The American Federation of Teachers authorizes strikes if schools reopen without certain safety measures

“The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second-largest teachers union, said it will back members to go on strike because of unsafe working conditions in schools due to the coronavirus pandemic. The AFT said striking should be a ‘last resort’ but demanded several safeguards before schools fully reopen.

“The safeguards, according to the union, should include comprehensive contact tracing in areas where classes resume, mandatory masking and updated ventilation systems in facilities, The New York Times reported. 

“‘We will fight on all fronts for the safety of our students and their educators,’ AFT President Randi Weingarten said at the union’s annual convention, held online this year due to the pandemic.

“Weingarten noted government assistance to the cruise and hedge fund industries during the pandemic, saying that if the federal government could provide such aid, ‘they sure as hell can help working families, and can help educators ensure our kids get the education they need.’

“The restrictions are not as strict some activists have called for, like only reopening schools after 14 days of no new cases in a region, according to the Times. As the White House has pushed aggressively for all schools to resume normal operations in the fall, teachers’ unions have said hundreds of billions of dollars are needed for the necessary safety measures.

“The relief package introduced by Senate Republicans this week is substantially less than the amount Democrats and labor leaders called for and would provide $70 billion to K-12 schools but on the condition that schools at least partially reopen in the fall.

“The AFT has said it will leave the decision to strike up to local chapters, one of which, the Florida Education Association, has already sued Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) administration over its plan to fully reopen schools in the state. Hundreds of teachers in the state, where cases are surging, have reportedly requested living wills” (The Hill).

"Plain and simple: it is wrong to reopen schools at this time" -Michael Flanagan

“There has been a growing push by the Trump administration and the Coronavirus deniers to reopen schools, and it is about to get ugly. Politicians are trying to convince parents that the reason they will not be able to return to work is because of lazy, selfish teachers…

“Politicians want the pressure on. They want to force schools to open before it is safe in order to get the economy moving. They want this, despite the fact that scientific data does not support the notion that reopening schools is safe. If we were to open schools now, we would literally be sacrificing children, teachers, and the health of families, to the wishes of these politicians who clearly have no regard for our lives.

“To accomplish this, they are seeking to create discord among us—it is a divide-and-conquer strategy at its most obvious. Scapegoat teachers and their unions as lazy and greedy, as unconcerned about the stress parents are under. Portray parents as having no concern for the professionals who educate their children.

“Plain and simple: it is wrong to reopen schools at this time. If schools are open now, there will be no safety. Social distancing in a school, even in a blended hybrid model, will never work. Air conditioning re-circulates the infected air. Schools cannot fund the constant cleaning, testing, and infrastructure maintenance necessary to make things sanitary. And it would be virtually impossible to enforce the mask mandates, especially among the children of COVID-19 hoax-mongers.

“It is wrong to force people back to work so they won’t have to risk eviction, food insecurity, and poverty—those who cannot afford to stay home. This will disproportionately affect communities of color, as COVID-19 has throughout the crisis. This… is by design, a fringe benefit for the white nationalist base of far too many of these politicians.

“The government is seeking to penalize workers who do not return to jobs to work under dangerous conditions by taking their unemployment benefits. The government threatens to penalize schools that do not fully reopen by eliminating funding.

“The real tragedy here is that none of this is actually about students, parents, or teachers. Trump does not care about education, nor does he care about the social and emotional needs of children. It’s all about money for the wealthy. The wealthy: the elites who can afford to keep their own children home, while the rest of us risk our lives and the lives of our children, for their own benefit.

“Teachers are essential workers, on that we can all agree. And we will continue to teach our best throughout the crisis. But we must be essential while continuing to work remotely. To place children and teachers in the same building simply because it forwards the agenda of Trump and some politicians is foolhardy at best, mass murder at worst.

“Children will recover from the difficulties of remote learning. They will recover from not being face-to-face with their teachers as they learn the Pythagorean Theorem, cell meiosis, or how to write a business letter. What they won’t be able to recover from is death. Death, or the fact that they have carried home a disease that killed their family members. They will never get over the emotional burden of losing a classmate, of losing a teacher.

