This thread is hilarious.

Did you vote for Bowser? Why? Well she reopened schools and seems to care about keeping them open, and her opposition doesn't.

OH my god why are you people so obsessed with school closures! Get over it! Bowser sucks!

And that friends, is this election in a nutshell. See ya next time.

Anonymous wrote:When are we going to get over the whole "schools were closed for too long!" thing? We're on the tail end of a once in a century pandemic, and yes mistake were made -- but JFC are we going to harp on those mistakes until the end of time?

And by "mistakes were made," you mean WTU knowingly lied every single day of the pandemic about the risk of kids going to school. Was there even one thing WTU said that wasn't a lie?

I did. I actually think Bowser does a pretty good job. She doesn't bow to pressure from the fringe groups. She raised the police budget during the height of "defund the police." She is going ahead with the new Ward 3 school. She fills potholes. There's only so much she can do about issues like crime and homelessness which are up all over America.

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:Somebody is really freaking out lol.

It's multiple people and I am one of them. We are exhausted of being told that school closures "don't matter" and that we should "get over it." People tend to freak out when you gaslight them for two years. The fact that you STILL don't understand that parents need schools in order to function, and that simply taking them away without justification for a year was going to have political ramification, is the part that floors me.

Who took them away? Who was our Mayor again?

Bowser wanted to open schools in August 2020! Were you not paying attention? Yes, she failed to successfully negotiate with the union to make it happen. That's on her (and the union, sorry). But she was starting from a premise of "we need schools to be open".

Please name the mayoral candidate or council member who stated clearly that schools NEED to be open and suggested the workable plan for making it happen. All I heard was a bunch of people saying mealy mouth BS to hold onto their WTU endorsement and advocating for MORE virtual school.

But go on.

Thank you for the advice. I've had enough of you all. I'm going on. with my life. You can continue to complain and live in 2020. There's a big world out here don't need to waste it on here with people who are still yelling about virtual school

Anonymous wrote:When are we going to get over the whole "schools were closed for too long!" thing? We're on the tail end of a once in a century pandemic, and yes mistake were made -- but JFC are we going to harp on those mistakes until the end of time?

Let me guess: You're a teacher? (And I'm guessing not a very good one at that?) You clearly don't have kids.

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Somebody is really freaking out lol.

It's multiple people and I am one of them. We are exhausted of being told that school closures "don't matter" and that we should "get over it." People tend to freak out when you gaslight them for two years. The fact that you STILL don't understand that parents need schools in order to function, and that simply taking them away without justification for a year was going to have political ramification, is the part that floors me.

Who took them away? Who was our Mayor again?

Well, arguably the union took them away. And the mayor didn't stand up to them.

I'm impressed by the idea some of you have that the union is completely blameless in the school closure debacle.

+100

I personally have really been struggling in the last year because I love our teachers and have always supported the union but I'm not sure I'm ever going to get over how the union handled Covid. They operated from fear and often from a refusal to look at facts and science. I was initially understanding because I also didn't want to go back to work when Covid was raging and there was no vaccine. But when teachers got vaccine priority and our school continued to offer no more than a handful of in-person slots, and the union was slow to encourage teachers to vaccinate or advocate strongly for a return to in person, I really lost so much respect for it.

Still love individual teachers, but I think something broke there. There is a trust that I think it's going to be hard to repair. I used to view the union as a partner on education advocacy and now I can see that they will put the fears (not even the actual interests, but the fears) of teachers ahead of good education policy, I don't feel that way anymore.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Somebody is really freaking out lol.

It's multiple people and I am one of them. We are exhausted of being told that school closures "don't matter" and that we should "get over it." People tend to freak out when you gaslight them for two years. The fact that you STILL don't understand that parents need schools in order to function, and that simply taking them away without justification for a year was going to have political ramification, is the part that floors me.

Who took them away? Who was our Mayor again?

Well, arguably the union took them away. And the mayor didn't stand up to them.

I'm impressed by the idea some of you have that the union is completely blameless in the school closure debacle.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:She is simply the lesser of all evils. There was no serious contender running against her.

This. I don't love her, at all, but at least things seem to be getting done. She got schools open, and part of me thinks under White, schools would still be closed. DC had plenty of tests to pick up in December, when things went all to shit with covid. I don't love it, but she got DC General closed and got those shelters built in a variety of wards. She clears the homeless encampments.

