Yesterday, I wrote a quick, profanity-laden blog post about why I thought that schools should open, but other parts of the society should close. “Lisasg2” wrote two excellent comments about her fears for the health of her husband, a public school teacher, should schools reopen. I responded in the comment section, but I’m turning my comment into a post, because I’m curious what other people think.
Lisa, I hear you. Nobody wants anything to happen to your husband. At least, I don’t. If something did happen to him, I would join you in any boycott of society. But here’s where I’m at…
I go the local supermarket once a week now. It’s a standard suburban supermarket – medium sized, not the fancy type place. Everybody knows me, because I used to shop there everyday. I go in there once per week now, and chat with the workers, who are all middle aged men and women. I ask them, “what’s the story? Anybody here sick? Everybody well?” And they always say, “Knock on wood. Yes.” These workers, who work in a confined space and in contact with hundreds of people of dubious hygiene, are safe.
My area of New Jersey was in the hot spot for the bad Italian version of the virus, and we now have hardly any cases. I’m sure that closing the schools helped to stop the spread. I was very vocal, if not here than on twitter and Facebook, that schools had to shut down in the spring. Also, we are militant mask wearers in this area of the country. I still walk to the other side of the street to put lots of room between myself and other pedestrians. We also shut businesses, churches, and everything.
Those measures clearly worked. The numbers prove it, even if people discount my anecdotal chats with supermarket employees.
Now, people in all sorts of professions are preparing to go back. Steve’s home until January, only because the company is saving money by having his team work from home. Other workers at his company are already back in the office. My BIL who is the director of a major architecture firm, is preparing to open his offices this fall. My neighbors the doctors are back. Jonah’s dentist is back. The local bank is open. Every other profession, if they haven’t fired everyone, is preparing to reopen.
Maybe that’s foolish. I’m not sure. But I do think that the lessons from this area of the country are super important. Masks and social distancing are highly, highly effective. Now, you might convince me that those measure are impossible in a classroom. You could also convince me that schools won’t be able to afford cleaning products and the safety procedures that are in effective in the private sphere. But we should think through options and take into consideration the incredible toll on children and families on school closures.
I also think the argument can be made that society clearly values teachers. After all, I have not read any accounts of mass furloughs or layoffs of teachers, which has happened in other professions. Other workers, like the people who work for my husband, are home schooling their kids, while putting in a full day on their computers. They are doing two jobs every single day. We need to honor those people and appreciate their sacrifices.
Also, keep in mind that I am arguing for school openings, and I have a child with uncontrolled epilepsy. The medicine still isn’t working. He had a seizure during our vacation last week. The life expectancy for someone with autism and epilepsy is 39. If he gets a fever, it could trigger a massive, life-ending seizure.
Still, I want my son back in school, because I believe that safety precautions work, and I can’t bare to see him so isolated.
Apt. 11d 
One problem is all of the places where political office-holders (I won’t say leadership in this instance) are pushing school systems to open without having done, and without planning to do, the things necessary to bring down the case count. I’m thinking of places in Georgia and Tennessee, where friends are talking about what’s happening in their localities. I’m also thinking of the example of Israel, about which Abigail Nussbaum recently wrote:
I’m still not super convinced that Berlin’s plans to go back semi-normal in the fall (well, second week of August) are all that great. The city has averaged 70 new cases a day the last week in a population of 3.8 million. That’s not quite twice what all of South Korea is averaging in a population of 51 million, so there’s a long way to go to safety. But American numbers are just crazy scary, and going up. I mean, NJ is one of the better parts of the States, but the number of daily infections there there is not far from Germany’s number, on one-tenth the population.
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Yeah, I am looking at this very much from a Jersey perspective, where we have completely changed behaviors. When I went to NC last week, I couldn’t believe that people were acting so irresponsibly. I do think that for schools to open up around the country, everybody has to be super vigilant in all other aspects of their lives. For me, it seems like an easy trade-off. Wear a mask, send a kid to school. But maybe that won’t fly elsewhere.