Teachers want to help families struggling during remote learning. We love our students and our profession, and we want to support parents during this once-in-a- lifetime crisis. We need to work together, and not against each other” (Badass Teachers’Association).

-Michael Flanagan

"Only 302 Children Will Die" - Joe Morice: 18 arguments why our children should not attend school this fall

“Like all of you, I’ve seen my feed become a flood of anxiety and faux expertise [on Facebook]. You’ll get no presumption of expertise here… Of note, when I started working on this piece [July 10] at 12:19 PM, the COVID death tally in the United States stood at 133,420.

“My kids want to go back to school.”

“I challenge that position. I believe what the kids desire is more abstract. I believe what they want is a return to normalcy. They want their idea of yesterday. And yesterday isn’t on the menu.

“I want my child in school so they can socialize.”

“…As I think more on it though, what do we think ‘social’ will look like? There aren’t going to be any lunch table groups, any lockers, any recess games, any study halls, any sitting next to friends, any talking to people in the hallway, any dances. All of that is off the menu. So, when we say that we want the kids to benefit from the social experience, what are we deluding ourselves into thinking in-building socialization will actually look like in the Fall?

“My kid is going to be left behind.”

“Left behind who? The entire country is grappling with the same issue, leaving all children in the same quagmire. Who exactly would they be behind? I believe the rhetorical answer to that is ‘They’ll be behind where they should be,’ to which I’ll counter that ‘where they should be’ is a fictional goal post that we as a society have taken as gospel because it maps to standardized tests which are used to grade schools and counties as they chase funding.

“Classrooms are safe.”

“At the current distancing guidelines from Fairfax County Public Schools middle and high schools would have no more than 12 people (teachers + students) in a classroom (I acknowledge this number may change as FCPS considers the Commonwealth’s 3 ft with a mask vs. 6 ft position, noting that FCPS is all mask regardless of the distance). For the purpose of this discussion we’ll say classes run 45 minutes.

“I posed the following question to 40 people today, representing professional and management roles in corporations, government agencies, and military commands: ‘Would your company or command have a 12-person, 45-minute meeting in a conference room?’ 100% of them said 'No' they would not…

“We do not even consider putting our office employees into the same situation we are contemplating putting our children into. And let’s drive this point home: there are instances here when commanding officers will not put soldiers, ACTUAL SOLDIERS, into the kind of indoor environment we’re contemplating for our children. For me, this is as close to a ‘kill shot’ argument as there is in this entire debate. How do we work from home because buildings with recycled air are not safe, because we don’t trust other people to not spread the virus, and then with the same breath send our children into buildings?

“Children only die .0016 of the time.”

“First, conceding we’re an increasingly morally bankrupt society, but when did we start talking about children’s lives, or anyone’s lives, like this? This how the villain in movies talks about mortality, usually 10-15 minutes before the good guy kills him.

“If you’re in this camp, and I acknowledge that many, many people are, I’m asking you to consider that number from a slightly different angle.

“FCPS has 189,000 children. .0016 of that is 302. 302 dead children are the Calvary Hill you’re erecting your argument on. So, let’s agree to do this: stop presenting this as a data point. If this is your argument, I challenge you to have courage equal to your conviction. Go ahead, plant a flag on the internet and say, ‘Only 302 children will die.’ No one will. That’s the kind action on social media that gets you fired from your job. And I trust our social media enclave isn’t so careless and irresponsible with life that it would even, for even a millisecond, enter any of your minds to make such an argument.

“Considered another way: You’re presented with a bag with 189,000 $1 bills. You’re told that in the bag are 302 random bills, they look and feel just like all the others, but each one of those bills will kill you. Do you take the money out of the bag?

