outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

I went to catch a bus once in November, for the only time since February, and checking the timetable before leaving found that services had been cut so much that walking for 45 minutes got me there at the time the bus would have left my street

Here’s what happens when you unnecessarily and knowingly expose children, school staff and their families to increased risk of infection because you failed to put in place in U.K. schools the scientifically recognised mitigations for all indoor spaces where households mix! https://t.co/sSWR0d8dlH

— SafeEdForAll (@SafeEdForAll_UK) February 12, 2021

I know ppl don't like Eric F-D, but the rush to re-open schools more widely in March (and re-open when not enough if the pop have their vaccines) could still make for the next fuck-up.

it's already happening where I work - we're set to bring in many of the kids by end of March. very frustrating, especially with the new variant becoming dominant right around then, let alone the likely spike happening from the Super Bowl and this coming vacation week.

Many UK schools have been more than a third full throughout this "lockdown" so community transmission has remained high.

The reporting on school is so variable and I can't parse it. It seems dumb to re-open w/o vaccination and teachers are terrified and striking, but an article claims open schools are fine and everyone quotes this for months, but then I heard it reported that the data was bad and some of the schools included in that study WERE ACTUALLY CLOSED at the time their numbers were cited?

Idek

Fwiw https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/upshot/schools-reopening-coronavirus-experts.html

Vaccination not a hard requirement for a lot of these people although honestly at this point it seems churlish not to wait until teachers are vaccinated which could be weeks not months in the UK and US.

another wrinkle - there are teachers who won't get vaccinated, because they're just as foolish as the parents that want to pretend we don't live in a COVID world, which is just awesome. I'm not sure any govt has even attempted to require that teachers get vaccinated

Fwiw we just had some kids test positive at our school during the mandatory weekly covid testing (that public schools absolutely can’t afford), and it turned out they had gone to a Super Bowl party on Sunday with 8 other students. As a teacher, that’s one of the things about being back that makes me most nervous, that kids will socialize maskless, and then will need to eat lunch indoors with each other at school.

oh god, don't get me started on lunch. Right now at least we're in a half-day, AM/PM hybrid model so kids don't eat lunch in school at all. can't wait for that bomb to explode.

saw larry hogan's spokesman bragging that they are providing 4 million tests for schools. he knows how many tests they actually need but also that 4 million is a big enough number to say at a press conference and none of our shitty media outlets will do the math. it's basically dr. evil saying "one million dollars."

he’s a prince

Eric FD is not a reliable source - he will cite literally anything that sounds bad without verifying.

Forgive me if this sounds blasé, but I think we all know the reason why everyone (in the US at least) from scientific "experts" to Biden to local politicians are saying that it's okay to open schools again without full, mandatory vaccination of all teachers, and it has something to do with continuing to allow the gears of capitalism running.

Or not even continue, but FORCE those gears to run

My dad puts “experts” in scare quotes too

I mean, I trust vaccines and contemporary western medicine saved my life. But let's not pretend that some of these experts *might just* be on the side of the ruling classes who want their underlings back at work and not having to look after young children.

My question about schools reopening is: however we cut it, no vaccine has been approved for children yet, so there doesn’t seem to be a good solution for this

I'm not sure any govt has even attempted to require that teachers get vaccinated

Just logically I would think the burden on leadership is *offering* the vax to all teachers who want it and--tho this won't happen--their immediate households? That would be ideal. They can choose to get vaccinated and go back to work basically protected even if some of their students & colleagues aren't following guidelines and/or reject the vax.

I mistrust any rhetoric that involves blaming some teachers who "won't" get the vax, which we don't know yet if that's true and we don't (per an earlier post which cited raw numbers but no background info) know why they didn't show up for a single appt.

