Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

Very much hoping that is also the right thread.

for venting our irrational Cat Food Fears and Experiences in 2020

Hurry!

Pretty sure Austin, TX is going to shut down businesses again some time in the next week.

I’ve been hearing oregon will shut down in restaurant dining and bars for like two weeks now, nothing

https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/crime/2020/07/07/knoxville-man-pulled-box-cutter-bus-driver-after-asked-wear-mask-warrants-state/5390345002/

Mugshots are getting a little too polished if you ask me

Everybody wants to be Mugshot BAE.

I suppose it was inevitable, but even though things are seemingly on track here, my older daughter's high school will be remote learning again for 2020-2021. There are just too many students and not enough space to ... space out. (I think they did the math and it would take an hour just to take 300 temperatures each day.) I believe the plan is divide all the students into A and B groups, each "going" to their virtual classes twice a week for an entire school day, with Wednesdays off. This is all understandable but less than ideal, of course, and even though they have built in time and resources for the kids who need the most help to get that help, I wonder what longterm effect this will have on learning for everyone. I was talking to a teacher some months back about two siblings she had in class, one with special needs and the other on gifted and talented track. She was worried more about the former, but that student apparently did ok with the remote system, whereas the gifted and talented student's grades took a huge hit (maybe because she knew the work didn't count, or not the same way?). I just heard from a friend whose son had a similarly topsy-turvy experience, apparently writing and doing his best on a paper at the end of last year because he *didn't* have to deal with the distractions and tedious structure of classroom instructions. I have no idea what this means for seniors, many of whom are readying themselves for colleges that similarly may or may not happen, at least not traditionally. I can only hope that they've devised a superior solution to the ad hoc instruction they tossed together at the start of this mess, which admittedly could have been worse.

If there's any silver lining to this school stuff it's that, ironically, we may find ourselves in a situation where the kids can't go to school because the schools can't make it safe for everyone, but kid may finally be allowed to hang out with groups of friends outside of school, which could assuage some concerns about their emotional growth and health.

good news...

1) latest COVID test = negative (as I expected)
2) my mother got a massive check for like 8 weeks of back federal unemployment today and 8 of state yesterday

Look after yourself, Neanderthal
Josh - that's so tough. It's a mess.

Just sneaking in a mini rant here about how I saw my parents for the first time since Feb and I asked several times to stay distanced, outside if possible, particularly as my kid is at school and liable to spread anything/have stuff spreaded this way, and of course it was ignored with them sitting the kids on laps, reading with heads together etc.

My mum is shielding and is in the high risk category but she hasn’t seen our son for 6 months and I’m not sure anything is going to stop her hugging him. We’ll be changing all his clothes beforehand, putting a mask on and hoping.

I think a hug is probably fine...*fingers Xd* it's more the fact they just seemed to completely forget that anything was different, and I'm sure this is how they are day-to-day despite saying "Oh yes we are distancing properly unlike those other sorts we see in the town..."

Josh, just outta interest, what school (DM if not interested in saying ... Or not, get it). I'm only asking, as my wife is kinda stressing about Loyola's Rogers Park campus gettin the ol force open, complete with creepy 'how comfortable on 5x scale are you about teaching in person', pay cuts, etc. Ya know - the more news stories I see about the push open K-12, I'm more and more convinced it's being done as a driver to open up higher Ed & charter schools, cause that's where the moolah is at for the rich boards members/Devos types.

OPRF in the People's Republic of Oak Park. I know they sent out surveys a week or so back and got a big response, so I can only assume their plans reflect the concerns and desires of the students, teachers and parents that responded. In our case it really is quite possibly simply a matter of space and logic, since 3400 kids is a huge number, and there is simply no way to safely divide them up in person. I mean, even the public pools here have decided to stay closed for the summer, and that's something I think the village *could* manage. It's a big bummer, because a lot of people are here for the school, and pay astronomical taxes for the privilege, but if you can't go to the school ... I know it's not the school's fault, but hearing this news (which may be formalized tomorrow morning) I had more than a few friends respond with some variation of "then why are we here?"

I promise you that opening public schools isn't a driver to open higher ed and charter schools. They are much more important in their own right. According to NCES:

~ 50 million kids attend public schools (k-12)
~ 3.5 million kids attend charter schools(k-12)
~ 5 million kids attend private schools (k-12)
~ 12 million kids attend higher ed (full time)
~ 7 million kids attend higher ed (part time)

ahem NONTRADITIONAL STUDENTS

NCES didn't offer that info, but IIRC it's like 30-40% of combined undergrad numbers?

