Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Yeah. And schools are in a pretty tough spot in terms of better safe than sorry. Plus, schools are cesspools and no one denies it. It wouldn't take a lot for an outbreak to happen at a school and there be fairly significant community spread. I haven't seen anyone complaining that schools closed. I've seen a lot of people stressed at the difficulty of remote learning, but haven't seen anyone really question schools closing.

Now the fun thing will be when they aren't normal in the fall, because almost nowhere will be.

 

Fox News scoop?

please

 

Schools will be the last thing to fully reopen.

Imagine the 25-year veteran kindergarten teacher, who has taught 500 local kids, getting sick and dying because online learning was too hard. Yeah. Think of that fallout.

Now, do schools need to get better at online schooling? Hell yes, but they are not going back to full classes in the fall.

 

Exactly. I had a long meeting with our elementary school administration this week. It's a committee I am on anyway, but it was especially good and important to experience it now. So much was discussed about virtual learning and improvements that can be made with input from many sources. Our district hasn't come out and said it, but the direction and tone of that meeting tells me to expect virtual learning in some form next year.

 

Washington (CNN)Republican Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida was spotted Friday walking around the Capitol and on the House floor without wearing a mask.

Asked why not, he told CNN: "There's just no need."


One thing I've taken from the last few months is that we've put some real clowns in public office.

 

Oh, there's no question. None. That's part of why they need cover for it. That can't be the standard for when the schools come back, but in some places it might be.

America in general is at great deficit for moral courage and resilience. We don't have an appetite for it. (Neither does Trump.)

 

Trump is absolutely the worst person we could have as president in a time like this. I seriously doubt that governors are making decisions because of media pressure. They all have state/local health commissioners, most of whom, I imagine, have advised against opening schools because kids, while not particularly prone to get this disease, are vectors to adults.

 

ABC-Ipsos poll found 70 percent of parents of school-age children do not yet want those kids back in school. Is that a lack of moral courage or hard-wired concern for the propagation of the species?

 

On the other hand, a survey of high school seniors found 95 percent of them willing to attend colleges on-site in the fall if social distancing, masks, etc. are guaranteed.

 

Presdident Trump hurts us in many ways beyond just the schools. A good president would have had testing in place before things got bad. A good president would have shared accurate information with the public from the beginning. A good president would have made sure the medical supplies we needed were ready and that they got into the right hands. A good Republican president could have done those things just as easily as a good Democrat. It's not about party. It's about him being a failure.

He absolutely could make an impact on schools, but only partially due to what you wrote. He could be working with Congress on relief for the states. Remember, a big part of state spending is education, but he's sitting on his hands while Mitch McConnell and his crew in the Senate fight against the money states will need to provide key services.

Your characterization of school decisions is twisted, cynical and unfair. You are basically arguing for schools to be opened whether it is safe or not, with President Trump providing political cover if things go wrong. You are arguing that schools are being overly cautions because they don't want to look bad. I'm not naive enough to say that is not a factor, but to say that is the deciding factor is ignorant or dishonest. The first job of superintendents and other school officials is to protect the students under their care. The most important job schools have is to provide a safe environment for learning. It's not that they would take heat if students got sick. It's that the people doing the criticizing would be right.

It isn't going to be five cases if COVID-19 gets into a school. It is going to be dozens, if not hundreds. We are talking about putting people in relatively small, enclosed spaces. Then, as the virus spreads through the student body, they take it home to their families. That young people tend to fare better with the virus makes it likely that it could be a week or two before anybody realizes there are students who are sick. How much does it spread in a week?

I do believe that it is extremely important to open schools if at all possible in the fall, but there are significant challenges. When is the last time you were inside a school? How do you practice social distancing? You can't do that in a class of 20 or more, so how do you get class sizes smaller than that? How do you spread out lunch periods so the cafeterias aren't packed? What about the bus to and from school?

It's not just about fear of the media or Twitter. To claim otherwise is to show a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation.

 

I'm not particularly fond of that office as long as DeVos is mismanaging it.

 

That’s no less true in European nations that have reopened schools. The virus there is the virus here.