids for parents. That's good, but ONLY if they limit the kids to one family.

Finally heard something intelligent from a Trump presser, though it did not come from him. Some communities are setting special seniors only shopping times in stores and forbidding entrance to younger shoppers.

for a call to arms national moonshot to raise our digital infrastructure with virtual classrooms for all. Safe virtual voting too, if it could be trusted.

I work in software development / implementation, trust me on this

Wish there was a safe secure way.

and paper back-ups are always necessary

All gyms, rec centers, trampoline parks, Y’s, are closed as well as restaurants and bars

Wherever you are it needs to go further

Our Governor Cuomo has shut down bars, restaurants and diners, theaters. Libraries, schools, Y's and other public places are closed. But grocery and some dept stores, like Walmart, remain open so people can get supplies.

With schools and everything else closed, kids are hanging out in groups, large and small, in the stores that are open. Others are racing each other on their bikes on sidewalks, or just walking around, arm in arm, in parking lots and sidewalks, chatting while their group presence blocks access to passersby. They are oblivious to people around them, which is the nature of youth. They need someone to drill it into them how unsafe that is.

But, they are all pretty responsible overall and understand why they are home.

go for a walk, or a bike ride

But they should make every effort to stay away from other people.

and hang out on the porch, they are 19, 17, and 11, so they also play a lot of board games and computer games.

only places that should be open are grocery stores and pharmacies, and restaurants for delivery or carryout only (and possibly to keep a lid on worse unrest over closures and social distancing etc liquor stores and cannabis dispensaries in states where that's legal).

I'll assume that we're talking about low-information (R) suburban parents here.

Consider a not-so-recent pandemic, the Spanish flu. The cities and towns that cancelled schools earlier had lower fatality rates than those who kept them open.

Keep in mind what schools were like then. Elementary school was recently required of the entire population. At the time there was a push to make middle school mandatory, and in most jurisdictions a middle-school diploma wasn't required. The high school graduation rate didn't hit 50% of the eligible age cohort until 1942, and then it crashed until something like 1948.

So school cancellations in 1918 affected maybe half of the population aged 6-18. And yet school cancellations still saved thousands of lives.

I know my daughter has about 4 hours of assignments to do each day.

Several countries are not closing them including the UK and Australia:

Snip:

“But the evidence that closing schools will have a significant impact on transmission of the pandemic is not that strong,” he said.

“Children don’t seem to get severely unwell, they either get a mild version or show no signs of illness, so the early data is that they are not significantly involved in transmission.”


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/why-australia-is-not-shutting-schools-to-help-control-the-spread-of-coronavirus

best practices, keep reminding to wash hands, etc.

Left un-supervised, we're handing control of an epidemic to children.

It's kind of insane, really.

Personally, imho, in another couple weeks when the virus is literally everywhere, we might as well re-open and just go for it.

This is out best opportunity to monitor the situation: Let teachers handle it locally the best they can.