Those lefty teacher unions get twitchy real fast though when you go in the other direction and say that you are fine keeping the schools closed and that you are going to just start sending voucher money to parents. What a scam those teachers have going. They want to get paid for staying home while the parents do the educating. If the child is lucky and the parent is able to do that. Definitely not always the case. That's kind of like why we had schools.
I love how they did it in Florida - which is a right to work state. The "union" tried to play hardball and the governor stomped on them. We've been back to school since August. My kid hasn't missed a day - getting all A's and one B (he's stubborn about doing his creative writing). Other parents that opted to keep their kids in virtual (they were afraid of COVID) now trying to get their kids in school in person, being told they have to wait until next year because there aren't enough spots and the teachers were let go. That's what you get. Soccer begins end of this month. DeSantis for the Win.
There have been a number of stupid statements about school re-openings (on both sides of the issue) — but this one by a union president establishes a new peak of stupidity.
C.D.C. officials say most available evidence indicates schools can be safe if precautions are taken on campus and in the community. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/world/cdc-schools-reopening.html Open schools. Close indoor dining. When to keep schools open, and how to do so, has been an issue plaguing the response by the United States to the pandemic since its beginning. President Biden vowed to “teach our children in safe schools” in his inaugural address. On Tuesday, federal health officials weighed in with a call for returning children to the nation’s classrooms as soon as possible, saying the “preponderance of available evidence” indicates that in-person instruction can be carried out safely as long as mask-wearing and social distancing are maintained. But local officials also must be willing to impose limits on other settings — like indoor dining, bars or poorly ventilated gyms — in order to keep infection rates low in the community at large, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionwrote in the journal JAMA. School administrators must limit risky activities such as indoor sports, they added. “It’s not going to be safe to have a pizza party with a group of students,” Margaret Honein, a member of the C.D.C.’s Covid-19 emergency response team and the first author of the article, said in an interview. “But outdoor cross-country, where distance can be maintained, might be fine to continue.” Federal officials cited the many benefits of in-person schooling for children, and argued for prioritizing their educational, developmental and emotional and mental health needs. “Schools are an important source not just of education, but health and social services for children,” Dr. Honein said. Even though the pandemic is rapidly changing, and contagious new variants are spreading, Dr. Honein and other C.D.C. officials argued there is little evidence that schools spark the kind of outbreaks seen in nursing homes and meatpacking plants, or contribute to increased transmission in communities. “Back in August and September, we did not have a lot of data on whether or not we would see the same sort of rapid spread in schools that we had seen in other high-density work sites or residential sites,” Dr. Honein said. “But there is accumulating data now that with high face mask compliance, and distancing and cohorting of students to minimize the total number of contacts, we can minimize the amount of transmission in schools.” The call by Dr. Honein and other officials reflects a consensus among some leading educators and public health experts that schools should be the last to close and the first to open when shutdowns are necessary. Last year, all kindergarten to grade 12 public schools closed for in-person instruction by March 25, shortly after the World Health Organization declared that the new coronavirus outbreak was a pandemic. Many schools subsequently switched to online teaching models for the rest of the school year. During the fall term, about one-quarter of school districts were completely online, about half were using a hybrid model, and fewer than one-quarter were fully open for in-person teaching. Yet more than half of school districts had students participating in sports programs. In an opinion column in USA Today earlier this week, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Dr. Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, called for widespread testing to keep schools safe and get children back into the classroom, not only for educational reasons, but to restore free school meals, give children a social outlet, and provide myriad school-based services that are vital to low-income children. The Covid-19 School Response Dashboard, a collaboration that tracks infections in school districts willing to share data, has reported that infection case rates among staff in October and November were similar to case rates in the surrounding communities. More recently, however, staff case rates in New York increased at a faster rate than community case rates. The causes are not clear. The increases may reflect a more frequent testing of schoolteachers. Case rates increased among teachers engaged in in-person teaching and among those teaching remotely, suggesting in-person instruction was not the sole factor. Emily Oster, a professor of economics and public policy at Brown University who created the dashboard, said that low case rates in the community make it possible to keep schools running safely. “Prioritizing schools is going to mean limiting some of those other activities, and deciding that we want to undertake some of those sacrifices to keep schools open, because we’ve decided as a society that schools are important relative to other things,” Dr. Oster said. “The frustration for many people is that you can go to an indoor restaurant. In Massachusetts, I could go to an indoor water park like Great Wolf Lodge — I can take my kids to Great Wolf Lodge. But in a lot of places in Massachusetts, there has been no school.” The C.D.C. also published two related studies on Tuesday. One was an investigation of a high school wrestling tournament in Florida in December that became a super-spreader event, leading to at least 79 infections and one death. The tournament brought together 10 schools and 130 athletes and coaches, and 30 percent of participants were infected with the coronavirus. Thirty-eight individuals went on to transmit the virus to at least 41 others, including family members. (The full number is not yet known, because fewer than half the participants were tested.) The researchers calculated that 1,700 in-person school days were lost to quarantines and isolation of patients and their contacts. The number would have been higher if not for the December holiday break. C.D.C. researchers also took a look at 17 elementary and secondary schools in rural Wisconsin where mask-wearing was routine. The incidence of infection was lower in schools than in the community at large, the scientists found. During 13 weeks in the fall of 2020, there were 191 infections among staff and students; only seven resulted from in-school transmission, according to the study.
