WASHINGTON—American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten issued the following statement after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines for reopening schools:
“Today, the CDC met fear of the pandemic with facts and evidence. For the first time since the start of this pandemic, we have a rigorous road map, based on science, that our members can use to fight for a safe reopening.
“The CDC has produced an informed, tactile plan that has the potential to help school communities around the country stay safe by defining the mitigation and accommodation measures, and other tools educators and kids need, so classrooms can once again be vibrant places of learning and engagement.
“Of course, this set of safeguards should have been done 10 months ago—and the AFT released its plan recommending a suite of similar reopening measures in April. Instead, the previous administration meddled with the facts and stoked mass chaos and confusion. Now we have the chance for a rapid reset.
“We note the CDC has identified the importance of layered mitigation, including compulsory masking, 6 feet of physical distancing, handwashing, cleaning and ventilation, diagnostic testing and contact tracing. It reinforces vaccine priority for teachers and school staff. Crucially, it emphasizes accommodations for educators with pre-existing conditions and those taking care of others at risk.
“We remain supportive of widespread testing—especially as mutant strains multiply in areas of uncontrolled community spread—and we urge the CDC to remain flexible as more data comes to light. The guidance is instructive for this moment in time, but this disease is not static.
“The stage is now set for Congress and the Education Department to make this guidance real—and that means securing the funding to get this done in the nation’s school districts and meet the social, emotional and academic needs of kids. To that end, we are encouraged that the department is citing examples of successful reopening strategies in New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C.
“There’s a lot of work ahead to get this done. But the good news is the Biden administration is committed to realizing these recommendations through its $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, and to creating a culture of trust and collaboration with educators and parents to get us there.”
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Sorry, until administrators, teachers, and staff are vaccinated and students all have N95 masks, reopening is extraordinarily heedless and dangerous.
Agreed!
Of course, a lot of us are already open and lacking what the CDC recommends, but “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”
I thought that with the change of administrations, we would see the end of the politicization of the CDC. Alas, this was but a dream.
“this was but a dream” and Randi and Rochelle are not fighting for teacher and student safety. Not good enough. no need to “open” until our kids are vaccinated.
I don’t mean to split hairs here, but what, exactly, is a “tactile” plan?
I think she was speaking metaphorically–one that it is concrete enough that you can feel it.
Or maybe she meant “tactical” or wrote or said “tactical” and it was transcribed incorrectly.
I think she meant a pterodactyl plan (which would have made perfect sense), but spell correct (aka Bill Gates) didn’t know what that was.
Not to derail the conversation, but I would note that no one gives a flying pterodactyl about Randi s tactile plans — if we are to believe David Coleman, at least.
There are about 3.2 million public school teachers in the United States and another 360,000 or so administrators and staff. They all need to be vaccinated. And the kids need proper masks–N95 masks. Then and only then will it be reasonably safe to reopen schools. The ones that are open now are not safe, and reopening all of them certainly would not be. These guidelines aren’t sensible and scientific. They put an imprimatur on a political agenda.
I am more interested in estimates of illness and hospitalizations not to mention deaths if we can manage to follow mitigation strategies. Realistically, we are not going to be able to vaccinate everybody ever. CDC has some interesting data on annual flu: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
If we can approach those figures, I don’t see how we can hope for more in the relatively near term. Of course, disaggregation of those figures would probably reveal some measures we should be taking with “ordinary” flu. I would love to have my doctor declare that if I take my vaccines I will never catch a virus that might hospitalize or kill me. I never expected it before and now is no different. I think we are reacting to those who seem oblivious to the health risks of school staff in today’s pandemic. What is a reasonable level of risk that we can expect to achieve short term that doesn’t demand sacrifice that everyone isn’t willing to assume?
Realistically, we are not going to be able to vaccinate everybody ever.
There are 3.2 million public school teachers. Biden just struck a deal for delivery of 200 million doses of the vaccine. Vaccinating the adults in school buildings is entirely feasible.
Again, what I wrote, above, is that we need to vaccinate all the adults in our schools and provide all the kids with N95 masks. Then we can reasonably safely reopen, and not until.
Note that this is a response to the comment that “we are not going to be able to vaccinate everybody ever.” We can, in fact, vaccinate all the adults in schools and do so relatively quickly. This should be a nonnegotiable prerequisite for reopening.