LAUSD is pushing for it fwiw https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-02-08/beutner-25000-covid-vaccines-reopen-elementary-schools

My question about schools reopening is: however we cut it, no vaccine has been approved for children yet, so there doesn’t seem to be a good solution for this

I mistrust any rhetoric that involves blaming some teachers who "won't" get the vax, which we don't know yet if that's true and we don't (per an earlier post which cited raw numbers but no background info) know why they didn't show up for a single appt.

From my anecdotal experience, it is true - it even came up in our union meeting yesterday. I do believe the majority of teachers want the vax, but there is definitely some element and disagreement among the ranks. And I'm in one of the hardest hit parts of NY, which makes it all the more flabbergasting.

That said, that we're getting pushed to this point now is overwhelmingly political pressure vs. getting children back to "normal". Everyone agrees remote teaching is far from ideal and actively damaging to some extent, and we'd all love to get back to where we were in February 2020, but considering the craziness we've been through to adjust/recreate our entire educational system this year, wouldn't it be nice to at least give the administration July and August to come up with a plan?

(The weekend after local protests occurred in a few times, our district superintendent announced a return to "full-time" to the public without giving a heads-up to the schools themselves, that we would bring back K-2 in "late March". Subsequent meetings confirmed there was absolutely no plan to how we would do this, and accommodate families that wanted to continue hybrid/remote learning, let alone handle the classes in the other grades.)

I do believe the majority of teachers want the vax, but there is definitely some element and disagreement among the ranks. And I'm in one of the hardest hit parts of NY, which makes it all the more flabbergasting.

Unfortunately I know this story well, because I worked in 2 schools in one of the Trumpiest parts of NYC, and a lot of the teachers drove in from even redder areas in Staten Island, Long Island, and NJ. NYC teachers as a whole are much whiter than the communities they serve in, which is a huge problem that the union addresses by lying about it and going "lalalalala I can't hear you!", ime.

Friends who worked in schools in Queens where most of the teachers drove from LI said the exact same thing, for the record.

But even knowing personally and anecdotally that there is some element of refusal among teachers/staff, I mistrust any argument that uses that as a foundation because it fits too neatly into anti-union, anti-worker arguments. Like...far-right conspiracy theory promoters created the problem of COVID denial, and then want to strategically use the believers that they created to undermine collective decision-making about safety for teachers. No thonx.

Forgive me if this sounds blasé, but I think we all know the reason why everyone (in the US at least) from scientific "experts" to Biden to local politicians are saying that it's okay to open schools again without full, mandatory vaccination of all teachers, and it has something to do with continuing to allow the gears of capitalism running.

― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Saturday, 13 February 2021 16:42 (two hours ago) link

IIRC you don’t have kids? Because I fully understand the logic of this from a lefty perspective. It seems very neat and airtight and clean from that perspective and makes it really easy to dismiss anyone saying otherwise, including, by the way, the American Academy of Pediatrics, notorious running dog of capitalism. But when you actually get to see the effects of this on your own kids and kids around them you might find it a little more complex than that.

So teachers should put themselves at risk of dying? Is that the balance of equities here?

Also just fwiw, having read the CDC guidelines very carefully, multiple times, they actually make it much harder to reopen schools than just saying “x number of teachers need to be vaccinated.” They set up much bigger roadblocks than that. I wish they had based it more on vaccination, which seems both a smarter safety move and an easier goal to satisfy (provided it’s not a 100% requirement because you can’t force people to get vaccinated and there are significant numbers of refusers)

Surely a shitty 18 months for young children is a small price to pay for the consequently not-dying adults

So teachers should put themselves at risk of dying? Is that the balance of equities here?

― Canon in Deez (silby), Saturday, February 13, 2021 2:27 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

Every day of living comes with a risk of dying. How much risk is tolerable is the hard question. Clearly I don’t consider the risk to be that high or I wouldn’t want to put my own kids at school at the risk of them bringing COVID home to me. I’d much prefer vaccination as a goal rather than the virtually unsatisfiable goals set up by the CDC. But even vaccination won’t make the risk zero.