“Same argument, applied to the 12,487 teachers in FCPS (per Wikipedia), using the ‘children’s multiplier’ of .0016 (all of us understanding the adult mortality rate is higher). That’s 20 teachers. That’s the number you’re talking about. It’s very easy to sit behind a keyboard and diminish and dismiss the risk you’re advocating other people assume. Take a breath and think about that.

“If you want to advocate for 2 days a week, look, I’m looking for someone to convince me. But please, for the love of God, drop things like this from your argument. Because the people I know who’ve said things like this, I know they’re better people than this. They’re good people under incredible stress who let things slip out as their frustration boils over. So, please do the right thing and move on from this, because one potential outcome is that one day, you’re going to have to stand in front of St. Peter and answer for this, and that’s not going to be conversation you enjoy.

“Hardly any kids get COVID.”

“(Deep sigh) Yes, that is statistically true as of this writing. But it is a cherry-picked argument because you’re leaving out an important piece. One can reasonably argue that, due to the school closures in March, children have had the least EXPOSURE to COVID. In other words, closing schools was the one pandemic mitigation action we took that worked. There can be no discussion of the rate of diagnosis within children without also acknowledging they were among our fastest and most quarantined people. Put another way, you cannot cite the effect without acknowledging the cause.

“The flu kills more people every year.”

“(Deep sigh). First of all, no, it doesn’t. Per the CDC, United States flu deaths average 20,000 annually. COVID, when I start writing here today, has killed 133,420 in six months. And when you mention the flu, do you mean the disease that, if you’re suspected of having it, everyone, literally everyone in the country tells you stay the f- away from other people? You mean the one where parents are pretty sure their kids have it but send them to school anyway because they have a meeting that day, the one that every year causes massive f-ing outbreaks in schools because schools are petri dishes and it causes kids to miss weeks of school and leaves them out of sports and band for a month? That one? Because you’re right – the flu kills people every year. It does, but you’re ignoring the why. It’s because there are people who are a–holes who don’t care about infecting other people. In that regard it’s a perfect comparison to COVID.

“Almost everyone recovers.”

“You’re confusing ‘release from the hospital’ and ‘no longer infected’ with ‘recovered.’ I’m fortunate to only know two people who have had COVID. One my age and one my dad’s age. The one my age described it as ‘absolute hell’ and although no longer infected cannot breathe right. The one my dad’s age was in the hospital for 13 weeks, had to have a trach ring put in because she could no longer be on a ventilator, and upon finally getting home and being faced with incalculable time in rehab told my mother, ‘I wish I had died.’

“While I’m making every effort to reach objectivity, on this particular point, you don’t know what the f- you’re talking about.

“If people get sick, they get sick.”

First, you mis-typed. What you intended to say was “If OTHER people get sick, they get sick.” And shame on you.

“I’m not going to live my life in fear.”

“You already live your life in fear. For your health, your family’s health, your job, your retirement, terrorists, extremists, one political party or the other being in power, the new neighbors, an unexpected home repair, the next sunrise. What you meant to say was, ‘I’m not prepared to add ANOTHER fear,’ and I’ve got news for you: that ship has sailed. It’s too late. There are two kinds of people, and only two: those that admit they’re afraid, and those that are lying to themselves about it.

“As to the fear argument, fear is the reason you wait up when your kids stay out late, it’s the reason you tell your kids not to dive in the shallow water, to look both ways before crossing the road. Fear is the respect for the wide world that we teach our children. Except in this instance, for reasons no one has been able to explain to me yet.

“FCPS leadership sucks”  [Now think about your School Board and Administration!]

“I will summarize my view of the School Board: if the 12 of you aren’t getting into a room together because it represents a risk, don’t tell me it’s OK for our kids. I understand your arguments, that we need the 2 days option for parents who can’t work from home, kids who don’t have internet or computer access, kids who needs meals from the school system, kids who need extra support to learn, and most tragically for kids who are at greater risk of abuse by being home. All very serious, all very real issues, all heartbreaking. No argument.

