The science on remote schooling is now clear. Here’s who it hurt most.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:School closings were bad. But opening them would have killed a lot of people - in particular, teachers and the family members of teachers. As a teacher, it disgusts me still that there were people who thought it was more important to open schools than to keep us and our families alive.

My child also suffered from closed schools. But the issue for me is not that schools closed, but that FCPS did such an inexcusably poor job of providing virtual instruction. It didn't have to be as useless as it was.

Also the family members of the students. Lots of kids lost parents.

Considering schools in red states were in-person and all private schools were in-person and it is now the end of 2022, you are going to have to work much harder to make your point than just saying in person school would have “killed” lots of people. I am shocked (though I shouldn’t be) how many people are still holding on to that with all of the evidence that says otherwise.

These people are trying to avoid the realization that their leadership basically made them and their kids the sacrificial lambs to their agenda.

Their agenda was to save lives - the lives of children, teachers, and their families. The insistence of one political group on using that to further their own agenda is both hypocritical and based on complete denial of scientific evidence.

No one in charge thought virtual school was a good idea. They just thought it was better than having all that death on their hands. They did their best. It's easy to criticize others when you yourself don't have any responsibility for the consequences, but all the time in the world to pretend you would have done something different or known something more.

The fact that the virtual school was so poorly done is what people should be angry about.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Everyone intellectually knew this would be the result of extended school closures. But as evident in this thread, a lot of people didn’t care, and still don’t.

I know that teachers tried. But here's where teachers' unions, and by extension, teachers, take a hit. They assured parents that as "experts" they knew what was best for children and would be quickly able to get children back up to speed once schools reopened. That has not turned out to be true. Instead, the problems caused by the pandemic, and exacerbated by virtual school, have made teaching even more difficult and students and parents chronically stressed and unsupported. Decision makers underestimated the harms of isolation and personal interaction between teachers and students and students with their fellow classmates. We are not talking about "learning losses" or setbacks, we now dealing with scores of anxious and depressed kids who can't learn. They don't trust anyone or believe that anyone cares about them.

Oh, and by the way, what was the plan for graduating seniors to make up all of the material they missed? There wasn't one, and no one cares. It's better to blame kids and their parents for everything and allow these kids to get lost.

The blame falls squarely on the democrats here:

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1095412.page

Thank God for Democrats. The Republican party does its level best to try and kill everyone. This pandemic was no different than any other day. I was so grateful to see a Dem back in office and often wonder how many lives would have been saved had there been Hillary Clinton sitting there in December of 2019.

Get over your sanctimonious BS.

At the risk of getting this thread hijacked and shut down, it was so lucky for us that Youngkin was not governor and a democrat was. Blackface or no, it was only because NoVa's blue leanings that we were spared the massacre that took place in red states.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Everyone intellectually knew this would be the result of extended school closures. But as evident in this thread, a lot of people didn’t care, and still don’t.

I know that teachers tried. But here's where teachers' unions, and by extension, teachers, take a hit. They assured parents that as "experts" they knew what was best for children and would be quickly able to get children back up to speed once schools reopened. That has not turned out to be true. Instead, the problems caused by the pandemic, and exacerbated by virtual school, have made teaching even more difficult and students and parents chronically stressed and unsupported. Decision makers underestimated the harms of isolation and personal interaction between teachers and students and students with their fellow classmates. We are not talking about "learning losses" or setbacks, we now dealing with scores of anxious and depressed kids who can't learn. They don't trust anyone or believe that anyone cares about them.

Oh, and by the way, what was the plan for graduating seniors to make up all of the material they missed? There wasn't one, and no one cares. It's better to blame kids and their parents for everything and allow these kids to get lost.

The blame falls squarely on the democrats here:

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1095412.page

Thank God for Democrats. The Republican party does its level best to try and kill everyone. This pandemic was no different than any other day. I was so grateful to see a Dem back in office and often wonder how many lives would have been saved had there been Hillary Clinton sitting there in December of 2019.

Get over your sanctimonious BS.

At the risk of getting this thread hijacked and shut down, it was so lucky for us that Youngkin was not governor and a democrat was. Blackface or no, it was only because NoVa's blue leanings that we were spared the massacre that took place in red states.

Pretty sure this is sarcasm, because we all know there wasn't a massacre in red states.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:School closings were bad. But opening them would have killed a lot of people - in particular, teachers and the family members of teachers. As a teacher, it disgusts me still that there were people who thought it was more important to open schools than to keep us and our families alive.

My child also suffered from closed schools. But the issue for me is not that schools closed, but that FCPS did such an inexcusably poor job of providing virtual instruction. It didn't have to be as useless as it was.

Also the family members of the students. Lots of kids lost parents.

Considering schools in red states were in-person and all private schools were in-person and it is now the end of 2022, you are going to have to work much harder to make your point than just saying in person school would have “killed” lots of people. I am shocked (though I shouldn’t be) how many people are still holding on to that with all of the evidence that says otherwise.