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I think we have to be careful to think that we’ve done has worked. I am now worrying about our increasing caseload in WA, after thinking that we had our numbers under control. New Jersey is looking good (caseloads lower than WA, though deaths are still the same). But, things could change.
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First let me say thank you, Laura, for this blog. I’ve been reading it since maybe 2004-2005, and though I don’t comment much, I read almost every day. It is the only blog I read. You have created a wonderful community. Much appreciation for what you share with all of us.
I’m glad that teachers are now essential workers. What a tragedy that most Americans didn’t realize that (not Laura or the community here, of course; I mean generally) until this moment, and the first consequence of realizing it will be putting teachers in jeopardy. I hope we act more like it’s so. I hope that people will clap for teachers, at least occasionally, the way they did for health care professionals. I hope people will double and triple tip (at Christmas? end of next year?) the way we did with Instacart shoppers. I hope red staters where teachers are paid virtually nothing will at least donate funds to teacher’s societies, the way they do organizations dedicated to the police and other first responders, and hold huge benefits for the families of those who die at City Hall. I also hope among the educated elite we give them just a little more respect. Most of these plans to re-open schools are being made without teacher input because the elite do not respect teachers. Doctors do not respect teachers. Academics do not respect teachers. At least grant them more respect.
Brief story. My husband has a Ph.D. and was one of those who intended to be an academic. He didn’t try (just one year, actually) because of the two-body problem–because he wanted to marry me, to have a family with me. Still his family of origin, many of whom are medical doctors, have insufficient respect for his career or accomplishments. His brother and wife are both doctors. In the spring, the family wanted to have a get-together. We didn’t want to go as the doctors were seeing patients, and in our state there was a shelter in place order. We weren’t supposed to go! In a long discussion about it with my mother-in-law, I said something about how he’d have to go back to work in the fall and he’d be at risk then, so we were protecting him now. I said he’s an essential worker. She laughed. “He’s not an essential worker,” she said. (And don’t think teachers don’t suffer from low-level denigration all the time). Lesson learned. Teachers are essential workers only when we want something from them. The rest of the time, to the elite, they’re not essential workers. Not like doctors. Etc. Etc.
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Laura wrote, “My area of New Jersey was in the hot spot for the bad Italian version of the virus, and we now have hardly any cases. I’m sure that closing the schools helped to stop the spread. I was very vocal, if not here than on twitter and Facebook, that schools had to shut down in the spring. Also, we are militant mask wearers in this area of the country. I still walk to the other side of the street to put lots of room between myself and other pedestrians. We also shut businesses, churches, and everything. Those measures clearly worked. The numbers prove it, even if people discount my anecdotal chats with supermarket employees.”
What if NJ’s “secret” was mostly just getting a lot of people sick and having a lot of people die already?
Everything shut down here for a long time, too, in fact before there was any significant amount of illness or death–but the closures just mostly seem to have delayed the first wave, as opposed to stopping it. The delay is nothing to sneeze at–there’s a lot more PPE available now, doctors know more, the counter-measures are more developed, etc., etc.
I’m also wondering about the practicality of teaching (particularly in the lower grades) with face coverings. Little kids need to be able to see teachers’ expressions, and vice versa and it’s essential for subjects like reading and foreign language to be able to see what people are doing with their faces. I actually wonder if we shouldn’t have a large clear shield installed in classrooms (something like our HEB checkers have at the store). You wouldn’t be able to use it all the time and there would be issues with sound projection, but it might be helpful, especially for upper grade teachers who do a lot of talking in one spot, as opposed to circulating around.
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I’m still sending my son to school if it opens in the fall (which is the plan) but I think it’s going to be a disaster on societal level. I’m just not willing to bear the costs of his continued quarantine given that every attempt at an effective response has been deliberately hamstrung. Large numbers are going to die unnecessarily but I don’t see any realistic way of stopping that before enough people die that nobody will believe the president when he shouts about too much testing being done.
