Reply to Howard County remote until April 2021.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m alarmed that there seems to be some agreement here that HoCo schools will be remote next Fall. A strong majority of adults will be vaccinated by then, and we’ve already seen significant evidence that opening up preschools and younger grades can even be done safely now. Staying closed next year, particularly for elementary students, seems irresponsible and dangerous. (With the caveat of proper vaccine distribution.)

I’m not interested in blaming teachers for this decision or not, but keeping schools closed would be a huge blow in so many ways.

I hope whoever is advocating for keeping schools closed is equally vocal about closing flipping indoor dining.

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If we get a best case scenario with vaccine distribution, maybe not. My concern is that we don't have sense of when it would be safe enough to bring any students back, even after all these months. [/quote]

This just isn’t true, though some of the evidence points to strategies that many schools would be unable to implement due to funding decisions across government. Generally though, we have strong evidence on early education being able to return safely, some of which I believe AFT has incorporated into their blueprint for reopening. In addition, a variety of studies have been undertaken in regard to comparing say, summer camps, to identify how those that didn’t have any positive cases/outbreaks were able to achieve that goal when compared to more reckless openings. And I’m not going to wade into the ugly private school discussion above, it seems clear that higher resourced schools that have been able to improve their ventilation systems, keep small class cohorts isolated, require daily screenings, and implement continual mask wearing have found better success in reopening. Public schools deserve to be able to do the same, but many public schools’ class sizes would likely make a cohort approach difficult if not impossible. NYC schools, further, continue to show important lessons.

Now, if you’re looking for certainty, you’re not going to get it. But we certainly have an ever-emerging sense of what a safe return could look like that will continue to improve. The core of a safe return is, of course, low community spread. That will hopefully be very much achieved by the time the vaccine has widely circulated by mid-summer, despite the behavior of the reckless idiots so many of our neighbors have proven to be that continues to raise our rates of infection.

I’m not arguing for a return now, to be clear. But there is a lot of work being done to understand when and how we can bring back students, which is critical to the health of our society. We can’t just throw up our hands and say if we don’t have a 100% clear answer, we don’t have a sense of any possible, safe answer. 
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