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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

Has any country made noticeable progress in improving the situation for schooling (EDIT: during covid waves) compared to lets say 18 months ago? Here in Germany the mantra seems to be "keep the schools running at all costs!" - except if "costs" means spending anything or preparing anything. So we don't have meaningful improvements done to schools, still don't have universal setups for remote or hybrid schooling, any non-standard concepts to roll out... (well, I guess some more moodle installs. but that's really not the biggest thing that needs solving. and do testing at schools now, but even that's seems to have been winged quite a lot.)

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I’ve got a kindergartener doing remote learning. The school system has adopted Google Suite as their platform(1). Default setup is a Chromebook. Format is pretty standard (recorded morning message and various activities throughout the day). A couple of live sessions are planned, with the class broken up into two groups to reduce the hectic video calls.

Return to school is planned in two weeks. Testing before attending school will be mandatory. I’m sure there will be hiccups as desperate parents looking to shed their children will lie about kids being positive. However, the public health department has accepted Omicron infection as inevitable and is taking measures to slow spread, rather than eliminate it.

(1) I should note that Google Suite being made available to schools is an amazing long-term strategy. It reminds me of Adobe’s policy of lax licensing security for Photoshop two decades ago, which basically assured their current market dominance now due to familiarity with their product.

Honestly the fact that Google got entrenched even more (or Zoom) is kinda scary to me. A few years ago it was noted that Google was basically giving away tech for free to schools so that they could embed themselves and eventually start squeezing money out of the education system (this happens internationally).

With Covid, everything kind of got forced onto schools that weren't technically prepared. I'm afraid of what costs we'll pay when our education system is also owned (via tech) by private industry.

Italy is the same, "school must be in presence" is a kind of mantra, and though it is (IMHO) right in theory, it fails in practice (where/when teachers, janitors, bus drivers, and even pupils are COVID positive in more than a tiny fraction).

Schools (generally speaking) are due to reopen on monday the 10th, but very likely only a part of them will actually be able to.

I have two toddler granddaughters. Both their parents had COVID last year (presumably delta), so I guess the kids must have caught it too. Their mother teaches in primary school, and is tested daily.

It's completely inadequate to rely on online schooling for small kids; a large part of what's important in their schooling is interacting with other kids. Over-12s: maybe not so much.

So I think it's inevitable that more-or-less all schools are going to be disease-ridden. Really, they always have been (i.e. not just COVID). It's similar with hospitals; the whole point of a hospital is that it's full of sick people. I hate hospital waiting rooms.

School year in Northern Spain went on as normal with a class intermittently being sent home due to a positive case. Classes were kept in "independent bubbles" and did not mix to ensure better social distancing.

From a parental point of view I don't think there is much more you can do. They just relaxed the rules further to only send home classes for a week if 5 or more kids test positive.

Having the classes have been incredibly good for the kids to be allowed to socialise and keep everyone including parents sane. Considering how low their change of getting seriously ill and how the new variant is spreading I think it will be back to normality in less than two months.

Well... Most Asian countries seem to only fail your definition because the situation there was mostly okay 18 months ago, so they didn't have room to improve.

fair point, clarified with an edit. (i.e. the standard is not "what were you doing 18 months ago", but "how prepared are you for schooling in a covid wave now vs how prepared you were 18 months ago")

Germany was most okay 18 months ago also...

Ireland is similarly keen to keep schools open.

Children from age 5 upwards are being vaccinated as of today, and the main focus in school buildings is on getting adequate ventilation and HEPA filters into classrooms. Contact tracing in schools has been not been a priority, for better or for worse.

The will is there, and there's money available to spend, but the implementation has been a bit less than stellar.

Yeah,I just don't get why we stopped contact tracing schools.

Well I do actually, it was causing so much disruption that it made in person schooling almost impossible.

HEPA filters seem like an obvious win, but there's clearly a bunch of RCT extremists in NPHET ;)

I've got a kid in grade 1, and I honestly don't know how contact tracing is supposed to work. Ten minutes after talking to grandma, if you ask him who he's spoken to today, he can't remember. If you ask him what he talked to grandma about, it's a mix of truth and fiction. He doesn't know the names of many classmates. Contact tracing depends on reliable narrators -- young children are far from that.

I do wish that we'd have something though. Our local government has just given up altogether.

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