“But you must first lead by example. Because you’re failing when it comes to optics. All your meetings are online. What our children see is all of you on a Zoom telling them it’s OK for them to be exactly where you aren’t. I understand you’re not PR people, but you really should think about hiring some.

“I talked it over with my kids.”

“Let’s put aside for a moment the concept of adults effectively deferring this decision to children, the same children who will continue to stuff things into a full trash can rather than change it out. Yes, those hygienic children.

“Listen, my 15-year-old daughter wants a sport car, which she’s not getting next year because it would be dangerous to her and to others. Those kinds of decisions are our job. We step in and decide as parents, we don’t let them expose themselves to risks because they’re still developing and screen addicted brains narrow their understanding of cause and effect.

“We as parents and adults serve to make difficult decisions. Sometimes those are in the form of lessons, where we try to steer kids towards the right answer and are willing to let them make a mistake in the hopes of teaching better decision making the next time around. This is not one of those moments. The stakes are too high for that. This is a ‘the adults are talking’ moment. Kids are not mature enough for this moment. That is not an attack on your child. It is a broad statement about all children. It is true of your children and it was true when we were children. We need to be doing that thinking here, and ‘Johnny wants to see Bobby at school’ cannot be the prevailing element in the equation.

“The teachers need to do their job.”

“How is it that the same society which abruptly shifted to virtual students only three months ago, and offered glowing endorsements of teachers stating, ‘we finally understand how difficult your job is,’ has now shifted to ‘screw you, do your job.’ There are myriad problems with that position but for the purposes of this piece let’s simply go with, ‘You’re not looking for a teacher. You’re looking for the babysitter you feel your property tax payment entitles you to.’

“Teachers have a greater chance to being killed by a car than they do of dying from COVID.”

“(Eye roll) Per the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), the U.S. see approximately 36,000 auto fatalities a year. Again, there have been 133,420 COVID deaths in the United States through 12:09 July 10, 2020. So no, they do not have a great chance of being killed in a car accident.

“And, if you want to take the actual environment into consideration, the odds of a teacher being killed in a car accident in their classroom, you know, the environment we’re actually talking about, that’s right around 0%.

“If the grocery store workers can be onsite what are the teachers afraid of?”

“(Deep breath) A grocery store worker, who absolutely risks exposure, has either six feet of space or a plexi-glass shield between them and individual adult customers who can grasp their own mortality whose transactions can be completed in moments, in a 40,000 SF space.

“A teacher is with 11 ‘customers’ who have not an inkling what mortality is, for 45 minutes, in a 675 SF space, six times a day.

“Just stop.

“Teachers are choosing remote because they don’t want to work.”

“(Deep breaths) Many teachers are opting to be remote. That is not a vacation. They’re requesting to do their job at a safer site. Just like many, many people who work in buildings with recycled air have done. And likely the building you’re not going into has a newer and better serviced air system than our schools.

“Of greater interest to me is the number of teachers choosing the 100% virtual option for their children. The people who spend the most time in the buildings are the same ones electing not to send their children into those buildings. That’s something I pay attention to.

“I wasn’t prepared to be a parent 24/7” and “I just need a break.”

“I truly, deeply respect that honesty. Truth be told, both arguments have crossed my mind. Pre COVID, I routinely worked from home 1 – 2 days a week. The solace was nice. When I was in the office, I had an actual office, a room with a door I could close, where I could focus. During the quarantine that hasn’t always been the case. I’ve been frustrated; I’ve been short; I’ve gone to just take a drive and get the hell away for a moment and been disgusted when one of the kids sees me and asks me to come for a ride, robbing me of those minutes of silence. You want to hear silence. I get it. I really, really do.

“Here’s another version of that, admittedly extreme. What if one of our kids becomes one of the 302? What’s that silence going to sound like? What if you have one of those matted frames where you add the kid’s school picture every year? What if you don’t get to finish the pictures?

“What does your gut tell you to do?”

Shawn and I have talked ad infinitum about all of these and other points. Two days ago, at mid-discussion I said, ‘Stop, right now, gut answer, what is it,’ and we both said, ‘virtual.’

