NYT and school closures
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
My kids were for sure pawns in the Trump battle. A broken clock is right two times a day and it was right to have the kids in school starting in fall 2020. |
You actually believe that? You'll fall for anything apparently.
Anonymous
You tell me why some schools were closed for a year and some weren't. There was a blueprint to open safely, yet some didn't. Why? They weren't saving lives so what was the point? |
Anonymous
Many teachers at our school in VA couldn’t get the first shot until mid Feb. |
Anonymous
Because some schools were rational and followed CDC guidelines. And others said “F it”. |
Anonymous
A huge number of schools on the East side. They may have had a small number of at risk kids, but they were not opening the school to all students. Some schools in this category that I have personal knowledge of: Miner, Payne, JO Wilson, Wheatley, Stokes East End. Also, there were many schools that only offered an "in-school virtual" option to students in spring of 2021, where students could go to school where they would be minded by a non-teacher while sitting on tablets and participating in "lessons" with a teacher working from home. Schools could not always tell you how those "minders" would be staffed, and also had no explanation for what would be done for kids in K or 1st who are often not able to independently use a tablet, and certainly not for the duration of the day (not to mention the absurdity of expecting Kindergarteners to sit at desks and do virtual school for 8 hours a day). At one point there was a spreadsheet floating around of exactly how many students were in actual schools as of March or April, and you can see a massive discrepancy between schools in the JR triangle and those elsewhere in the city. A lot of people will try to tell you that "demand was lower" in these part so the city because of the LIE that poor people and people of color were happy to keep their kids at home for longer and it was only privileged white people who wanted in person school. But this ignores the fact that many of these schools could not get teachers to come back in person and only offered families a babysitting service with no details about who would be doing the babysitting, and continued virtual education. At that point, yes, it was easier for a lot of families to keep kids home rather than try to figure out if that was even a safe or appropriate environment for kids, especially younger kids (though I'd also worry about behavioral issues among older kids and the ability of these unidentified "minders" to address behavioral problems). A lot of parents in DC at well-resourced DCPS schools don't realize how much of their "return to school" in spring 2021 was accomplished with funds from the PTO, teachers who were more willing to return to work with the higher SES populations, and administrators more willing to lean on teachers to return, AND to provide them with proper support to do so. This was not the experience of the majority of schools in the city, and no one talks about it. Here's the order in which school children in DC went back to school: August 2020: rich kids at privates March 2021: rich kids at publics August 2021: everyone else And people wonder why test scores are bad, truancy rates are bad, behavioral problems are up, juvenile crime is up? This isn't rocket science. DC FAILED children during the pandemic. Fail. Grade F. |
Anonymous
AND many of the schools that brought kids back to the buildings sooner weren’t dealing with overcrowding, limited space, vulnerable populations, etc. |
Anonymous
And the ones who said F it were right - and CDC was irrational. That's what everything is showing now. |
Anonymous
This attitude is why the vulnerable populations are the most behind now. At least own it. |
Anonymous
“Own” what exactly? It was a crappy situation. |
Anonymous
So what do you think people should be DOING about it other than writing articles and complaining on message boards? And are YOU willing to help pay for it with your taxes. If the answer is no, please STFU. |
Anonymous
Don't even engage with these idiots. They just want to complain because they have no actual solutions. They think they "know" what should have been done and are engaging in hindsight BS. God help us if there is another pandemic in our lifetimes. They will assume everything is exactly the same as COVID and ignore all public health recommendations because they "know" better. And people will die. But whatever. They "know". |
Anonymous
This. A lot of people decided the way to suck it to Trump and the Magas was to simply take the opposite position from what Trump or Magas said. So if Trump said schools should reopen, or red states reopened schools, a lot of mindless liberals were like "we will keep our children home forever! only when it's safe!" Which is actually much more extreme position than the reopenings you saw in red states. Some of which were poorly handled and not done in keeping with public health guidelines -- I didn't want that either. But there was a group of people who were like "hey what if we prioritize kids and education, but do so in the safest possible way with masking and measures used in other countries, like schedules with more built in outdoor time throughout the day (studies show that chances of spreading Covid go way down if you don't sit in the same place to long), hybrid or abbreviated schedules (perhaps two days in the classroom a week, or morning class only, to reduce exposure), mandatory testing. Many of these are things that were ultimately adopted by schools when they finally reopened. But there was this vocal group who decided that the response to Trump and Magas had to be the opposite, even if it made no sense. Even if it was worse than some kind of compromise choice that might actually have acknowledged that hey, kids should probably be in school,, or hey, a lot of middle and working class families don't have the resources to just educate their kids at home for a year and a half. If you said these things, you were a Maga, probably also racist. It was a crazy time. Yes, kids were pawns in a political game. No question about it. |
Anonymous
Put me in that basket too. Private school teachers taught. In Sweden, and many other developed countries, teachers taught, and kids did not suffer to the extent they are suffering in the USA now (at least, the public school kids). |
Anonymous
I didn’t see any of that AT ALL. There were people working to make a safe environment and then there were people who said F it. Trump made it political at the national level, but schools weren’t virtual out of spite. So ridiculous. |
Anonymous
They are just so irrational. I don’t get it. |