Larry Cuban reposts here the best summary of the dilemmas of reopening the schools during a pandemic.
Trump and DeVos think that they can sit in D.C. and order the schools to open up for in-person instruction or lose funding.
An order is not a plan. School boards and superintendents have to figure out how, when, and whether to reopen, and how to pay for it.
They know that in-person instruction is far superior to remote instruction.
For most, their top priority is to protect the lives and health of students and staff.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
That’s an A+ paper. 100% correct.
This was very well stated.
It is not worth rising children and adult lives so that Trump can think the resulting ‘booming economy’ will cause him to be re-elected. Every public school has been underfunded for years and now they are expected to provide a ‘safe environment’? Businesses that have money are wondering how best to protect their workers and customers. They are struggling.
The virus HAS to be under control before the economy is going to get better. Wearing a mask is the first thing that has to be make a law thought out the US. Trump, the ignorant liar, tells his people, “You don’t need to wear a mask”.
the only truth which matters, and yet so many people keep trying to walk, or run, or skip around it: The virus HAS to be under control before the economy is going to get better.
Suppose a corporate employer wanted to hold a meeting with 20 people, seated 3 feet apart, in an unventilated room for 45 minutes. Then do this 5 or 6 times per day. No one would want to attend these meetings. The idea is ludicrous. Yet that is what is being asked of millions of Americans in our schools.
exactly
The key decision makers are not just the school boards and superintendents, but the teachers in various subjects across the grade spans who have to figure out the details given the constraints of budgets that others have determined.
Moreover, our understanding of possibilities and hazards of opening is neither stable nor free from political calculations designed to TRUMP sound reasoning about education.
Some plans are workable for a thin and improvised form of instruction but useless for the other reason for opening schools, the restoration of coherent work schedules for parents/caregivers of school-age children. TRUMP and ten-yacht Devos really have no interest in education, other than shoveling money around to privatize education.
This is good. I was pleased to see their use of the term I have consistently used to describe the push to reopen schools: magical thinking. And the correct attribution of such magical thinking to Trump, with his unparalleled capacity for such thinking–if he wants it to be so, then it’s so. Here, a few other points that I wish had been stressed in this article:
Some recent studies show that kids 10 and older are just as likely to become infected and to infect others as are adults.
The types of masks typically worn by most people and that will be worn by teachers, students, administrators, and staff are only partially effective. People SHOULD wear masks, but they shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking that these provide anywhere close to the sort of protection that an N95 mask does.
Most schools have poor air conditioning, heating, and ventilation systems of precisely the kinds that have been shown to be effective at spreading the virus.
There is considerable, mounting evidence that Covid-19 causes blood clotting throughout the body, in the brain, the heart, the kidneys, etc., leading, even in people who were never sick enough to be hospitalized, to such consequences as inflammation of the heart. So, there are long-term consequences of infection, even in little people who otherwise didn’t seem terribly sick.
Classrooms are enclosed spaces. In the course of a day, the students and teachers in a typical classroom will expel 57,000 liters of air into these enclosed spaces, to be recirculated via the lungs of other teachers and students.
Fauci suggested in his interview with Randi Weingarten that teachers and students wear goggles and removable, disposable clothing, like medical professionals. We’re not likely to see that.
Kids are kids. No disciplinary regime will be draconian enough to keep them socially distanced and wearing their masks. People who think otherwise just don’t know kids.
Most set-ups I’ve seen for classrooms to be reopened involve desks spaced 3 feet apart. This is less than the CDC’s minimal suggested distance of 6 feet, and even that, the CDC says, isn’t optimal.
In some parts of the country, we are seeing dramatic surges. What do these have in common? They rushed to reopen. And here we are, now, doing exactly the same thing around the country with our schools, forcing 60+ million students and teachers to spend 7 hours a day in enclosed Coronavirus Exposure Chambers. If you are lucky enough to live in a place where infections and deaths have fallen off dramatically, just wait until the reopening of schools occurs. Inevitably, the reopening will have the same results Trump Mini Governor DeSantis got here in Florida by letting Spring Breakers run amok on our beaches, refusing to issue orders to wear masks, keeping bars and restaurants open, and so on.