These people are trying to avoid the realization that their leadership basically made them and their kids the sacrificial lambs to their agenda.

Their agenda was to save lives - the lives of children, teachers, and their families. The insistence of one political group on using that to further their own agenda is both hypocritical and based on complete denial of scientific evidence.

No one in charge thought virtual school was a good idea. They just thought it was better than having all that death on their hands. They did their best. It's easy to criticize others when you yourself don't have any responsibility for the consequences, but all the time in the world to pretend you would have done something different or known something more.

The fact that the virtual school was so poorly done is what people should be angry about.

So poorly and for so long. The initial decision to close in March 2020 was understandable, but we knew much more by the fall. It is ridiculous that some leaders and the teachers’ unions were still pushing for closures in the fall of 2020. I think that's what most people are mad about- not the March decision.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Remote learning was eye-opening for me. I watched the remote learning lessons with my ES and MS kids to have an idea about the quality of teaching. And then I crafted lessons and supplementary material for them. Don't get me wrong, I do believe the socialization at school is extremely important, and many subjects were taught with great competency. Still, I saw the pandemic lockdown as a unique opportunity to hunker down and concentrate on making sure that my kids were accelerated and enriched in the ways that they needed. I am seeing the results now in-person school. The leg-up that they got in individual attention during the remote schooling by my involvement is paying rich dividends now.

Yes, it helped that I am educated enough to handle ES and MS curriculum, it helped that I was working from home too, it helped that I was not doing elder care, it helped that I did not have other priorities in life. I am sure someone will chime in about my privilege. But a lot of people who are a lot more privileged than me decided not to be involved in their children schooling. That is the reality. I can understand LMC kids falling behind. I cannot understand MC and above kids from functional families falling behind. I am 100% behind the school closing.

Lots of school systems are offering lots of options for tutoring but most don’t take advantage of it. We always supplemented before Covid. The curriculum is weak at best.

So your position is -- in-person is generally not great and so remote schooling wasn't much worse?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just don’t understand the point of this. I mean it is very very obvious that virtual school sucked and would lead to worse outcomes. It isn’t like that wasn’t expected. The issue is we dealt with an emergency and now we are picking up the aftermath.

It’s like when a tornado strikes and a town is leveled and people have to find immediate shelter and clothes and in some case mourn and heal.

After that stage there is so much work. On tv you never see the tearing down of the rest of the structures and the painfully slow process of rebuilding. You never see the altered lives and how some move away or move in with family. We are with schools in this painful part of assessing and rebuilding. The fact that you are whining and pointing fingers at teachers and schools isn’t going to make the original emergency and pain go away. It won’t make how anyone handled it go away. It will show your child how you deal with adversity by blaming and shaming.
Everyone is sorry this all happened. Yiu show your character by how you move on.

A tornado hit my hometown when I was growing up and destroyed the high school, and heavily damaged the elementary and middle schools. We were still all back in school 2 weeks later. You figure it out.

The problem here is that the people and organizations that pushed for long-term school closures during the pandemic did so without acknowledging and weighing the harm that would result from school closures. Even now, many are refusing to acknowledge that harm. Some of these people are likely to push for more closures in the future, still ignoring the harm to students.

And, some like you refuse to understand the harm done by keeping them open. The harm in kids losing their parents and loved ones unnecessarily because some people thought nothing of spreading covid to others, which ended up killing their parents.

It's ironic how some of us teach our kids to be resilient and be apart of the greater good, which means if something like this happens they/we shift and adapt to make it work. You seem rather inflexible as it's only about your needs. If we saved one child from losing their parent or one parent from losing their child, it was all worth it to me. Be thankful you've never been in that situation. So, while you celebrate with your family today, many of us grieve those we've lost.

There’s no evidence that keeping kids at home did significantly reduce deaths. You act as if you think schools are the only infection source, and that kids will necessarily stay home if they’re not able to go to school.

There is evidence that keeping schools closed led to educational harms, though.

Exactly. It is remarkable to me how delusional the pro-virtual posters remain. It was clear by fall 2020 that virtual was a disastrous mistake that would severely harm the most vulnerable students. And sure enough, that’s what the data now shows. But that was evident in fall 2020. Furthermore, there is no evidence whatsoever that closing the schools saved lives; in fact there are some theories that the closures disproportionately caused spread to the elderly caregivers at home. In school kids would have worn masks.

Honestly at this point, any time I hear a parent talking about how their kid “thrived” in virtual, in my head I translate it to “I am terrible at assessing actual academic development and I don’t know my kid very well.” The amount of data about how absolutely terrible virtual was for learning is simply too overwhelming.

Actually there is evidence. You just refuse to acknowledge it. It reduced numbers getting Covid and deaths.

