It's less than a month now until schools are supposed to open, including ours, and little else has been on my mind for weeks now. It's hard to focus, hard to think about sending my children into overcrowded classrooms with ill-protected teachers and risking all their lives. How do we think this is OK?
I started to write a longer answer, but the simple answer is: I don't. I don't think it's OK, and I'm not sending my kids to school in this situation. We have been worried about this for a while now, and Saturday night, we talked it over (again) and we finally decided that unless something drastically changes, we just can't send them to in-person school. Decision made, we called them in for a family meeting and explained our reasoning to them. They were ... unhappy. To say the least.
Liam was so angry he wouldn't even talk to us, and he went upstairs and kicked the crap out of his trash can instead (me, today: You know we have a fully functional punching bag downstairs you can use to pound your anger out on. him: I know, but I can't destroy it, so that's not as satisfying). Max was upset because he doesn't learn well online and doesn't know what to do with all his extra unstructured time. Henry was the most philosophical about it; he said it sucks, but he's glad that at least now he will get to see all his grandparents during the school year. Way to bright-side things, Henry!
Two days later, and they're all pretty accepting. Liam has even *almost* decided to forgive me for ruining his "pivotal" junior year. It helped that this morning Washington Township (a school corporation just north of Indy) became the first in the state to say they won't open in person for the fall, and this afternoon, Los Angeles and San Diego (the two largest school systems in California) both announced they would be doing remote education only for the fall. I can only hope these are just the first dominoes and that one by one, schools around the country will make the same smart decision. Or not even close all the way. My friend Kelly lives in Evanston, Illinois, and their high school's plan is to split the kids up into four groups, and send each group every other Tuesday and Wednesday or every other Thursday and Friday. So each kid goes to school four days a month in person. The teachers still teach in real time; they just teach to a quarter of the students in person and three-quarters of them online. And the school buildings are marked so hallways and stairways are one way, to avoid kids crowding in the halls going every which way.
Anyway, I used up most of my writing energy today sending an email to our school superintendent, so I think I'll just let that speak for my position.
Dear Mr. Hartley,
I appreciate that the school corporation is in a really tough spot right now, but I wanted to offer my feedback as a parent of three students (grades 11, 9, and 5) in Plymouth schools.
Put simply, I do not see a safe path to reopening in-person schools at this time. This weekend, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos downplayed the risk to students, saying that children are not as susceptible as adults to the coronavirus and that schools must open at any cost. This position is not supported by guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics or the CDC. Our students have been the most isolated age group in the country since early March when schools first shut down, so we don't actually know what their susceptibility would be for "normal" exposure. And even with that relative isolation, children age 19 and under make up 18.6% of the cases in Marshall County, per in.gov/coronavirus. What happens to that percentage once we start asking kids to sit in classrooms with each other for seven hours a day? In no other work setting in the country are people expected to gather in such numbers indoors for such a length of time, let alone in a place like Marshall County, which currently has a high rate of new infections.
This doesn't even take into account the higher risk and higher mortality rate posed to staff members, or the exponential community spread that likely will result from all this increased exposure. The risk of fatalities among students may be very small (though that risk is higher for staff members), but even one preventable death is too many. No one should forget that every child and employee is a person, not a number. I value the lives of our teachers and staff members and students far too much to put them at risk, not to mention that each of the students who goes to school then comes home to adults and other children who are also then exposed.
Please consider also that even if a person has only a "mild" or "moderate" case of COVID-19, they can have lasting or even permanent disability or impairment.
If there is a virtual option for PCSC, I will have my children do that, but I urge you to put the safety of children and staff members at the top of your list of concerns, above any funding, cost, or even quality of education issues, and keep the schools closed until this virus is under control. Yes, the kids may fall behind a little if they're doing eLearning, but they will have a much better chance of being alive to make later gains.
I appreciate your consideration of this letter, and I trust you'll take it into account when you make your decision. Thank you for your time.
Holli Fort
I don't necessarily expect a response, but I still thought it was important to communicate my thought process. I cannot be the only person in the school district who feels the same. I just can't.
I guess we'll wait and see. In the meantime, I can't say that we feel good about this decision, but I can say that it's the best of the options that we have to choose from. And in case you're wondering, yes, we were clear with the boys that it's perfectly OK to be angry about this (though maybe they shouldn't take it out on unsuspecting trash bins). We understand why they're upset, and we're upset for them. We don't want them to miss a single thing in life, and it really does suck that they are missing so much now. All we can do is give them time, and hope that someday they look back and realize that we made this decision not to punish them but to keep them safe.
Nationwide cases: 3,341,838. Deaths: 135,425.
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