Arguing for reopening under current conditions, given what we know, is Trump-level denial and magical thinking. It’s heedless and extraordinarily dangerous. Kids and teachers and lots of others will die and suffer severe long-term health consequences. And if you think we’ve seen surges elsewhere before, well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. All this talk about “reopening safely” sounds to me like talk about safely injecting disinfectants or safely jumping our of airplanes without parachutes: roll into a ball, aim for a tree canopy to protect your head, wear you mask, sit in desks 3 feet apart. And this talk pushes out the conversations we should be having about what we can do with distance learning in the meantime, recognizing how bad it is, and how we can ensure that poor kids have working computers and software and internet connections and meals and safety checks at home until we have a vaccine.
This speaks volumes.
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‘I’m sorry, but it’s a fantasy’
by Jeff Gregorich, superintendent of schools at Hayden Winkelman Unified School District in Arizona
…I’ve been in the building every day, sanitizing doors and measuring out space in classrooms. We still haven’t received our order of Plexiglas barriers, so we’re cutting up shower curtains and trying to make do with that. It’s one obstacle after the next. Just last week I found out we had another staff member who tested positive, so I went through the guidance from OSHA and the CDC and tried to figure out the protocols. I’m not an expert at any of this, but I did my best with the contact tracing. I called 10 people on staff and told them they’d had a possible exposure. I arranged separate cars and got us all to the testing site. Some of my staff members were crying. They’ve seen what can happen, and they’re coming to me with questions I can’t always answer. “Does my whole family need to get tested?” “How long do I have to quarantine?” “What if this virus hits me like it did Mrs. Byrd?”
We got back two of those tests already — both positive. We’re still waiting on eight more. That makes 11 percent of my staff that’s gotten covid, and we haven’t had a single student in our buildings since March…
Mrs. Byrd did everything right. She followed all the protocols. If there’s such a thing as a safe, controlled environment inside a classroom during a pandemic, that was it. We had three teachers sharing a room so they could teach a virtual summer school. They were so careful. This was back in June, when cases here were starting to spike. The kids were at home, but the teachers wanted to be together in the classroom so they could team up on the new technology. I thought that was a good idea. It’s a big room. They could watch and learn from each other. Mrs. Byrd was a master teacher. She’d been here since 1982, and she was always coming up with creative ideas. They delivered care packages to the elementary students so they could sprout beans for something hands-on at home, and then the teachers all took turns in front of the camera. All three of them wore masks. They checked their temperatures. They taught on their own devices and didn’t share anything, not even a pencil.
At first she thought it was a sinus infection. That’s what the doctor told her, but it kept getting worse. I got a call that she’d been rushed to the hospital. Her oxygen was low, and they put her on a ventilator pretty much right away. The other two teachers started feeling sick the same weekend, so they went to get tested. They both had it bad for the next month. Mrs. Byrd’s husband got it and was hospitalized. Her brother got it and passed away. Mrs. Byrd fought for a few weeks until she couldn’t anymore…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/01/schools-reopening-coronavirus-arizona-superintendent/
Well, a school (in Indiana, I believe) already opened & closed: found a + covid case the FIRST week.
Quelle surpris.
It was a school in Indiana and one child was COVID-19 positive on the FIRST DAY of school.
Whoopee! Open more schools!
Exactly, retired. Reopening schools is mind-blowing stupid.
Video: Teachers worry about the fall: ‘We’re talking about actual human lives’
As states decide whether to open schools in the fall, teachers across the country worry their lives are being put at risk.
https://wapo.st/3joRcSa
Schools are closed, stagnant places with poor ventilation.