The school I work for should be announcing within the next week whether they will be in person or not, so it’s a real sort of pins and needles feeling right now. Hasn’t helped to be inundated with doom and gloom emails about how “tough financial decisions” are coming if we go online and staff/faculty surveys about how comfortable we’d be on campus knowing that pay cuts and layoffs were the trade off, blah blah blah. It’s stressful.

I have no idea what to do with my elementary school kids in Houston. We should get an announcement on the 15th, but if school does reopen physically, we have the option to keep the kids home to learn remotely. Our five year old is set to enter Kindergarten and she NEEDS socialization. She is becoming feral and our ten year old is wilting. I have so much anger in me because this dumbfuck state in this dumbfuck country couldn't get it together and do the right thing. It is fucking kids up and I don't know what I want to happen when school starts.

really feeling that post. it’s infuriating. hang in there CA.

Yeah I don’t know what I’m going to do with my 5 year old all day if kindergarten doesn’t open. I’m supposed to be working but I’ve spent the past hour listening to him devise a jail escape plan

Because I'm up early, anyway, I'm about to dial in to our elementary school district board meeting (our high school is its own separate school district) to find out where things stand for Fall 2020. Should be fun. Especially fun that such an important meeting is happening while so many parents are working. I know not everyone has the luxury of auditing in their jammies like me.

Anyway, I am not hopeful. It's kind of a fait accompli lose-lose. Stay home from school, not ideal. Go to school, also not ideal, for different reasons.

541 participants on the board meeting that just went live. That's a pretty big turnout, virtual or no.

I have to say that I really feel for all y'all with kids.

It is impossible. Like, not "difficult," or "draining," or "emotionally exhausting" - those, I think, are trivializing and patronizing. It is actively impossible, and was from the start. Kobayashi Maru-type shit, and has been from the beginning. If you're very fortunate and/or very rich, it can be manageable, barely.

But working parents of small and high-needs kids are constantly failing at one or the other. And of course let's make it as shitty as possible for mothers, because that's a longstanding tradition.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/business/covid-economy-parents-kids-career-homeschooling.html

I can't imagine people dealing with multiple kids, it's been hard enough with just one and I'm wildly proud of him, all things considered, by how he's adjusting to this. We've, pretty much by necessity, since we both work full time jobs, had to allow more iPad time than we ever would prefer, since he can Facetime a couple friends from school to play games together. We also got one of those summer bridge workbook things, which he has been incredible about doing each day without complaint. The other thing I've found really hard is having to sit in so many meetings and Zoom calls when I really just want to go do things with him to help make this more memorable!

I'm lucky for a lot of reasons, but at the least for having kids that can deal with remote learning pretty well. But then, they're a lot older; parents I know with younger kids have had a harder time.

Here, at least, daycares have opened again, to some degree, which has helped some parents I know of small kids. But yeah, it's all impossible. My sister lives in England, and she has a 2-year old boy who had just started daycare when everything shut down. She had to calculate, when things reopened a little, whether sending him back for the sake of socialization was worth the risk, and she ultimately determined yes. As his mother she could tell how much he needed that connection with kids his age.

Sounds from this meeting in progress that they are leaning toward a hybrid K-8 model that includes social distancing and other (relative) safeguards, and also takes into account some several hundred parents who indicated they would keep their kids home. There is apparently no way to safely send everyone back even if they wanted to. Spreading the kids out to new learning areas to keep them socially distanced and spread out means more teachers for those new learning areas, and they calculated that alone would cost $11 million. The hybrid model was about half that, which is still not ideal.

Of course the craziest thing about all of this is that it could all change overnight with another spike or ... who knows what is in store. Even if a vaccine is introduced there are a number of unanswered questions, not least how the virus behaves seasonally. Whether it will come back every year, back in another form, whether each year will feature a precarious few months of rising illness and death until i it's under control again ...

Intriguing idea just brought up is parents organizing little learning pods on their own. (This is something that some parents brought up, not the school). That is, very small groups of kids learning remotely together. That helps with some of the socialization concerns, at least for little kids, but there are serious equity concerns. Again, impossible situation.

I mean, that's a great idea for parents that have the capacity to host those but, as you rightly point out, that's really not an equitable solution.

man i feel like people are pretending to care about equity but realistically, if they were offered a way to quietly get their kid into a "learning pod" they would gladly do so privately with no regard for equity.

the pressure to pretend to care about people less fortunate than you will expire at some point and the divide that already exists will get wider. that's what happens with everything else! :(

i am so disgusted with the USA that i have no words to describe it. i won't even try, it's not worth it.

Parent Q&A about to start. Curious.

i suspect yr right about pods la lechera. if a solution to socialization along with education for kids that is also equitable, what can that look like? i've not seen any ideas for that yet but haven't really looked

"exists"

edu-camps by lottery sounds not good and displaces them from family?

i saw a tweet somewhere that said like "if pro athletics with all it's resources and motivations cannot find a solution for isolation-camp style league play, why would anyone decide local schools can safely max out attendance-based learning?"