When we get distribution and staffing up to speed, we can vaccinate those who can take and want the vaccine. People just have to decide on priorities of who gets it when. Have all the factory workers processing our food supply been vaccinated? Have mitigation strategies improved to such a level that teachers should be ahead of them? These vaccines are not going to arrive en masse. We still need to prioritize. They still have not finished vaccinating the highest priority population even though the next group, mine, is allowed to chase it across the landscape now. I’m sure you have heard the stories of people spending hours online and on the phone trying to get an appointment.
I don’t disagree with the goal of vaccinating all school staff. We will still have to provide all the other mitigation strategies for maximum protection since we really do not know how effective the vaccines will be in the long term. In some sense, vaccination and masking are a minimum standards for everyone to meet.
Teachers are confined to tiny rooms where they rebreathe others’ air in the middle of an airborne pandemic. They need to be next in priority after we have vaccinated our aged.
If the federal government is going to ask all schools to reopen, then it needs to do this. Note, as well, that we have a lot of older teachers. 31 percent are over 50. 18.8 percent are 55 or older (2011-12, National Center for Education Statistics–I wish I had more recent stats).
“When we get distribution and staffing up to speed, we can vaccinate those who can take and want the vaccine.”
Getting vaccinated should be not be optional, with a few rare medical exceptions. To work in a public school, you should have to submit a certificate of vaccination. And before someone jumps on me for suggesting such a draconian requirement, please note that all 50 states have vaccination requirements for public school students.
And once again, vaccinating the three million public school teachers isn’t that difficult. It’s a matter of having the will to do it. Three million is a small percentage of the number of soon to be available doses.
But what about other essential workers? I agree. Front-line healthcare workers first. Elderly persons second. Teachers and other adult school personnel third. Why these? Because teachers spend their work days in small, enclosed places where they rebreathe others’ air. I won’t repeat, here, the calculations that I provided on this blog on this very subject way back in freaking March or April. Suffice it to say that teachers breathe air breathed out by kids all day long. We now know that a) kids over 10 transmit the virus at the same rate as adults, b) kids under 10 are also transmitters of the virus, and c) many of the kids who are asymptomatic nonetheless have a high viral load.
I think I agree with you, Bob. It just bothers the heck out me that we are considered more essential than, say, immigrants in a meat packing plant. I suspect it is because teachers would be more difficult to replace because, as hard as reformers try to turn it into a minimum wage job, good teaching requires a higher level of education. Workers in a plant basically have little choice between that job and starvation. In our system they are about as close to expendable as a worker can get. Is anyone paying attention to them or are they just too dependent on their jobs to make any noise? I remember how the system works in schools. If you were going to make any noise, you had better have a whole lot of people behind you. Otherwise, you were toast. Since I never had tenure, the union was next to useless. Probational teachers are basically “at will” employees.
I’m fine with the feds commissioning a study of risk of exposure in various work environments and prioritizing vaccine distribution based on that. Any such study, if done well, would put teachers very near the top of the list. I suspect that fast food workers would be fairly high on the list because like teachers, they work in small, confined spaces with other people in close proximity for hours on end, though the number of people they come into contact with is limited unless they are cashiers.
If the federal government is going to ask all schools to reopen, then it needs to do this”
That’s exactly right.
The head of the CDC has made opening schools a priority but not vaccinating teachers and other adults working in schools.
That’s a glaring contradiction.
It should actually be embarrassing, but these people never seem to be embarrassed by anything.
As you note, it really would not be that difficult to vaccinate all the k-12 teachers in the US. It could be done a very short period of time IF it was given the priority it deserves.
The problem is not feasibility but political will.
Exactly right, SomeDAM
It’s a glaring contradiction. It seems to be mandatory, these days, for Democratic politicians to have themselves filmed giving that speech two-minute speech about how important teachers are and how much they care about them because they care about kids and the future and blah, blah, blah. But when it comes down to it, they will be just fine with putting their lives at risk by forcing them back to school without vaccinating them and without ensuring that their students have proper masks. Mr. Biden, you are doing some wonderful things, but in this, you are all hat and no cattle.
All Cat in the Hat and no Fish.