Delusional. Amazingly so.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Welp, here it is...Washington Post for that matter. Too bad it took them so long to figure this out. I was screaming for schools to open in summer of 2020 and lost many friends because of it. Luckily my kid had in person and did just fine. Many others did not fare as well, and it seems older students will struggle more to catch up.

I am gifting the article. You're welcome.

https://wapo.st/3gz0Hld

I read it hurt those in grades 1, 2, and 3 most because they lost 1.5-2.0 years of instruction in four national subjects like math, reading, spelling and writing.
Unfortunately upon return to full day, in person school in Fall 2021 there was lack of testing and lack of remedial work done given the students missing 50-80% of the instruction hours from March 2020- June 2021.

Then for Fall 2021, many private and public schools and teachers were told to “go easy” in all the kids and focus mainly on “Socio emotional” things and still never circled back and fixed the math and reading deficits.

Sad.

[Anonymous]

and yet people are still dying from covid and children are now dying of RSV. sigh.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It was clear the unions put the leverage that covid closures gave them over the well-being and education of students.

If you haven’t realized yet that teacher unions are for teachers and not for parents and students, this should be super clear now. Apple Ballots and candidates who teacher unions throw money at aren’t necessarily pro working family or good for education.

Think your yourself as a voter and put your child’s education first. The unions had a lot of power in this area while schools were closed and used it to push for their own interests well beyond covid safety.

It will take years for students to recover from the learning loss. There were ways to safely mitigate covid risks and reopen long before the schools were opened. The evidence is clear how destructive the lockdowns were.

Teacher unions are teachers. They do what's best for students, and what teachers want is to further the profession. There isn't some mob boss doing this.

Teachers unions are what is ruining public education.

Nonsense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:and yet people are still dying from covid and children are now dying of RSV. sigh.

That is mainly because kids wore masks for so long. Their immune systems are weak do to lack of exposure. Sigh.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:and yet people are still dying from covid and children are now dying of RSV. sigh.

That is mainly because kids wore masks for so long. Their immune systems are weak do to lack of exposure. Sigh.

This actually isn’t true. Sigh.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:and yet people are still dying from covid and children are now dying of RSV. sigh.

That is mainly because kids wore masks for so long. Their immune systems are weak do to lack of exposure. Sigh.

Your immune system isn’t a muscle, it’s a photo album. Wearing a mask did not weaken anyone’s immune system. COVID infections did, though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:and yet people are still dying from covid and children are now dying of RSV. sigh.

That is mainly because kids wore masks for so long. Their immune systems are weak do to lack of exposure. Sigh.

This actually isn’t true. Sigh.

Actually it is true.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/science/rsv-children-hospitals.html?unlocked_article_code=IVyZ0vKFjW6bbelpcl1w8SiE4Okq1ir_5gTQw3JWVGkKEI5x1v8yfxX0dOt8lsAX1pdBUNduWZ7CtfpoOTdt-nfTYFgcOYM_MrzKDgRu_etmWyhccXVHR06JO1cXq_AiptFmbutyMBvPZc718JAVs1C3J2RDmJ3FGzODLm7YWVrfbp3Ztsj8IdfHvGn1PT5QI4JJHjHmleXdfuv9VN7ewa72fIIHM74-O3qUzPq4e3xjIr1sJftorXeOf-P2rCyX7U3Y4hZTaRq0UwfWniHoPFWGGmKDssvrM5su6qgwOEWtfAa4duCfvNM4RflzI2DxM9HFwlhfYcqMD9Ua9r3JMw&smid=share-url

“The immune system works by recognition and repetition,” said Dr. Sarah Combs, an emergency medicine physician at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., where over 1,000 children tested positive for R.S.V. between July and early October of this year. “And when you give it a bit of a rest, like we did during the pandemic — and for good reason — we now have a generation of immune-naive children.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:and yet people are still dying from covid and children are now dying of RSV. sigh.

That is mainly because kids wore masks for so long. Their immune systems are weak do to lack of exposure. Sigh.

This actually isn’t true. Sigh.

Correct. Their immune systems aren’t weak— they’re just naive, in the sense they lack a normal collection of neutralizing antibodies against common infections due to a collective lack of exposure. They’re all getting 2+ years worth of infections over a few month period.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:and yet people are still dying from covid and children are now dying of RSV. sigh.

That is mainly because kids wore masks for so long. Their immune systems are weak do to lack of exposure. Sigh.

Your immune system isn’t a muscle, it’s a photo album. Wearing a mask did not weaken anyone’s immune system. COVID infections did, though.

Your body retains the ability to recognize the viruses, but doesn’t retain the cells that fight those viruses. Those wane over a few months after infection. After that you'll be able to get reinfected, but generally the severity will be lessened.

A big problem we have now with young kids is that there's an unusually large number of kids getting RSV for the *first* time, primarily due to pandemic related behaviors. That first infection is where there's highest risk.