Should schools be closed?

[Igel]

10. The parents don't get it.

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.