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Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)
Caitlyn Peetz on Twitter: 8am MCPS press conference for a “COVID-19 update”
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Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
Or perhaps they could test waste water? Seems sooo much easier to manage. |
Anonymous
+1,000,000 I feel like I don't have any agency here. I can't change state policy, the only thing I can do is vote with my pocketbook and my kid's attendance record. It's not perfect. In fact, it's terrible. It's punitive for her and for us. But she's not going in and I'm going to stop spending any damn money on anything from this state. No more take out or delivery. And we weren't going to gyms or concerts or anything else anyway. (We have been, however, ordering a TON of local delivery.) I don't trust the testing metrics, but it's not fear for our family that makes me choose this. I just don't think it's right for anyone to have to make these life or death choices over crap as trivial as manicures and burgers. |
Anonymous
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Questions unaddressed or unasked that might have helped:
What percent of the staff at each school is available, and how many of those unavailable are currently covered by a substitute (what is the actual staffing shortage at my kid's school so that I can decide if it is a workable/positive arrangement)? How can we help, directly (volunteer, work as a temp/contract sub)? What is the current case count/percentage positive at each school (help me decide, by my family's own risk tolerance, whether the transmission risk at my kid's school is acceptable or not)? Given known non-compliance attitudes regarding testing/reporting, what additional measures are being considered? (test to stay, mask outdoors, mandatory outdoor lunch, etc.) What might have been considered but is currently off the table, and why? What happens to kids that are kept home by parents? Are lesson plans provided for home instruction? Are materials made available for pickup? Are days counted as truant, or are they considered acceptable health-related absences? What happens at the end of the 14-day period to ensure a safe return to school? Feel free to add. Clearly this comes from a more covid-cautious perspective. Happy to have folks add questions pertaining more to the keep-schools-open-regardless side. The more real, detailed info from MCPS, the better. The only real bit of new info I got from the presser was that ther's a one-day asynchronous learning period when switching to virtual to let teachers set up/prepare. Everything else seems to have been stated before, and the red/yellow/green is just window dressing (and, apparently, only available to MCPS administrators -- hey, MCPS gonna MCPS!) |
Anonymous
NO mention of what happens after returning from quarantine. |
Anonymous
I mean, DCPS did opt-out rather than opt-in. It's possible the law is different, but also possible that MCPS just interpreted the law more conservatively. |
Anonymous
Adding: What happens when the majority of schools are in the red and quarantining for 14 days? Are we effectively all virtual? |
Anonymous
If you are sending your kids in person and living life as normal you are not Covid cautious and stop complaining. |
Anonymous
Yeah, yeah.  Troll on.
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Anonymous
But kids aren't filling up hospitals. It's not even parents filling up hospitals. People 60 and older in Maryland make up 22.6% of the population, but are responsible for more than 50% of the hospitalizations. About 210 people over 70, and another 120 people 60-69, are admitted to hospitals each day with COVID in Maryland. Kids under 18? About 27. I can't find an ICU breakdown, but I bet that's even more extreme. If you want to relieve hospitals, we don't need to close schools. We just need to lockdown seniors. |
Anonymous
This! |
Anonymous
This is way, way harder than you realize. First, it's not just seniors - its seniors PLUS anyone who is immunocompromised/at risk. But these people still need food, shelter, often medical or other regular care. Do you also lockdown those who assist this group, especially medical providers/caregivers? What does that mean - do they not get to see their families for... how long? Or do you lockdown their families as well? What about people in the original lockdown group who still have jobs they need to keep - do they get paid leave or financial support if they can't work from home? What about folks on limited incomes who can't afford regular food/grocery delivery and need to go out to shop? People living in multigenerational households? Grandma who watches the kids after school so their single immunocompromised parent can go to work at the grocery store? My kid does really really bad on virtual. I want schools to stay open more than anything. I'd much rather see temporary restrictions on indoor dining and large public gatherings, a universal mask mandate, and free N95s and home tests for everybody, but when the larger governments (county/state/country) are refusing to take these measures, MCPS may make the only move they CAN take. When PUBLIC health is at stake, you don't depend on personal responsibility to protect you. Yes, omicron is mild. But because it is so much more infectious, hospitalizations and deaths will skyrocket. And our health system is on the verge of collapse (if not already past the breaking point). Hope you don't get into a car accident or have a heart attack any time soon, because you won't get good care for it. Everybody should care about health system overload, even if you are not personally at risk for serious illness from coronavirus. And therefore everybody should do everything they can to reduce the spread. |
Anonymous
Closing schools has not been shown to make a difference in and of itself. MCPS should but be taking some active public health role because those that are supposed to have abdicated their responsibility. Maybe the ship has sailed on locking down seniors, but even some strongly worded guidance might get some of them to take some common sense precautions. I know my parents would be shocked if schools closed in their district in the name of protecting them while they could freely go out to dinner, the movies, etc. |
Anonymous
So what you're saying is that because the state and county won't adopt real public health measures that would work, and high-risk individuals won't voluntarily make changes to protect themselves, we should take dramatic and disruptive steps with kids even though its not actually going to meaningfully address the problems with overwhelmed hospitals. How does that make any sense. This isn't a classroom assignment- you don't get points for "effort." And you're right- not everyone high risk can isolate. And that's OK. As you seemed to acknowledge, the objective here is addressing the overall hospital utilization problem, particularly reducing the number of the sickest patients that cannot be effectively treated at community hospitals. This doesn't mean we need every high-risk person to isolate for the time being- it means we just need to reduce the the exposures of a substantial portion of high risk population enough to reduce transmissions to them. The elderly are certainly the biggest well-defined high-risk group, which shows when you look at hospitalizations and deaths. Many of these people don't work, nor do they have young kids to care for. That's obviously not true for all seniors, but it is true for enough of them that isolating the ones that can be isolated would help quite a bit. And this sort of isolation is a spectrum- doctors offices have been low-risk settings. Congregate facilities are higher risk, but we could make substantial resources available for testing staff to keep cases out. What you wouldn't want, however, are seniors socializing with kids and adults who are active in higher-risk settings. Yet how many kids just saw their grandparents over Christmas? |
Anonymous
| Agree with 17:25PP. And I strongly suspect many of the parents shrieking on our MCPS PTA listserv are the same ones who travelled over the holidays and went to restaurants, sports arenas, and engaged in other high risk behavior. Now someone's tested positive in their family and they want 2k HS students to sit at home because they just had to go to the Wizards game with 15k of their closest friends. |