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A bit of self promotion, but you might be interested in this white paper that I wrote with a group from Harvard:
Click to access 20schoolsduringpandemic2.pdf
There’s a lot to say about your post Laura, and I am largely in agreement. There’s a lot of distrust, though, of claims about the effectiveness of social distancing and masks, and I understand why: in the early stages public authorities simply told fibs about masks. Instead of saying “Yes, they’re very effective, but please don’t use them because we haven’t got a good enough supply for hospital and clinic workers” they cast doubt on their effectiveness. We have politicians in charge who no sane person could trust (I’m not saying no sane person could vote for them, but even people who vote for them can’t trust them). There’s a huge social cost associated with the tendency of public health authorities to bend, or obscure, truths which they think will lead people to act in suboptimal ways.
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Thanks for the report, harry! Will definitely check it out.
And, you are totally right about how leadership both screwed up and has been insufficient. Sad. People died and will die, because of that.
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We have to be nimble and data driven and be ready to change plans. And, that’s the problem. I see little willingness to do all those things. I see pie in the sky plans from academics and thinkers that will be implemented in ways that burden the people on the ground. And, worst, as we say about the half measures of implementation, they won’t work. If those distancing measures & masking don’t work, and we send people to school to see the adults getting infected or sick? Then we’re back to square one.
I have my pies in the sky but I see little evidence that we will go back to school (as a country — I have higher hopes for my own spot) in a way that goes beyond sticking our fingers in our ears and humming and hoping.
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Regarding teachers and respect — I have a great deal of respect for teachers and enough observation of the best to see what they do. I’ve always thought people who think they could take over the job of the teachers (Americorp, executivies, . . . .). An experiment I’d like to see is to have people in the Bill & Melinda Gates education division take over a classroom for a month and see what they could teach. Having watched my kids teachers, I am certain that I could not do a better job — even when my field specific expertise is higher.
But, teachers are essential workers now. We could take 3 month breaks from education in extreme circumstances (after all, we do over the summers) and, we did it in March not just to stop the spread but to protect the children, too. We can’t take year long breaks from educating the children. We also couldn’t develop an alternative system for food and other essentials, and so delivery people and grocery store employees became essential employees. Neither of those groups thought they would have to take risks to do their job. Health care folks know that risk is part of their job, but they too were asked to take on far more risk.
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I echo lisasg2’s gratitude. 🙂 I agree with bj – the trick is staying nimble, and we’re not doing it.
There is only one way forward and that really is to get Covid-19 under control as much as possible. I am daily sick that US leadership does not seem to have absorbed that.
In a Canadian context, I’m worried for teachers, parents, grandparents, and kids. I read the comments on the previous post and I agree with concerns about long-term effects. I also have lost a child to a 1:10,000 medical event + error due to understaffed hospital. I’m also worried about kids being out of school and our own Sick Kids hospital had similar recommendations to the AAP…but they were developed prior to Israel’s experience. We need to stay nimble.
I believe that our future holds a wave of people suffering from poor health, grief/complicated grief/PTSD, and economic difficulty. Our kids are going to need their mental health and education to meet these challenges. The world will need our teachers. We also at this point in history have a tremendous, in fact, unprecedented ability to share information and work together if we only would. I’m grateful to all the countries making their experiments visible with true, factual data. I wish the US were one of them.
What I am having trouble reconciling right now is how little of our capacity we are throwing at the educational issue, including here in Ontario. I wish all of our governments were bringing industry and creative leaders – ed tech, logistics, hospital space planners, hand sanitizer manufacturers – to the table, plus cold hard cash, to _support_ teachers and schools in whatever they need, and adjust as things go. Respond fast like Amazon. Support online learning and make it better and better for the inevitable shut downs (what happens when 20% of teachers in one school are sick?), support classrooms, find space, hire more staff and teachers and have teachers mentor. Pay kids not in college (or forgive loans) to be kind of nannies for families who need help.
Of course that takes money and muscle and that is not what’s happening.