I have to agree with you here, Bob: “Getting vaccinated should be not be optional, with a few rare medical exceptions. To work in a public school, you should have to submit a certificate of [covid] vaccination.” I don’t know how anyone can argue otherwise. Fully opened schools are a public good, but there are few workplaces more closely linked to community spread. See Israel for how that works.
I just read this on the “Educators Room.”
https://theeducatorsroom.com/teachers-gave-all-they-had-and-that-wasnt-enough/
Really worth reading this young teacher express her feelings about the push to get teachers back in the classroom.
She lost me when she went into “Our schools are failing” mode, but I was soon nodding my head in agreement again. Essential and expendable. That about sums it up. I am afraid that the pandemic has shown that we put a whole lot of people in that pot.
speduktr: I agree with you and almost didn’t share this because of the “schools are failing” part.
And about that appropriate social distancing: have these people forgotten what it’s like in a K-12 school? Teachers are in small rooms where they rebreathe others’ air all day long. And kids have the attention spans about rules of gerbils on meth.
There you go again speculating about gerbils on amphetamines.
Maybe you should do the experiment first .
Gerbils on meth
Breaking bad
Running til death
In their pad
Please bear in mind that we are not talking, here, about whether teachers will be inconvenienced. We are talking about whether they will die or suffer the consequences of “long Covid.” The precautionary principle applies, especially when it is well within the powers of the state to ensure that all adults in schools are vaccinated soon.
I listened to part of a story last night about a man trying to secure an appointment for a vaccine for his 82 year old father who is caregiver for his cognitively compromised mother. He couldn’t do it because his father did not have an online account with the pharmacy, and he couldn’t arrange one for his father through his own. The details are even more egregious, but I am probably already distorting the facts. I question the ease of vaccination after watching people scramble for slots. I got an email message myself from my hospital network. By the time I got it, though, any slots they might have had were gone, and they were back to their message about waiting for more vaccine. My school district, however, has somehow managed to have half of the teachers vaccinated. I am sure they have some clout through parents who are medical professionals. It’s no surprise that a wealthy district is ahead of the curb with all mitigation strategies.
Not sure where you are spedukatr, but I certainly relate here in NJ. Teachers are not prioritized for vaccines here —front-line workers/ nursing-home patients and other elderly are, with other elderly allowed to butt into the top-tier, as NJ was having some issues getting the front-liners to show up fast enough to use up the doses available.
However hubby & myself (both 71yo) are ‘registered’ everywhere possible & getting bupkis. Some elderly peers in my bookclub & choral groups have gotten appts (& even 1st-dose vaccines), but only through connections or lottery-style luck. One of my millennial sons actually got an appt—a combination of being a recently-former smoker & just being ear-to-ground digitally. We get texts from him every time he learns of a new batch of vaccine/appt availability [he’s on some kind of twitter-alert feed], but it’s always just a couple hundred doses, & the appts get made w/n the 5mins it takes him to text us & we try to sign up.
We are much more concerned that our 30+ sons doing in-person musical-instrument lessons a couple of days a week get vaccinated pronto [tho the non-recent smoker may have to wait until summer!- not right!]. We feel we are doing OK locked-down, w/ retirement income, plus hubby making $ online via zoom as a ‘casual employee’ of the co he long worked for. We don’t need the agita & can wait until things loosen up in April/ May, which looks to be on track. Realize we are very privileged in that.
I’m hunkered down outside of Chicago. I just want to be vaccinated in time to play mom to the mom when my daughter has her first in a few months. They seem to be saying that we still should follow all restrictions even after we are vaccinated, so it will be up to my daughter to decide whether she wants us to come.
The new CDC guidelines say that students should not wear N95 masks because these are in short supply and should be reserved for medical professionals. I have no argument with that. However, the guidance about reopening all schools “safely” is misguided, given that
a) SARS-CoV-2 is airborne and transmitted by that means;
b) Non-N95 masks, though better than nothing, have been shown by lots of studies to be pretty ineffective;
c) students and teachers are confined to tiny rooms where they rebreathe one another’s exhalations all day long;
d) Covid aerosals can linger in the air for many hours and travel much further than six feet;
e) kids 10 and over transmit the virus at the same rate as adults do;
f) kids under 10 transmit the virus, though at rates we don’t yet have a grasp on, though we know that they can have very high viral loads;
g) kids can transmit the virus even though they are overtly asymptomatic;
h) we don’t test students enough to know who has the virus and who doesn’t, and there is no plan for regular testing of significant portions of the student population; and
i) we have experienced, recently, some slight declines in rates of hospitalization, positive tests, and deaths, but all are expected to climb soon.
