Disclaimer: I have a paid work gig project that has to get out the door, so I’m going to have write this quickly. Probably too quickly.

FINALLY. People suddenly realized that our schools are probably not going to open, if it is left up to local education officials (and the teachers’ unions), and that it MAJOR FUCKING DISASTER. It’s a disaster for the economy, and for kids and parents.

It’s a disaster for the young kids, whose little pliable brains were completely neglected for half a year. Did you know there is a short window of time to teach certain skills, like handwriting, and when that window shuts, it’s very, very hard to learn those skills.

It’s a disaster for special ed kids, who were totally neglected for six months. Those kids need every second of education that they can get, and they got nada.

It’s a disaster for teenagers, who are prone to depression and self-hatred. Without their packs of friends, they have been moping in their rooms for half a year. What happens when we add another year onto the prison sentence? Bad stuff.

And women, who had to pick up the slack, are fucked career-wise. They have been the unpaid laborers of the school districts for six months. Now add another year? Screw you. Pay me.

Schools could reopen if we made schools the priority for the pandemic relief efforts. Instead of opening bars, let’s force everyone to wear masks and open the schools in September er.

Speaking of bars, my college kid is going to get a job as a bus boy at a bar and grill this week. Society thinks it is okay for my kid to work in a restaurant around a whole bunch customers, many of whom are teachers and professors, but he can’t take an upper level seminar with ten people. THERE WILL BE MORE PEOPLE IN THE RESTAURANT THAN IN THE SEMINAR ROOM. Will someone explain this to me?

Right now, I don’t expect either of my kids to enter a classroom in September, and I basically want to stab everyone.

Betsy DeVos gave a press conference about the need to open schools this morning, and for probably for the first time ever, I agreed with everything she said. That is where we are at, people. Dogs and cats living together.

This whole ideal of public education may be already falling apart. I’m hearing stories about armies of tutors being hired this summer to make up for the complete and utter collapse of public education this spring. The rich and the UPM are going to have governesses and tutors. Everybody will get trade school.