In Toronto we had 54 new cases today. We still have to Sept 8 to bring those numbers lower. But I honestly believe that when it’s cold and the forced air comes on, we will be back to April or worse. And it may happen before then, because so much of it is luck and testing – do you catch the cases when they are at 2, 4, 16 – or 256 because you happened to have asymptomatic super spreaders and your testing was off. I still don’t know where my family will fall in all this, and it may be a week-to-week decision.
The question for me isn’t will there be some people who will get in the middle. There will be people who get sick; mitigation will not be 100%, and that may be my family. It has been before. The question is, are we doing our best to make that the smallest number of people possible. Right now…no. No we are not. I’m in touch with my MPP to let him know what I would like his government to do, which is the best I can personally do right now.
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Jenn said, ” Pay kids not in college (or forgive loans) to be kind of nannies for families who need help.”
I’ve also seen the suggesting of hiring young adults that age to be “camp counselors” to reduce school group sizes or manage kids on campus when it’s not their instructional days. (I’ve previously mentioned having a lot of concerns about what happens when kids who are doing 2 days of school on campus go back and forth repeatedly between home, school and their possibly illegal daycare situation.)
It might, by the way, be a really good idea to put up some large, covered outdoor structures, even very temporary ones. (My kids’ school was talking about doing that a year or two ago and I really wish we had it.)
“And it may happen before then, because so much of it is luck and testing – do you catch the cases when they are at 2, 4, 16 – or 256 because you happened to have asymptomatic super spreaders and your testing was off.”
I continue to think that schools ought to do regular batch testing.
A good thing that is happening is that it looks like elite colleges are going to be leading the way in terms of figuring out how to safely do college.
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Oh, you guys are too sweet. Thanks for reading this blog! I see can’t believe that we’ve all been together for so many years.
More later. I just finished off a couple of huge tasks, and I’m about to reward myself with some carbs and wine.
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Mmmh, I’ll join in that. Still together after all these years. (About eleven, I think.)
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Hmm. I’m writing from Israel, where, as Doug noted, the school openings 6 weeks ago led to a dramatic resurgence which is now completely out of control (and yes, it clearly was about the schools; that is where the infections occurred). The problem isn’t just that schools and buses are by definition closed spaces, especially in winter or, as here, in intense heat; Not just that kids cannot maintain social distancing and masks fro 8 hours at a time; it’s also that without either doubling the physical buildings or halving the days in school, there is no realistic way to keep the classrooms small and the bodies 2 meters apart. The result was the spiraling of the pandemic – and families accepting the high likelihood that by sending their kids to school they may all be sent into 14-days quarantine any moment.
Now, Denmark did manage to reopen schools with just a very moderate climb in infections – but they only opened for younger kids (I think up to 4th Grade).
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That’s interesting — the WaPost article doesn’t mention schools and talks about weddings and bars and restaurants as being the prime vectors.
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I saw a really good idea today–no indoor PE.
It goes without saying, but also: no assemblies, no choir, no multi-class activities.
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https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-education/2020/07/08/trump-pushes-reopen-schools-arizona-school-leaders-face-more-uncertainty/5401041002/
“The school district’s superintendent, Jeff Gregorich, said three teachers went above and beyond in taking precautions against the spread of the virus while teaching in the same room, but all three contracted COVID-19.”
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Oooooh!
On the other hand, AZ is virtually our worst case scenario right now.
I’d also like some more specifics on what the precautions taken were.
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For me, the hardest part of all this is that every single option we’re looking at regarding schools (and also universities) is shitty. Going back face to face is shitty because it will endanger our teachers, staff, and our kids. Staying online is shitty because of the impact it has on kids (the learning loss and delayed development is going to be profound), families (particularly women), and our economy (which won’t be able to start up without functioning schools).
My deepest concern that we are underestimating the impact this will have on kids, particularly poor kids, children of color, and children with special educational needs, because the future consequences are far off and difficult to measure. I get that teachers are rightly concerned about their health and safety, but who is advocating for these kids in this debate? Their voices need to be heard, and their needs more strongly articulated.