Some of us have known this all along while others of you have been pushing for keeping schools closed and students "isolated". You own this, gwb. You and your ilk own what has been done to our children during this pandemic. You will try to paper over it, but you will forever have been on the wrong side of history here.
So tell us how you are going to protect the teachers. As soon as we opened schools in our area we landed up with dead and hospitalized teachers. Now the schools are closed again because they can’t fundamentally staff them with so many staff members sick with COVID and no one in the community willing to sub even when they increased sub pay 4X. And to set the record straight I have provided articles and opinions on both sides of the re-opening schools issue. If they can re-open schools safely with masks & social distancing especially for younger students then I am supportive. It is hard to teach K-3 students remotely and have them learn effectively. The problem is many school systems attempted to re-open with no safety measures with crowded classrooms (that already exceeded state standards) — the result was endless COVID spread — and usually the schools re-opened merely to appease parents who were tired of babysitting their demon spawn at home and wanted the school system to do it. There needs to be a national standard of the required safety measures in schools. The CDC tried to do this under Trump but he nixed it because it was “too tough”. Well we need a national standard for schools by the CDC to be firmly established and followed to safely open schools. I will note I am not buying the nonsense that schools should open up because COVID caused the suicide rate to greatly increase — which the actual 2020 data has demonstrated to be nonsense.
You apparently didn't read the quote YOU provided from the article. I'll post it again, and perhaps it will sink in. "The incidence of infection was lower in schools than in the community at large, the scientists found. During 13 weeks in the fall of 2020, there were 191 infections among staff and students; only seven resulted from in-school transmission, according to the study." This kinda means the teachers aren't getting sick in school like you claim. I'll say what I said at the beginning of all of this and have been saying all along: Show me the percentage of school kids who have perished from COVID from going to school. Show me the percentage of adults as well. Don't say things like "when we opened up - so and so died" because half the time the people got sick outside of school. If you don't know, say you don't know. But you can't do that. you have to push your narrative. The right thing to do is to compare fatalities from COVID from going to school in students and adults and compare this to the general population to determine if schools actually cause higher mortality rates from the disease than, say, going to Home Depot or Walmart (which have remained open the whole time). I think we are starting to see that some of us knew the answer all along. This thread is full of articles and personal commentary from you pointing out the dangers of reopening schools in the time of COVID. While you may have posted a few articles from your spam bot that have pushed the other side of the story on occasion this is more like hedging your bet, as I suspect your conscience realized how flawed this position was from the start. But it is CLEAR where you've stood on this issue and CLEAR that you would eventually try to back peddle from it. Right, Trump trump trump...
