What we do know is that the Trump administration, which is concentrating instead on the protection of statues, is unlikely to be much help.
When will school start? Where will it be? It's a month out from when a lot of kids start school and some of the largest school districts don't have a plan. They don't even have a start date. If they do have a start date, such as in Los Angeles, it's not clear if kids will be on campus.
It's a full-on crisis of society. The children can't really learn this way. And the parents can't work this way.
Remote learning is not going to cut it. It's just not.
And if parents are assisting remote learning all day, or even some days each week, they're not working. The reality is that a big part of what school does for society is childcare.
Distance learning may be better than nothing. You may even be missing it if you're trying to deal with the camp and activity vacuum this summer and your kids have found a way to play Fortnite or watch Netflix for a disgusting number of hours each day until you loose them, feral, into the neighborhood just so you can do your own work for a disgustingly few hours.
Pity the souls of the parents trying to work without daycare for kids too young to go feral. That's assuming you still have work: CNN's Tami Luhby reports that parents who have been able to claim unemployment benefits if their schools or childcare closed down because of Covid may not be able to now that some options are opening back up, even if they're very limited.
Nope, distance learning is not the ultimate answer.
There are a variety of models at play elsewhere, like the staggered schedules and strict distancing. Or, in Denmark, some schools have isolated each classroom into cohorts, or protective bubbles, and there is no mingling outside of a class. But in the UK, the government had to abandon a plan to reopen all schools.
The resurgence has made an already cloudy situation even worse. Even where schools are making plans to reopen, it's not even clear whether they'll be able to stay that way, since many states have stalled or reversed their plans to reopen. Schools need to have plans for remote learning and plans for in-person learning and be ready to pivot if their states turn into hotspots again.
This is already complicating plans in Arizona and California.
Read more about how states and school districts are dealing (or not) with a resurgence of the virus.
Kids need in-person learning. The American Academy of Pediatrics, which presumably has public health as well as the well-being of individual kids in its purview, released a statement Monday calling for schools to make a priority out of kids being physically in the classroom.
The statement also says there's evidence the last six months have harmed children and put them at greater risk of morbidity and mortality:
"Policies to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 within schools must be balanced with the known harms to children, adolescents, families, and the community by keeping children at home."
Covid is still going to be a concern. Teachers' unions and parents, meanwhile, are going to be focused on keeping themselves and their individual kids safe from Covid.
Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul voiced these concerns quite well yesterday when he pushed Dr. Anthony Fauci on the schools issue during congressional testimony. But he laced his frustration at closed schools with a large number of inaccurate statements that it's safe for kids, that they don't transmit the virus. Read a fact check of Paul's comments here.
Sterile classrooms? Ha. CNN's Evan McMorris-Santoro wrote about one New York school district recently and described how they're still weighing a variety of plans.
But I wondered what it'll ultimately be like for kids who do finally show up. Here's how Evan described the cumbersome process to get inside and be inside a school, even without students.
Going into a school building in New York these days is a time-consuming process. Visitors are required to have their temperature checked and are asked a series of questions about any possible symptoms related to Covid-19 before they are allowed to set foot inside. Once there, they are closely monitored by staff who swoop into recently vacated rooms to disinfect everything inside.
As with many places nationwide, there's no official start date for the 2020-2021 school year and the clock is ticking on summer.
"complete" - Google News
July 02, 2020 at 11:15AM
https://ift.tt/2BVA1q7
The schools situation is a complete crisis. And completely unfixable - CNN
"complete" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2Fvz4Dj
https://ift.tt/2YviVIP
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