Reply to City council voting today on bill to force school closings

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Reply to "City council voting today on bill to force school closings"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So stupid. I support each school having a threshold focused on the teachers (i.e. close if &gt;15% of teachers are unavailable) but not students and certainly not city-wide. [/quote]

Yeah, tying it to staffing makes sense.  But case rates don't mean anything without more context -- how many kids are sick?  Are all grades equally affected?  How many are really ill?  Is there in-school spread?  What mitigation measures is the school already taking, and are there more that could be implemented (ventilation, for example)?[/quote]

And the idea of a district-wide threshold is especially dumb when you consider that most HS/MS students will be required to be vaccinated by March, whereas elementary schools have a population of kids (PK) who are not even allowed to be vaccinated, but who also are at much lower risk from Covid. All of that should be taken into account.

If you have a school with 100% vaccine compliance, I would want either evidence that vaccinated people are experiencing serious illness, or a compelling public health argument (virus spreading so rapidly we have to shut down everything to stop it) before closing that school. It would be absurd to send those kids home to protect them from a virus they are vaccinated against.

You can't have a blanket policy tied to case rates. You just can't. I've really had it with the Council on this issue. Not just White. Silverman has also been egregiously bad. They are so clearly suggesting policy based on some very loud (and uninformed!) constituents and not based on what is actually happening in schools. It's really frustrating and I am weirdly grateful for Bowser, who I can't stand, because at least she seems to understand that schools can't just close because some tiny percentage of parents signed an online petition.[/quote]

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