The most depressing part of this for me is the seemingly complete inability of so many on both sides (pro back to school and anti back to school) to show some compassion for those making decisions. Yes – there has been a total lack of leadership at the national level and in many states. But at the same time, there are a lot of people, particularly in schools and academia, trying to make the best of a really bad situation.
We’re less than two months out from the start of our K-12 schools and our universities, and I don’t think we have any clue as to what we’re going to be doing. I am trying to be okay with that as I recognize how hard this is. I am involved in local decision making here (sitting on our local school committee and having recently moved to campus administration), and I have ZERO idea of what we should be doing.
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slnoonanj said, “We’re less than two months out from the start of our K-12 schools and our universities, and I don’t think we have any clue as to what we’re going to be doing. I am trying to be okay with that as I recognize how hard this is. I am involved in local decision making here (sitting on our local school committee and having recently moved to campus administration), and I have ZERO idea of what we should be doing.”
One thing I’ve been realizing this week is that schools need a lot of protective equipment and supplies for in-person reopening, and they probably don’t have that stuff.
Worse, they may not even know what they need, and the best time to place those orders was probably 3 months ago.
It would have been better to have this conversation a lot earlier, but it is time to ask our public health people, if schools are reopening, what stuff do they need?
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I had the thought about protective equipment just this morning, as I was continuing my search for hand sanitizer & cleaning wipes. When the pandemic started, my kiddo told me that there wasn’t soap in the bathrooms (yech, yech yech). I sent him with hand sanitizer then. And, they did get soap (which then caused lines).
I think the individual logistics of acquiring these needed supplies is one of the deep failures of leadership — the stories of doctors trying to make back alley deals, the Patriots owners plane being used to pick up protective equipment, the Illinois parking lot deal for millions of dollars of equipment, the failed deals where governments/others were conned are terrible examples of logistical failure. And schools competing for protective equipment will hurt everyone.
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If we are reopening schools we also need to make sure that parents with jobs aren’t penalized if they need to pull their children out of school if their particular school has an outbreak.
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Marianne said, “If we are reopening schools we also need to make sure that parents with jobs aren’t penalized if they need to pull their children out of school if their particular school has an outbreak.”
That is a fair point.
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We need a general sick leave law.
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If we are reopening schools we also need to make sure that parents with jobs aren’t penalized if they need to pull their children out of school if their particular school has an outbreak.
This gets to what is one of the biggest potential problems with reopening the schools. Namely, the fact that so many parents don’t really care about schools as an educational resource but rather a place to warehouse their kids during the day. So, what happens when a kid gets coronavirus and the parent sends them to school with a fever anyway? Don’t tell me this won’t happen because parents already send their kids to school with vomiting or diarrhea or strep because they don’t want to take a day off instead.
I suppose we can hope that temperature checks would catch this but I doubt they will in all cases.
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You can be fired for not showing up to work even if your child is sick. I mean, you probably won’t be and I certainly won’t be, the huge numbers of people in that situation.
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Temperature checks aren’t going to stop presymptomatic spread. I think we are putting too much weight into symptom checks and surface cleaning and not enough into ventilation and masking (including, potentially medical grade masks). We don’t have them, but if we lack the will to contain the virus, that might be what we need to spend money on.
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You can be fired for not showing up to work even if your child is sick. I mean, you probably won’t be and I certainly won’t be, the huge numbers of people in that situation.
Yeah, I know this. But what is your point? Is it to excuse the inevitable situation where parents knowingly send their corona kids to school because they feel backed into a corner?
I already get pissed off when people send their strep or norovirus kids to school because they feel like they can’t do anything else and this would be worse. I mean, I feel sympathetic to their plight but I really don’t feel like it justifies exposing my kids to the plague.
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…and not enough into ventilation and masking…
If any MAGAts send unmasked kids to our school mumbling “Freedom. ‘Murica” I won’t be held responsible for my actions.
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My point is that how people keep getting away with this shit is by setting the peasants to fight against each other instead of the problem.
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My point is that how people keep getting away with this shit is by setting the peasants to fight against each other instead of the problem.