“A lot of the arguments I hear people making for the 2 days sound like we’re trying to talk ourselves into ignoring our instincts, they are almost exclusively, ‘We’re doing 2 days, but…’ There’s a fantastic book by Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear, which I’ll minimize for you: your gut instinct is a hardwired part of your brain, and you should listen to it. In the introduction, he talks about elevators, and how, of all living things, humans are the only ones that would voluntarily get into a soundproof steel box with a potential predator just so they could skip a flight of stairs.

“I keep thinking that the 2-day option is the soundproof steel box. I welcome, damn, beg, anyone to convince me otherwise.

“At the time I started writing at 12:09 PM, 133,420 Americans had died from COVID. Upon completing this draft at 7:04 PM, that number rose to 133,940. 520 Americans died of COVID while I was working on this. In seven hours. The length of a school day.”

-Joe Morice 

Reality is disrupting the ideology of today’s Republican Party by Heather Cox Richardson

“For a generation, Republicans have tried to unravel the activist government under which Americans have lived since the 1930's, when Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and invested in infrastructure. From the beginning, that government was enormously popular. Both Republicans and Democrats believed that the principle behind it—that the country worked best when government protected and defended ordinary Americans—was permanent.

“But the ideologues who now control the Republican Party have always wanted to get rid of this New Deal state and go back to the world of the 1920's, when businessmen ran the government. They believe that government regulation and taxation is an assault on their liberty, because it restricts their ability to make money.

“They have won office not by convincing Americans to give up their own government benefits—most Americans actually like clean water and Social Security and safe bridges—but by selling a narrative in which ‘Liberals’ are trying to undermine the country by stealing the tax dollars of hardworking Americans—quietly understood to be white men—and redistributing them to lazy people who want handouts, not-so-quietly understood to be people of color and feminist women. According to this narrative, legislation that protects ordinary Americans simply redistributes wealth. It is ‘socialism,’ or ‘communism.’

“Meanwhile, Republican policies have actually redistributed wealth upward. When voters began to turn against those policies, Republicans upped the ante, saying that ‘Liberals’ were simply buying Black votes with handouts, or, as Carly Fiorina said in a 2016 debate, planning to butcher babies and sell their body parts. To make sure Republicans stayed in power, they suppressed voting by people likely to vote Democratic, and gerrymandered states so that even if Democrats won a majority of votes, they would have a minority of representatives.

“This system rewarded those who moved to the right, not to the middle. It gave them Donald Trump as a 2016 candidate, who talked of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists and treated women not as equals but as objects either for sex or derision. And, although as a candidate Trump talked about making taxes fairer, improving health care, and helping those struggling economically, in fact as president he has done more to bring about the destruction of the New Deal state than most of his predecessors. He has slashed regulations, given a huge tax cut to the wealthy, and gutted the government.

“If the end of the New Deal state is going to usher in a new era of peace and prosperity, it should be now. Instead, the gutting of our government destroyed our carefully constructed pandemic response teams and plans, leaving America vulnerable to the coronavirus. Pressed to take the lead on combating the virus, the administration refused to use federal power, and instead relied on ‘public-private partnerships’ which meant states were largely on their own.

“When governors tried to take over, the Republican objection to government regulation, cultivated over a generation, had people refusing to wear masks or follow government instructions. As the rest of the world watches in horror, we have suffered more than 4 million infections, and are approaching 150,000 deaths.

“The pandemic also crashed the economy as businesses shut down to avoid infections. It threw more than 20 million Americans out of work. Republican ideology says the government has no business supporting ordinary Americans: they should work to survive, even if that means they have to take the risk of contracting Covid-19. Schools should open, businesses should get up and going, and the economy should rebuild. As Texas’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick said to Fox News Channel Tucker Carlson in March, grandparents should be willing to contract coronavirus for the U.S. to ‘get back to work.’

