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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Would people feel differently if this were going to last 5 years? I certainly hope we get a vaccine, but there is every chance that it will take awhile, take longer still to distribute, be imperfect, last only for a year, etc. I get that there is a safety risk to teachers, but I just don’t think shutting down ES indefinitely can be the answer. The 2-9 age bracket is at almost no risk and seems to spread very little; they are also the bracket where the lack of childcare is going to end some moms’ careers forever and DL is basically a joke. Open schools for PK-2/5 (drawing the exact line based on science and educational research). I just don’t think we can ignore that this may go on for awhile and there are going to be decades’ long ripple effects to all the K-2ers who don’t learn to read or add and forget how to interact with peers. I’m entirely serious.[/quote]

Completely agree with you, PP.  Pandemics end when society says so more often than when the disease in question is vanquished.  There may never be an effective vaccine for Covid19.  We can't sacrifice the education of a generation of little middle-class and poor kids, handing upward mobility to private school students and immigrants from countries where covid didn't derail student learning.

The learning needs to go forward this fall, vs. simply pretending that kids in the early elementary grades can stay on top of academics via virtual instruction, particularly with minimal supervision while parents work on-line.

I don't care if my kid has to sport full PPE to attend school, standing in a sports field wearing ski clothes, listening to a teacher shouting instructions on a megaphone while a math lesson is taught on a jumbotron to attend school again.  Just figure it out, ed leaders.  Innovate.

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Mmm doesn’t work that way. The hiv/aids pandemic is actually ongoing but it is contained to a acceptable degree. COVID-19 however is not. No one is asking for a cure but as it stands now there’s not enough information.

Just a few months ago people were like ‘kids can’t get it,’ now we know that to be absolutely false. I do believe that for this whole year we will have DL and by the 2021-22 school year we will have some level of normalcy.[/quote]

Exactly.  We don't solve this by just declaring it's over or telling educators to "innovate".  It's easy for us to sit here and summarily say it should happen or make up some lazy joke about bullhorns and jumbotrons like it's somehow that easy.  But that's just ignoring the facts.  Our national political leadership failed us and now it's beyond a solution that's safe enough to execute.  So we now pay the price and have to figure our solutions on a family by family basis.  With us it means being stuck at home with our kids learning on computers.  I don't like it, and I know there are others who have it worse, but at least I don't blame the teachers for it or expect them to just "figure it out."
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This. I love how we leap from “maybe six months into a pandemic when there is a high level of community spread and we don’t know a lot about how children transmit this disease or its long-term effects and so perhaps we should be cautious until we gave a better understanding of these things” somehow becomes “OUR SCHOOLS WILL NEVER REOPEN AND GENERATIONS WILL BE ILLITERATE.” 🙄 There’s no vaccine in Germany either but their kids went back to school because their government acted according to what was scientifically advisable, had an actual lockdown (not the half-assed measures we took) and managed to stop the spread and bring down the R0. They didn’t just say YOLO![/quote]

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