Yes. But here *the problem* is that we have a president who has totally failed in his job to lead the nation out of this mess and his MAGAt followers who are completely devoid of civic virtue. As a result, we should be in a position where we could reopen the schools without them turning into plague-ridden wasteland like most other civilized countries in the world instead of where we are now.
That is the problem, not the lack of universal sick leave problem. (Although solving that would be nice too.)
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“Namely, the fact that so many parents don’t really care about schools as an educational resource but rather a place to warehouse their kids during the day. So, what happens when a kid gets coronavirus and the parent sends them to school with a fever anyway? Don’t tell me this won’t happen because parents already send their kids to school with vomiting or diarrhea or strep because they don’t want to take a day off instead.”
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Whoops, let’s try that again…
“Namely, the fact that so many parents don’t really care about schools as an educational resource but rather a place to warehouse their kids during the day. So, what happens when a kid gets coronavirus and the parent sends them to school with a fever anyway? Don’t tell me this won’t happen because parents already send their kids to school with vomiting or diarrhea or strep because they don’t want to take a day off instead. ”
Commenting from another country…. but the schools here (both State and Church as well as Private) have been absolutely strict on kids with *any* symptoms of anything coming to school.
Messages home both before and after schools started up again, telling parents that kids with *any* respiratory infection symptoms must be kept home, and that if they turn up at school, they will be quarantined and parents called to collect them.
Just had to keep my kid home for 5 days with a common cold (just a snotty nose, no other symptoms of anything else) — luckily I can work from home, so could cope.
This isn’t just a paper warning, either. I know of parents who have been called in….
Of course, it simply means that those kids whose parents can’t take leave – are just left at home alone. But better than infecting the whole class.
It has meant a bit of leeway on assignments, though. As kids have needed more time to complete work, if they have to stay away for every sniffle.
Over the last 6 weeks since schools have been open again – the absentee rate has been up over 15%. Some of that is kids never coming back to school after being out over lockdown (truancy, or parents who basically don’t care about education at all), but a big chunk is a much higher rate of kids being kept home for all the usual minor winter ailments.
It can work, if there is the political will to make it work.
Of course, this doesn’t address the issue of asymptomatic infection – where there are no observable symptoms, but the child is still contagious. But, TBH – nothing resolves that except a hard total lockdown (only food and essential services open), enforced on the whole population. Which is clearly just not a realistic possibility in the US.
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There are no good solutions that are realistic in the US.
Even in socialist Massachusetts, our schools have had cuts in budget that have led to teacher layoffs (not summer layoffs, apparently, as I’d hoped.)
Meanwhile, in order to make reopening schools work, we probably need close to double the staff to keep groups of children small and stable and ensure they are distant from one another – we need more people because we have to both police and teach and find a way to encourage and connect. We need to be renting additional space (churches? Office buildings losing tenants? Municipal buildings?). We need to be realistic that keeping masks on small children for hours on end is not going to work, they will need mask breaks; how do we do that? Outside? And we need to be prepared to encourage and support any parents who are willing to keep their kids home and teach them there.
It’s not happening here. I haven’t heard of it happening elsewhere.
I read about college plans and I don’t feel any more encouraged that they have it down. In person but no in-person contact with anyone off campus? Social distancing among college students on the weekend? Sure, 70% will comply. Good luck with the rest.
What WILL happen is that once the infections are widespread enough or a teacher or two dies, the schools will shut down again and we’ll be right back where we started.
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Disney World opened today.
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And the tickets are sold out. It is mostly outside and people will be wearing masks and the number of people will be limited. I guess it will be an experiment.
The problem is that these experiments with 6 week timelines are not getting attention. I wonder what the study design would be? If we test everyone what do we learn? Maybe not much.
And, a negative COVID tests does not mean you are “clean”. There’s no evidence that tests turn positive as soon as you are exposed (recommendation is to test on day 4 after exposure) and knowledge of the relationship between a negative test (ie no (or low?) viral load) and transmission is not well understood.
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