Given all this, reopening without a) vaccinating all adults in school buildings and b) ramping up production of N95 masks to a level where all students can have them, is incredibly heedless and dangerous, it’s shocking for the CDC to be putting forth this misguided “guidance,” and it seems likely that STILL, the organization is acting not as a scientific body but as a political arm of the administration.
N95 masks are in short supply …still.. a year after the pandemic started.
And no, it’s not all Trump because hospitals, doctors offices, emts, clinics and other medical organizations could have requisitioned their own masks so that there would be no issue of them being in short supply for hospitals .
My question : is there anyone, ANYONE in this country who has a single clue?
It would certainly appear not.
Trump could have used the Defense Production Act to turn factory resources to the production of these masks. He didn’t. It’s time, now, to do that. A lot of American lives are at stake.
America may not be producing them, but other countries are.
You can buy them online.
Hell. You can even buy them in my local hardware store .
The time for excuses is long past.
I may be misremembering, but it seems to me that all these different agencies have/had been fighting to find masks at the expense of each other. Whoever had the most money could get some. However our own manufacturing capacity could not handle the demand, which pointed out another real shortcoming in the global economy model. I think we are being very unfair to the Biden administration in our expectations less than a month after the new administration assumed office. We already know there was no plan for distribution of the vaccine. It would be fair to assume that there was no plan for supplying any other necessary components. We have all seen the administration define being open as one day a week, which still allows for a lot of leeway. I read about a high school district that plans to offer some extracurricular/elective programs as their in-house component using a pod system to restrict the number of random contacts. I seriously doubt that the administration will cave to the strident voices of a minority who are demanding a return to “normal.” The decisions about what and how schools open are local/state decisions anyway.
@speduktr – agree with the fact that we have unrealistic expectations of a president who has only held office for a month, inheriting another leader’s plan.
We probably have high expectations….because we finally have someone rational, serious and competent in office so we can actually have “an expectation” at all.
What should we read into the fact that Randi didn’t mention Chicago? What is she saying that Boston, NYC, and DC did? Or is she just mentioning the locals that are most loyal to her? Union democracy could still use some strengthening.
Come on, Peter, seriously?! Everybody knows that anyone west of DC is not to be taken seriously although California and possibly Texas like to think they are the center of the universe.
I follow WaPo Ed articles almost as religiously as Diane’s blog. The comment thread there is a salty mix of conservatives & liberals, with austerity-type taxpayers and union-busters onboard along with parents, teachers, Dems. These CDC guidelines differ very little from those they’ve previously published, but their recent release is finally driving that public conversation where it needs to go: the issue of reopening push by districts which are not following CDC safety protocols.
A “tactile” plan? I’m sorry, what?
If public schools are not fully open in the fall, I will become a voucher supporter.
You mean if your public schools aren’t open. Although I hope most of us are vaccinated by then, we still do not know how long the vaccinations will last. We also don’t know whether we still will be able to transmit the virus if we have been vaccinated. That also assumes that the studies will have been completed to allow all children to be vaccinated as well. Then there is the cost of making sure that every school building has an up to date HVAC system at the very least. Given the fact that we have ignored infrastructure upkeep of all sorts for fifty years…and not just for schools we have a long way to go before all school buildings are safe.
I meant all public schools, including in the city where I live.
Every public school building will not have a new HVAC system by fall. Or within years. The cost is astronomical. If that’s a minimum requirement for opening closed public schools, then you can write them off for years.
I can’t ever remember attending or working in a school that had an adequate system, so that is probably not the best choice of examples. It scares me a little that the decision makers in this process will not necessarily be people who are guided by the latest in public health policy. The death rate from flu is estimated at around 0.1%. We are apparently willing to accept that risk. How close to that do we have to get before we will feel the same way about Covid-19?
Do you work in a building with windows and healthy airflow and and up to date HVAC?
Everyone should be able to.
Teachers have developed asthma and other conditions because of unhealthy maintenance of buildings. And now we are in the middle of a pandemic. Why is it ok to save money/ or not spend money for healthy working conditions. Why is it ok to be so dismissive of teachers?