Ronni
Well-known Member
- Location
- Nashville TN
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos spent the weekend pushing for the Trump administration’s case to quickly reopen public schools. She downplayed the guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that called in-person classes the “highest risk” scenario for schools. Last week, President Trump threatened to cut off federal funding to schools that did not reopen fully.
There Is data, collected from around the world, that suggests that children are far less likely to become seriously ill from the coronavirus than adults.
That is all well and good, but it doesn’t address the complex and multilayered and truly confounding issues surrounding kids being infected while at school. I mean, what happens if a child tests positive?
Does the teacher and all the kids in that classroom have to quarantine for 14 days? And the parents of the infected child, them too? And what about the parents' co-workers, all of whom might have been exposed? The teacher's family, his/her friends she might have come into contact with, the other teachers in the break room where they all congregated?
I mean, it's just mind boggling how quickly the situation can spiral if even ONE child in public school becomes infected! And even if the rest of the kids in class don't quarantine, will there be a substitute teacher willing to step in and teach the rest of the students, knowing that they have all been exposed to the virus?
Every state has their own re-opening protocols of course. Nashville Public Schools is not re-opening this first semester, they're gearing up to be completely virtual, which a LOT of pushback from some parents I might add, primarily from the folks who have to leave their homes to work, but their kids can't go to school so who will watch/teach them? It's a crappy situation for them.
And then of course, there are the parents who are at home because they can work from home, or because Mom or Dad has been the primary caregiver of the children and has stayed at home and let the other parent work. But even some of them (my daughter has had some frantic phone calls from her friends about this) are freaking out that they have to teach their kid(s) all semester, because they don't know how/their kids won't listen/they will lose their mind if the don't get some separation from their kid(s) etc.
There are all kinds of resources being provided for the children to learn at home, but none that I've been able to find to help the parents teach them, parents who are in a lot of cases completely unprepared to be doing this.
I'm grateful that it hasn't affected my grands to any great degree. Paige, my daughter, has been homeschooling her young kids from the get-go, so it won't change her situation much. My other grands are all older, middle/high school, and don't require the kind of supervision that a younger child tends to need.
There are no perfect answers, no "right" way to do this. No matter what decisions are made, it's going to have a deeply negative impact on some, while being totally OK with others.
There Is data, collected from around the world, that suggests that children are far less likely to become seriously ill from the coronavirus than adults.
That is all well and good, but it doesn’t address the complex and multilayered and truly confounding issues surrounding kids being infected while at school. I mean, what happens if a child tests positive?
Does the teacher and all the kids in that classroom have to quarantine for 14 days? And the parents of the infected child, them too? And what about the parents' co-workers, all of whom might have been exposed? The teacher's family, his/her friends she might have come into contact with, the other teachers in the break room where they all congregated?
I mean, it's just mind boggling how quickly the situation can spiral if even ONE child in public school becomes infected! And even if the rest of the kids in class don't quarantine, will there be a substitute teacher willing to step in and teach the rest of the students, knowing that they have all been exposed to the virus?
Every state has their own re-opening protocols of course. Nashville Public Schools is not re-opening this first semester, they're gearing up to be completely virtual, which a LOT of pushback from some parents I might add, primarily from the folks who have to leave their homes to work, but their kids can't go to school so who will watch/teach them? It's a crappy situation for them.
And then of course, there are the parents who are at home because they can work from home, or because Mom or Dad has been the primary caregiver of the children and has stayed at home and let the other parent work. But even some of them (my daughter has had some frantic phone calls from her friends about this) are freaking out that they have to teach their kid(s) all semester, because they don't know how/their kids won't listen/they will lose their mind if the don't get some separation from their kid(s) etc.
There are all kinds of resources being provided for the children to learn at home, but none that I've been able to find to help the parents teach them, parents who are in a lot of cases completely unprepared to be doing this.
I'm grateful that it hasn't affected my grands to any great degree. Paige, my daughter, has been homeschooling her young kids from the get-go, so it won't change her situation much. My other grands are all older, middle/high school, and don't require the kind of supervision that a younger child tends to need.
There are no perfect answers, no "right" way to do this. No matter what decisions are made, it's going to have a deeply negative impact on some, while being totally OK with others.