Let's look at the entire quote from the article again. C.D.C. researchers also took a look at 17 elementary and secondary schools in rural Wisconsin where mask-wearing was routine. The incidence of infection was lower in schools than in the community at large, the scientists found. During 13 weeks in the fall of 2020, there were 191 infections among staff and students; only seven resulted from in-school transmission, according to the study. So they looked at a mere 17 schools in the study in a rural area.... in state with a low rate of overcrowded schools. Not a big sample size. The reality is that many school systems are not even reporting or tracking COVID cases. The data is not very encompassing; nor does it cover urban, suburban, and rural schools with various levels of enrollment, crowding, and safety measures. Show me the data proving staff members did not get COVID at the school. Their fellow staff members in many cases believe they did because many teachers have firmly isolated at home except when in school. It may be true that schools provide less community spread than other venues such as restaurants and gyms -- the bottom line is if community spread is large (or spread in schools are large) then you will not be able to staff the schools. It only took a few weeks of being open for our local schools systems to have over 20% of the staff out with COVID -- leaving them unable to staff the schools -- forcing them to be closed in every local school district. Maybe you lucked out in Florida due to year-round warm weather -- but re-openings starting in late October in North Carolina with schools that were already overcrowded did not work out very well. All are firmly shut locally for in-student learning at least until mid-March. At this point the typical defense of "prove the teacher got COVID at school" pushed by right-wing politicians when driving to re-open schools is not cutting it anymore. Whether teachers got COVID at school or outside in the community -- the staff is fearful -- especially after attending virtual funerals of one of their own. To quote a teacher at one of our local school board meetings recently -- "there is nothing more that teachers would like than getting back to school. Give us the f@cken vaccination." Of course teachers are way back in Group 4 of those to be vaccinated and none will be vaccinate soon. To get teachers back in school willingly -- assuming that opening schools is a priority -- then lets move teachers up in the order to be vaccinated. Or it is time to stop squawking about re-opening schools if they are unwilling to take measures to move up the priority to protect the staff. Obviously teachers are not going to be vaccinated quickly because it is unlikely the national vaccination priorities will shift. This leaves the only way of getting schools back into session is to do it with proper safety precautions. Locally this would require only 1/3 to 1/2 of the students be in the building at any one time to maintain proper social distancing. So let's take a look at some of the information on safely re-opening schools outlined in a local WRAL article. “The most important thing is to make sure that the school you’re in is offering face-to-face instruction, that they have detailed plans, that they have adherence to the mitigation strategies, that they can document adherence to the mitigation strategies and that they have transparency around reporting their infections," said Benjamin." Experts said breakfast and lunch should be eaten outside and masks should only be removed while eating or drinking. (It is snowing tonight in NC -- the temperature tomorrow will be 32 as the high ... let's have lunch outside. Maybe Florida doesn't have to worry about this problem.) ..... "I don't think there's enough understanding of the need to follow guidelines. It's going to be impossible for the teachers and staff to enforce it," said Wake parent Jessica Gaddis. ..... President Joe Biden has pledged to help the majority of schools reopen within his first 100 days in office. His administration has proposed billions in relief to K-12 schools to help pay for mitigation efforts that the CDC recommends. (Good luck with re-opening schools in the first 100 days as per CDC standards As demonstrated in Europe schools can safely be re-opened with the following in place: The community spread rate as noted in positive COVID test rates is below 5% Schools strictly adhere to safety and cleaning measures. As soon as one of these is not true in a community in Europe they closed the schools generally. As a whole Europe had a much greater percentage of students in school this fall than the U.S. by following these guidelines. Trying to claim that "Trump was right" because he pushed the re-opening of schools and pretending that he "won" is itself a re-writing of history. Trump nixed the safety standards from the CDC outlining how to re-open schools because they were "too tough". With schools his response was similar to the rest of his national COVID response he provided no direction and did nothing. No plans, no information, no help. Now we are back to re-opening schools by following proper national safety standards on how to properly re-open --- with the addition of federal money to support applying the standards in schools (assuming Congress passes the package). Of course, Trump provided no money to assist in the safe re-opening of schools either. Let's hope the re-openings this spring go better.
Hey man, YOU posted the article. It's also YOU telling us to "listen to the science and the experts", and YOU who tells us the CDC is an expert to listen to. Then when you don't like the data, you make excuses for it. Par for the course with you. Blah blah blah. If you can go to Home Depot or Walmart, you can go to school. And the latter has a MUCH bigger impact on the children.
The CDC are the experts. Tell us why Trump did not "listen to the science and the experts" and follow their standards to safely re-open schools. He straight-out refused to implement the CDC recommendations for safely re-opening schools -- which is why this thread was started in the first post. If Trump has implemented a national standard for safely re-opening schools and properly funded it then we would have had completely different results this fall.