I don't think there is a good solution (just as I don't think they can stop parents from doing it independently.) I think the only half-solution for the time being is to further pursue aggressive efforts to ensure equity and ramp up in-school resources that works around remote learning. That's how the high school is doing it here, afaict. It's formally remote learning 2020-2021, but the school will be open to some extent and staff/resources accessible for those most in need of help.

Board meeting Q&A was just comments, btw, so a mix between complements, questions and airings of grievences. It does sound like they are leaning toward a hybrid model, which means a good chance I will have one kid remote learning in 11th and the other remote/school part time in 8th grade. And neither will have five days of school a week. I'm also not sure when the fall semester (as such) will end for either, though I suspect it will end at Thanksgiving and resume some time in 2021, and in between they will reassess things.

Yeah I mean I’m not usually this openly pessimistic — but if we weren’t actually all that concerned about equity before, why would anyone think that NOW is the time to finally develop and implement that plan? Pro sports can’t even do it is otm.

To me it looks like marching some kids/teachers into killer germ factories while others will be safely ensconced in their private learning pods. Again I’m not usually this much of a pessimist. I grew up w a teacher and am a teacher and we have never been treated with respect or care. Why start now?? Where’s the motivation? I don’t see any. Pods for the fortunate it is.

ding ding ding! yesterday i saw a tweet that said something along the lines of 'equity and inclusion' are the 'thoughts and prayers' of public education.

i'm irate, and i'm scared, and i'm voiceless. i know one (really important!) way that the question of schools might make progress: ask the teachers! decisions are being made overwhelmingly at state, federal, and district/school committee levels, in response to the concerns expressed by parents. but the reality of a return to the classroom, which will be overwhelmingly managed by teachers, is entirely out of their control.

isn’t this what unions are for?

hypothetically

My solution so far has been to not make the kids do anything school-related except what they feel like doing (which is almost nothing).

So it's simultaneously in line with caring about equity, and in line with being a lazy and indulgent parent. Win-win! But it can't last forever.

But here's the thing about local branches of the big teachers' unions (NEA/AFT): they're not strong or empowered on issues of school policy.

District administrations (lead by superintendents) and school committees (made up of local representatives) hash out consequential decisions about schools within fairly narrow guidelines handed to them by the state and federal authorities. Unions, where they exist and have bargaining power, are not typically invited to the table until *after* decisions are announced. There, they join a bevy of other voices to push back on the *implementation* of big decisions, but are rarely able to influence the decisions themselves. Additionally, they are about equal in decision-making power to PTAs, advisory boards, contractors. Typically, they need to maintain a working relationship with their administration so that they can protect individual staff members from abuse/etc., and that is where they need to spend most of their capital.

IOW unions can react to policy, and shape particulars, but rarely drive it.

plus not everyone has a union to rely on even for that
what's the point of asking "isn't that what unions are for?" you want us to spend our energy unionizing on top of all this shit? :(

sorry, i am ignorant about teachers’ unions, which is why i put that out there. soda’s post clears up a lot.

workplace safety has historically been a major driver of union activity i.e. coalmines etc and i do kinda feel like man, if unions can’t step up to the plate here - in education, in meatpacking, in transportation - then.. wtf are they good for? losing pension fights? protecting cops? my dad would kill me if he heard me talking this way btw

most union work (IME) is advocacy on behalf of individual teachers re. grievances against districts

The union that I belong to is largely useless for people in my position, and I haven't been afraid to let loose on the leadership, even though the current union president had helped me out significantly during a nightmare situation

Maybe if we start teaching the kids an entirely anti-capitalist, Marxist agenda. Governors will shut schools right back down

Thank you for that explan, soda.

As teachers' unions go, AFT (NY state) and UFT (NYC) are maybe uniquely powerful among unions, even to the point of influencing statewide policy. In NYC, the union did push to close schools sooner, but they also penalized "striking"/sick-out teachers with a loss of personal time or something like that, and forced employees in schools to keep going to work until the official closure.

(Also from what I heard, the mayor & DOE didn't agree to close city schools sooner because the healthcare workers' union was ALSO advocating for their members who needed schools as childcare so they could go to work. The schools didn't close until an agreement was negotiated for the govt to fund keeping childcare centers open for "essential workers." It's easy to see how both students and teachers were effectively collateral to force this issue.)

In the more recent NYC budget fight, the UFT notably SUPPORTED keeping cops in schools despite devastating budget cuts to the educational system that could have been alleviated by putting cop $$ back into the budget. I'm not an insider to the union anymore so idk what the reasoning was but basically they don't push back unless or until they've already done a backroom deal.