“The coronavirus has brought the Republican narrative up against reality. Just 32% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, and only 38% of the country think the economy is good. Americans believe that the government should have done a better job managing the pandemic, and they do not believe they should risk their lives for the economy.

“To try to deflect attention from the failure of his approach to the coronavirus, Trump is once, again, escalating the narrative. He has launched an offensive against Democratic cities, trying to convince voters he is protecting them from ‘violent anarchists’ coddled by Democrats. He is using federal law enforcement officers in unprecedented ways, not to quell protests, but to escalate them.

“In Portland, Oregon, as officers have used tear gas, less-than-lethal munitions (which nonetheless fractured a man’s skull), and batons to attack protesters, the events, which had fallen to a few hundred attendees, grew again into the thousands. And now the administration is planning to send in more officers, to escalate further.

“The Republicans’ ideology is also making it impossible for them to deal with the economy. We are on the verge of a catastrophe as the $600 weekly federal bonus attached to state unemployment benefits runs out this week just as the moratorium on evictions for an inability to pay rent ends. At the same time, state and local budgets, hammered by the pandemic, will mean more layoffs.

“The House passed a $3 trillion bill in May to address these issues, along with providing more money to combat the coronavirus, but Republicans in the Senate rejected it out of hand. Today on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation,’ Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) went back to his ideological roots. ‘The only objective Democrats have is to defeat Donald Trump, and they've cynically decided the best way to defeat Donald Trump is shut down every business in America, shut down every school in America,’ he said. House Speaker ‘Nancy Pelosi talks about working men and women. What she's proposing is keeping working men and women from working. Her objectives are shoveling cash at the problem and shutting America down.’

“Instead, both Trump and Cruz want a payroll tax cut, which will do little to stimulate the economy since the tens of millions who have lost their jobs would not see any money, and this late in the year much of the tax has already been paid. But the payroll tax cut is popular among Republican ideologues because it funds Social Security and Medicare. Cut it, and those programs take a hit.

“Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took to the Sunday talk shows to try to reassure people that the Republicans would, in fact, manage to cobble together a relief bill in the next few days (after not writing one in the last two months). They are talking about passing piecemeal measures, but, recognizing that this means Republicans will call all the shots, Pelosi says no.

“Meadows and Mnuchin say they want liability protection for businesses and schools if they open and people get Covid-19. They were also clear they would not agree to extending the $600 federal addition to state unemployment benefits, arguing that it simply ‘paid people to stay home.’ They say they want to guarantee people 70% of their wages, but the reason the earlier bill had a flat $600 payment was because it appeared impossible for states to administer a complicated program based on a percentage, so this might well just be a straw argument. The Republican approach to handling the coronavirus and the economy is apparently not to turn to our government, but to put our heads down, go on as usual, and hope for a vaccine...” (Heather Cox Richardson).

Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and Professor of History at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught at MIT and the University of Massachusetts. Richardson has authored six books.

Notes:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/coronavirus-u-s-map-where-virus-has-been-confirmed-across-n1124546

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-suggests-he-other-seniors-willing-n1167341

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-safely-reopening-americas-schools/

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/26/support-for-trumps-coronavirus-strategy-dips-381509

https://www.opb.org/news/article/more-federal-officers-deploying-portland/#.Xx4eCETiZdo.twitter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/20/payroll-tax-cut-stimulus-trump/

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/how-a-payroll-tax-cut-could-impact-social-security-and-medicare.html

https://www.newsday.com/news/health/coronavirus/coronavirus-relief-bill-mnuchin-pelosi-1.47381175

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/white-house-chief-staff-details-plan-unemployment-benefits/story

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/26/shoveling-cash-problem-coronavirus-cruz-381673

https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/generations-americans-unemployed-covid-19/

Let’s Use Evidence-Based Criteria to Decide When (or Whether) It’s Safe to Open K-12 Schools

“School season is rapidly approaching. A huge public health policy question out there is ‘how do we decide when school can start this Fall (if at all) and under what circumstances?’  Thus far, the governor [of Arizona] has been talking about when schools would be allowed rather than under what circumstances. 

