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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

The board could have opened schools months ago, but chose not to.

The board opened some schools for a single day at the end of the school year, just to qualify for state funding to pay teachers.

The board spent time (whilst schools were closed) deciding how to rename schools, something which has zero impact on educational outcomes.

The board has a member who made racist remarks on Twitter and, despite not losing her position, is suing the school board: https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board...

These are other reasons to be dissatisfied.

More concerning to some people is that becoming a member of the SFBOE is a common launching point for the SF Board of Supervisors.

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> The board spent time (whilst schools were closed) deciding how to rename schools, something which has zero impact on educational outcomes.

I'd like to expand on this one, as it's been a particular frustrating one. It launched San Francisco's school system into the national spotlight as our Board of Education debated this publicly and initially planned to spend millions of dollars before the outrage and backlash canceled these plans.

Amongst other issues, they did short, haphazard research on the origins of the names of the schools, instead typing common Hispanic surnames into Google/Wikipedia, finding the first result, and deciding that the word colonizer being mentioned in the Wikipedia article was sufficient to rename the school. They problem? Wrong person, they didn't bother to look so far as the school's website to determine who it was named after. Here's a video of the full deliberation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1jj33NBAH8

Some articles summarizing other issues with this process: https://abc7news.com/sfusd-san-francisco-unified-schools-dis...

While here, I'd also like to throw in this article about Alison Collins, the school board member who is suing her colleagues and the city for $87 million dollars: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/Alis...

The teachers were worried about Covid.

Kids weren't vaccinated.

Kids don't need to be vaccinated. Adults who are concerned about it, including teachers, should be. Keeping schools closed because children aren't vaccinated is irrational.

> Kids don't need to be vaccinated.

A large unvaccinated reservoir population in constant contact with the vaccinated population is how you breed variants that are, e.g., more dangerous to young people (like Delta already is) and more likely to break through existing vaccines (which Delta also is, though not intensely so from the information I've seen.)

What the heck are you talking about? Brazil variant for example is pretty brutal on kids, death is not so uncommon result. School is one of the worst places for spreading, since tons of kids lack will/discipline to behave consistently, and are cramped in various classes. Once 1 member of household is sick, the chance rest will get it is pretty high.

Remote teaching sucks for many reasons for kids and should be used only when really unavoidable, but to claim kids are a-OK and shouldn't be vaccinated ain't based on science I've read so far.

The CDC disagrees with you: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

> Although children can be infected with SARS-CoV-2, can get sick from COVID-19, and can spread the virus to others, less than 10% of COVID-19 cases in the United States have been among children and adolescents aged 5–17 years (COVID Data Tracker). Compared with adults, children and adolescents who have COVID-19 are more commonly asymptomatic (never develop symptoms) or have mild, non-specific symptoms.

> Some studies have found that it is possible for communities to reduce incidence of COVID-19 while keeping schools open for in-person instruction.

> Evidence suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student.

> A study comparing county-level COVID-19 hospitalizations between counties with in-person learning and those without in-person learning found no effect of in-person school reopening on COVID-19 hospitalization rates when baseline hospitalization rates were low or moderate.

SF has some of the lowest infection rates in the country. So there is no scientific reason to keep schools closed when you see the harm it is causing disadvantaged families.

Something that is often overlooked in these conversations is the elementary schools should perhaps be considered completely differently from high schools. There were zero transmissions between students at my kids elementary school this whole year, despite the school opening as quickly as possible and despite several kids with asymptomatic COVID showing up at school and only being detected belatedly. I don’t think the same outcome would necessarily be expected at a high school.

This is relevant because younger kids need more supervision and are less likely to spread COVID, while older kids need less supervision and are more likely to spread; therefor keeping older kids home and sending younger ones in might be totally rational. But it doesn’t seem like this gets brought up.

My four year old has far better mask discipline than the majority of adults, kids are adaptable

5% of vaccinated people aren't immune. Teachers don't accept those odds.

I think bunnypapr would have been perfect to protect teachers if safety were the primary concern https://bunnypapr.com

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