America Drank Away Its Children's Future

[douglas9]

A brief history of the past four months in America:

Experts: Don’t rush to reopen, this isn’t over.

Donald Trump: LIBERATE!

Covid-19: Wheee!

Trump officials: Here’s our opposition research on Anthony Fauci.

And we’re now faced with an agonizing choice: Do we reopen schools, creating risks of a further viral explosion, or do we keep children home, with severe negative effects on their learning?

None of this had to happen. Other countries stuck with their lockdowns long enough to reduce infections to rates much lower than those prevailing here; Covid-19 death rates per capita in the European Union are only a 10th those in the United States — and falling — while ours are rising fast. As a result, they’re in a position to reopen schools fairly safely.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/opinion/coronavirus-schools-bars.html

[Dawson Leery]

1. A sizable plurality of Americans are self serving and short-sided.

[ResistantAmerican17]

2. The question I have not heard asked: how can we even speculate

about transmission by kids since they are overwhelmingly the one group who have been truly quarantined? No bars, no beach parties, no Nuremberg rallies...

[brush]

3. That might be a point if kids were the only ones who will be...

in a re-opened school. There are however teachers, administrators, staff, food service people, bus drivers, custodians and others in and out of schools to consider.

Re-opening now with the virus re-spiking with a vengeance is folly.

[ResistantAmerican17]

4. I just can't even conceive how this makes sense.

As a type 1 diabetic with no spleen, and an educator, this isn’t a hypothetical..Your point is spot on. Even if child to child infection only causes 14,000 children to die— an acceptable tally to the amway queen, devos, it’s the adults you identify, and me specifically who are potential victims. It’s systemic murder.

[Igel]

6. Talk to your state or district.

I'm outside of Houston.

District I'm with isn't exceptional for the area. We must open schools and offer in-class instruction.

Parents get to decide what's right for them/their kids. Online or in-class. And with that comes a bunch of other questions about wifi access and other things that might make a single mom with a troubled 9th grade rethink letting her kid be at home all day for "online learning" while she's off working.

Teachers have been asked whether they want to teach online, in class, or mixed. "Mixed" is "some course sections online, some in person." Not "today online, tomorrow in person."

Somebody'll have to look at the surveys and sort out how many teachers will be on-campus but doing online classes and how many will be in the classroom with the students. Then they have to match courses and experience and certifications. If there's one AP certified chem teacher and she wants "online" but the students are split between in-class and online, she has to be "mixed instruction." But if he's in a high-risk group--68, diabetic, male, African-American with heart disease--then perhaps there's some workaround. In the end, there'll be a crunch--maybe very small, maybe huge.

This is entirely DeVosian. The 5-word blipvert "schools must reopen in the fall" left out the other 800 words that explained that she wasn't going to dictate the definition of "reopen" and that might mean online for most students.

[Salviati]

5. Reopening schools will also present severe challenges to learning and socialization...

Either you follow proper procedure, in which case you run into a lot of questions a few of which are: How can you work with students effectively when maintaining proper physical distance? How can we accomidate all of our nations students in rooms where the occupancy is cut by 1/2 to 1/3 of normal? Where do we get all the extra space, where do we get all of the extra teachers? What do we do about student mixing between classes? How much social development can you get when you have to remain at a distance from all of your classmates, and what stresses are going to be placed on students and teachers in order to enforce proper procedures?

Or you say to hell with it, and try to go back to business as usual, like Orange County wants to, in which case what are the negative effects on learning caused by the death of a teacher or classmate? What are the effects on socialization and learning caused by an epidemic of outbreaks that will probably have us wishing that we were only dealing with school shootings. What will it do to a generation of students to know that they were placed in this dangerous situation not merely because of passive indifference to the danger, but were actively pushed into this situation.

I understand the desire to return to normalcy, but that is not a possible choice here.

The choice is not between negative academic and social costs or a high body count. It is between negative academic and social costs with or without a high body count.