“A couple of weeks ago, he postponed the start of school until August 17, a date that he described as ‘aspirational.’  Setting a date for school to start is arbitrary if it’s not linked with evidence-based public health metrics. It makes a lot more sense to tie school openings to evidence-based performance criteria.

“There are two categories of criteria that should be used to make the school opening decision:

• The quality of school district mitigation plans & their ability to execute those plans with fidelity; and
• Evidence-based criteria that measure community transmission. 

“Both these factors should be in place before considering setting a date for in-person instruction to begin.

“While many school districts have quality mitigation plans to lower the risk of spread, community transmission is too high right now to adequately protect kids and staff, even if they have good plans. Testing capacity is inadequate, sample turn-around times are insufficient, contact tracers get tardy data, public health laws are inadequate and unenforced, and testing & infection control are inadequate in care homes.  All the above issues are fueling community spread and need to be improved before schools open this Fall. But, how would we measure success?

“Fortunately, we can come up with evidence-based performance measures to help determine whether community transmission is low enough warrant opening our K-12 schools for in person instruction.

“Let’s explore the possibilities.  Consider the four bullets below as the criteria that would need to be met to set a date to open schools for in-person instruction:

• A 30-day reduction in the number of new COVID cases in the community measured by a 7-day moving average;
• A community percent positive rate of less than 5% for 2-weeks measured by a 7-day moving average;
• Eighty percent of case and contact tracing investigations completed within 96 hours of sample collection over a 21-day period; and
• Community hospitals open for elective procedures.

"When a community meets all these criteria, the district could be free to set a date for in-person instruction (if their county health department has validated their mitigation plans).  County personnel could conduct periodic on-site validation of school’s mitigation plans.  If community transmission rebounds and the above criteria are no longer met, then districts would need to suspend in-person instruction.

“Another advantage to this evidence-based performance criteria approach is that members of a community would have a common goal to work toward, as nearly everybody agrees that in-person school instruction is important and worthy of trying to achieve.  Having measurable criteria in place to make that happen can build additional community motivation to achieve and maintain the important mitigation measures that reduce transmission of the virus” (Arizona Public Health Association).

This Teacher Asks You to Just Please Give Her a Minute by Sera Deo

“Give us a minute.

“I spent today removing my personal belongings from my classroom. I’m not alone. This is being required in many districts right now. Chairs. Pillows. Lamps. Bookcases. Books. Nothing but desks and chairs remained. I left my empty classroom and cried all the way home.

“Give us a minute.

“Before you say that parents need to be able to work. That parents need a plan. That parents aren’t teachers. Remember. Most parents aren’t teachers, but most teachers ARE parents. We want what’s best for your kids and OUR kids, too. We are in this together.

“Give us a minute.

“Before you spew your negative personal experience with virtual learning from the spring. Think. Do you have any idea how hard we worked to make it the best it could possibly be? Do you have any idea how it feels to read your words?

“Give us a minute.

“Before you rattle off your ideas about what will work in the fall. Understand. For every idea you have, we know a student and a family who needs something different. What works well in your house for your children is not necessarily the solution for all.

“Give us a minute.

“Teachers are not supposed to be working right now. But we are. Tirelessly. As always. There has never been a time before when we weren’t ready to make it okay. We use nights and weekends away from our families to make sure your children feel supported.

“We go to sporting events and plays. We buy girl scout cookies and boy scout wreaths. We buy supplies. We buy food. We visit homes. And hospitals. We prepare for gunmen. We do whatever it takes. Every single time.

“But right now, we’re scared. We are scared to death. We are not sleeping. We are sick with worry. We want to do what is right for our kids, and yours, because we consider them ours, too.

“Give us a minute.

“Please."

Grown & Flown

Sera Deo is a 4th grade teacher in Averill Park, NY. She lives with her husband Rich and their two children, Ryan, 20, and Emma, 15. The photograph is by Sera Deo.