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Even more important than masks and gloves in coronavirus fight is proper ventilation
BY FRANK J. FAZZIO, JR. MD
AUGUST 01, 2020 08:00 AM
…Imagine a person seated at a desk. He lights a cigarette, takes a puff, exhaling gently through his nostrils. A small cloud of smoke wafts around his head. Seated across the desk, you likely would not be able to smell the smoke immediately. Within 30-60 seconds, you would. Imagine instead that you entered the room after he had finished the cigarette. You would smell it immediately at a distance. Undetectable, COVID virions can spread in the same manner. Were the two of you outdoors, a hint of a breeze from you to him would protect you…
No two infected people shed virions at the same rate, and the number of virions necessary to infect you is large. The minimum infective dose which varies among pathogens is typically in the hundreds to thousands. Becoming infected is dependent on how many virions are being added to the room, how big the room is and how long you are collecting them…
Ventilation: Free the air of virions! Every closed space needs to have windows or doors open at opposite ends of the space to permit flow-through. Where necessary, fans should be placed at the downwind opening, blowing outward, to assist in establishing this flow-through. In barber shops, bars, small offices, restaurants, grocery stores and larger spaces; in cars, buses, trains, subways and somehow in airplanes. And hospitals! Yes, there is mixing in all these scenarios, but it is better than people being confined together in a closed, stagnant space. The whole business of becoming infected is a numbers game!
Dr. Fazzio is a retired Boise surgeon and past president of the Ada County Medical Society, past chairman of the Department of Surgery at Saint Alphonsus RMC and founder and past president of the medical staff at Treasure Valley Hospital.
Read more here: https://www.idahostatesman.com/article244643287.html#storylink=cpy
‘This Push to Open Schools Is Guaranteed to Fail’
It is time to stop pretending. Our children are staying home.
We’ve seen the failures—in testing, in containment, in federal and state leadership—compound in catastrophic ways. And as our pandemic summer has stretched on, many of us have let go, one by one, of experiences from the world we used to inhabit. We bid goodbye to sleepaway camp, to live music, to distant travel, to boisterous weddings, and to spontaneity in general. Today, a new realization is dawning, and as the debate over schools reopening rages, we must acknowledge it plainly: We aren’t going back to how it was. And we shouldn’t.
“This push to open schools is guaranteed to fail,” says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and molecular virologist, and the dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. I’ve been corresponding with Hotez, and with several epidemiologists, over the course of the pandemic, and have noticed a starkness in their views in recent weeks. “The social-distancing expectations and mask requirements for the lower grades are unrealistic,” Hotez told me. “In communities with high transmission, it’s inevitable that COVID-19 will enter the schools. Within two weeks of opening schools in communities with high virus transmission, teachers will become ill. All it will take is for a single teacher to become hospitalized with COVID and everything will shut down.”…
Indeed, my conversations with epidemiologists in recent days were all strikingly dark. They agreed: Schools should not risk reopening, probably not even for the youngest children, in the coming weeks. “We can’t pretend like everything’s fine,” said Gary Simon, the director of the infectious diseases division at George Washington University. “If I had a school-age kid, I wouldn’t want to send him to school.”
The evidence is all around us. There is the summer camp in Georgia where hundreds of kids and counselors—nearly half the camp—got infected after only a few days together. Then there’s the school in Indiana where, just hours after reopening last week, a student tested positive for the coronavirus. (“We knew it was a when, not if,” the superintendent told The New York Times, but officials were “very shocked it was on Day 1.”)
There’s also the JAMA Pediatrics study that suggests that babies and young children can carry extremely high viral loads of SARS-CoV-2. The study’s authors found at least as much viral material in the throats and airways of young children as in infected adults, and sometimes 100 times as much as in adults. We’ve long known that kids older than age 10 can efficiently transmit the virus, but this new research suggests that younger kids pose a risk of transmission to the people around them, just as older children do. The more we learn, the more likely it seems that children are highly effective vectors for transmission. Springtime school closures took place before the virus seized the nation. A return to the classroom now—even with thoughtful precautions—would create excellent conditions to test just how quickly COVID-19 can saturate a community. School was deemed unsafe for children, teachers, and staffers back in March. The pandemic is worse in the United States now than it was then, with multiple epicenters burning across the country. So why would schools reopen now?…
There is another cause for concern, this one about what the virus might do to children themselves. Although the rate of morbidity in young children is relatively low, young children are also among the least-tested cohort in America…
Read More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/push-reopen-schools-fail/614869/?utm_source=atl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=share