The Woeful Inadequacy of School Reopening Plans

Is this “possible” in that it exists and the FDA hasn’t acted on it or this is test only theoretical?

Personally I think it’s way too soon to reopen schools really anywhere, even in cities or countries with mask mandates and positive test rates around 1% or lower.

We just absolutely don’t know what the effects will be. We’ve never shut down school buildings for months and reopened them. We’ve never needed to understand the effects on busing, learning rates, transmission via children to adults, effects of children being back in these buildings, etc. etc.

It feels so shortsighted to act like the only issues we need to certify are first order, direct properties of the virus itself, like testing, masks, transmission rates, and not being more humble to say, wait a minute, we just totally do not know all the effects or edge cases we need to be worried about.

But I reject the framing that this is a question of FDA being a bottleneck. That's not it, at all.

There is a criminal chaos actor, and larger political group, operating at the federal level in the US. Entire workflows aimed at actual public health and safety have been disrupted and compromised.

It will not be possible to move forward until the chaos is removed from the system.

It is possible to do child care safely, as some programs in NYC remarkably demonstrated over the spring and summer, but it is all too easy to fail. And even "success" still involves some level of infection, spread, and risk of death or long term health impacts in the participants.

The overall aggregate risk may be low, but the predictability in any particular case is also low, so engaging is something like playing a game of Russian Roulette.

That said, in NYC, we are open to having our 3 kids return to in-person school, at least in the 1st quarter, while we expect 2nd and 3rd quarters over winter to be full lockdown. Even if there is a return for the start of 1st quarter, we do not expect it to last, as the temporary quarantine bar is low, and the overall fragility of the dependencies and relationships required is high.

Younger children are not very likely to maintain distance from one another nor will they keep their masks on. They're also likely to talk loudly or scream which would increase the likelihood of viral transmission. Unfortunately, distance learning is not a realistic option for younger children.

> Note I am assuming kids can spread it as well as adults

I have not kept up with research about how likely covid-19 is transmitted between people when comparing adults versus children. But looking at historical data in terms of viral transmission between children in school and daycare settings and the fact that children tend to be less fastidious compared to adults, it stands to reason that their will be viral outbreaks regardless of what measures the school takes.

This is what came to mind for me. I've lived in Georgia my whole life. In fact my hometown is right on the county line of Paulding County. There have been plenty of quips about the unenforceability of a mask mandate, but they can enforce rules against spaghetti strap tops or above-the-knee shorts. The first thing that came to mind when I read it was Road Rage Randy bursting into the principal's office demanding to know why his son was told he'd have to wear a dangerous, oxygen-restricting, anti-freedom muzzle to come to school this morning. It might be unenforceable just because of unhinged dads.

Judging by the stream of Facebook posts and arguments in comment threads among my own family, people I went to church with as a child, and other connections from "outside the city," the anti-scientific beliefs are deeply entrenched here. The zeitgeist is some kind of rapidly evolving mixture of: it's just a flu, the numbers are faked, masks rob you of oxygen, there's nothing you can do about a virus we just have to live with it like we do colds every year, vaccines weaken your immune system. To compound the madness, this crap is all mixed with reactions to Black Lives Matter protests. I'm losing it.

Infighting within the union, however, is new, and sad. Both are true-

* the plans that have been made are very far to the conservative- preservation of health and safety- end of the spectrum.

* any return involves risk of infection, and with that risk of death or permanent health damage. During the awful spring peak, more than 100 teachers and low level staff and administrators died.

Teachers sign up for extremely difficult work- dealing not only with the dynamics of their children in the classroom, but because children are sensitive lenses for their families, with the dynamics of the families as well. That emotionally difficult work is fundamentally different from work that is risky from a health perspective.

In an ideal world, all workers would continue to be paid, and those who decided to subject themselves to these new hazards would receive hazard pay for doing so, as well as additional insurance and care protections, but would not be required to and could work fully remotely. That's what would be right, but that's not what is happening, and that it's not happening is not the DOE's fault, nor the union's fault. It's the fault ultimately of the US political leadership.

But technical professionals != elementary school kids.

You get all the headaches of contracts and support agreements with government bodies as customers, all the headaches of oversight for a product that affects children, and none of the upside of a customer willing to pay a high price.

Governments are tragically slow to invest in infrastructure, and when they finally do it’s usually garbage built by a patchwork saga of contractors way over budget and behind schedule.

For citizens of the US, it sucks.

Using schools for daycare facilities isn't an honest discussion of the drawbacks of leaving schools closed either.

> ... Indeed, many people who care deeply about vulnerable populations in ways that he has never shown are desperate to open schools. Children can be less safe at home than they are at school; families can face a crisis if a parent or guardian (often a mother) has to stay with a child rather than go to work.

> But as Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, put it last week, when she announced that all school instruction in her city will be remote at least until November, we have now moved to “a very different place in the arc of the pandemic.”...