Yes you’re okay with the risk but yknow there’s workers involved who may not be?

“Every day of living comes with the risk of dying” is rank sophistry

Have you bought that gun yet? To keep in the same home as your children? Who you’re so proprietarily concerned for?

Agree with in orbit: once teachers have actually been offered and given the vaccine, then we can figure out what to do if teachers are refusing to be vaccinated or refusing to teach if vaccinated. Until then, it's a moot point. Treat teachers like every other high risk group imo. Make the vaccine available, make it easy to sign up and get the vaccine, reach out to them to correct any misinformation, and then proceed from there. Trying to guess the attitudes of a huge and diverse workforce and make decisions accordingly is a recipe for paralysis and scapegoating.

No I haven’t. Not sure why you’ve made me some kind of personal cause but I am married to a teacher who will soon be vaccinated and going to work in person. I think vaccination would be the ideal metric, as I said, except that a lot of teachers refuse and I don’t know what to do about that other than maybe say return to school once all teachers who want the vaccine have had the chance.

Separately, accusing people of not actually caring about their own kids is a really bad look and one of the shittiest and worst moves I’ve seen among people who are against reopening schools. I don’t really expect people who don’t have kids to understand, but to me that just says that YOU don’t actually care about children at all.

It's not about having or not having kids. It's about worker safety.

I think people who don't have kids can understand. They were all kids once.

The idea that parenthood endows one with special ineffable understanding of or care for children is pretty outrageous to me also.

Me too.

I think man alive was objecting to the claim that people who want to reopen schools want to do it because they love capitalism.

I think it probably endows you with special understanding of what YOU want for YOUR child, intensely, and maybe rightfully? The most insistent voices for reopening I see in my feeds are the parents whose kids aren't doing well being out of school for whatever reasons. Advocating for your kid in that case is basically your job as a parent, and for some people I think that's probably the highest good in their hierarchy?

We are not all obligated to agree with them, however.

Kids who aren’t doing well out of school = most elementary school aged kids.

Adults who aren’t doing well during pandemic = most adults

Doing well in school and becoming a teacher so I can do well in a pandemic

The issue, for me, is that it shouldn't come down to whether teachers are willing to teach in a period of high transmission without a vaccine. There is a vaccine. We have the ability to lower transmission with lockdowns. If we're not using them, it's because we don't care enough to, and that's not on the teachers.

This country has a pattern of expecting teachers to put in extra labor to compensate for systemic failures, but at a certain point, our ability to give even more just becomes saturated. You can't keep making decisions that render school openings unsafe for staff and families, and act like it's the teachers who are making the call not to reopen schools.

The notion that anyone who is exposed to covid, whether they are teachers or frontline healthcare workers, is selfish or trying to ruin your life by not wanting the risk to themselves to be so high is a fucking toxic one and it needs to die already. Nobody signed up for this bullshit, the very least you should expect are safe working conditions. I was thinking about this attitude yesterday watching this video and I’m thinking about it now reading people just casually disregarding the risk to teachers.

Next time you want to order from @Deliveroo think about this 😂🤣😂🤣 pic.twitter.com/LNvXCgfUG4

— tom (@tom_the_cabbie) February 11, 2021

This country has a pattern of expecting teachers to put in extra labor to compensate for systemic failures

Uh, that's pretty much worldwide.

Agree with in orbit: once teachers have actually been offered and given the vaccine, then we can figure out what to do if teachers are refusing to be vaccinated or refusing to teach if vaccinated. Until then, it's a moot point. Treat teachers like every other high risk group imo. Make the vaccine available, make it easy to sign up and get the vaccine, reach out to them to correct any misinformation, and then proceed from there.

I mean, every decision about who to give vaccines to in the US is going to be made in that context. I was just talking about whether in-person teachers should be treated as high-risk workers or not. Whether the US should have enough vaccines for its high-risk workers is another question.