I'd love to see her crack down on crime and the freaking ATV situation. This council (and Robert White) sure won't put any energy there, and she just might now that the election is done.

The bolded is an excellent point. DC was ahead of the game on rapid testing and got it in place just as Omicron hit. That testing wound up being vital in the coming weeks. And then the rest of the year, my PK kid got a test in her backpack every Friday, and for months we tested weekly to keep track of Covid occurrence in the school There were problems with DCPS reporting of Covid cases in the fall, but by the time Omicron hit, and it really counted, things had improved a lot.

I give Bowser a ton of credit for that. Add in stuff like the Covid Centers, mask distribution, the drop-box PCR testing, etc... do you know people in other cities? They never had any of this stuff, or at least not all of it. Bowser actually did a ton to help the city combat Covid and she gets zero credit for it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Somebody is really freaking out lol.

It's multiple people and I am one of them. We are exhausted of being told that school closures "don't matter" and that we should "get over it." People tend to freak out when you gaslight them for two years. The fact that you STILL don't understand that parents need schools in order to function, and that simply taking them away without justification for a year was going to have political ramification, is the part that floors me.

Who took them away? Who was our Mayor again?

Bowser wanted to open schools in August 2020! Were you not paying attention? Yes, she failed to successfully negotiate with the union to make it happen. That's on her (and the union, sorry). But she was starting from a premise of "we need schools to be open".

Please name the mayoral candidate or council member who stated clearly that schools NEED to be open and suggested the workable plan for making it happen. All I heard was a bunch of people saying mealy mouth BS to hold onto their WTU endorsement and advocating for MORE virtual school.

But go on.

Anonymous wrote:She is simply the lesser of all evils. There was no serious contender running against her.

This. I don't love her, at all, but at least things seem to be getting done. She got schools open, and part of me thinks under White, schools would still be closed. DC had plenty of tests to pick up in December, when things went all to shit with covid. I don't love it, but she got DC General closed and got those shelters built in a variety of wards. She clears the homeless encampments.

I'd love to see her crack down on crime and the freaking ATV situation. This council (and Robert White) sure won't put any energy there, and she just might now that the election is done.

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:When are we going to get over the whole "schools were closed for too long!" thing? We're on the tail end of a once in a century pandemic, and yes mistake were made -- but JFC are we going to harp on those mistakes until the end of time?

I will stop being mad about it when
1) there are no longer repercussions from it, for my family personally. There still are. Still paying for that tutoring to catch kids up from what they didn't get last year. Still dealing with some mental health challenges.
2) someone publicly OWNS the mistakes and says "we should not have done this, this was bad, we should never do it again."
3) we've gone a year without a proposal from a council member and/or portion of the teachers union to go back to virtual.
4) we do evaluations of the interventions that we CONTINUE TO DO to weigh their benefits and harms, and don't sweep things under the rug. That would go a long way for me in helping me believe that we don't stupid harmful stuff in the future, for some other thing that happens.

And yet I’m sure you voted for Bowser, who closed the schools to try to score political points and then opened the schools later than almost every other jurisdiction and ran on what a great job she did opening the schools, while demonizing teachers, which you clearly fell for hook, line and sinker.

Yea, this is absolutely true. I'm agnostic on the whole school thing, but where did we get the idea that Bowser was all about opening them? She only staked out that position when it became clear that that's where the political winds were blowing. I don't get it.

But, again -- can we just move the hell on. Please? It's getting ridiculous.

You don't have kids in DCPS, do you?

Seriously, it sounds like you weren't involved at all in any of the 1,000 convos about school reopening. Maybe go read up through one of the thousands of threads on DCUM, to understand the school reopening issues.

Then, stop asking people to ignore issues related to CHILDREN and SCHOOLS.

We were the primary caregivers to our DCPS grandchildren while their parents were working full time. All of the virtual learning happened at our house under our supervision. So I'd say we experienced it first-hand enough to be entitled to express an opinion.

So you personally were not in a family that experienced any harms from the school closures. Congratulations! Your income wasn't hurt, your children's income wasn't hurt. It sounds like your grandkids had no issues with logging on, you've got stable internet, and they do great with virtual learning. Also, miraculously, you've missed every bit of news about the measured learning losses, the harms to women's labor force participation, the mental health impacts to children, and the mental health impacts to parents. Even if you haven't missed all of that, you don't have any ability to conceive of the fact that your experience is not universal (or arguably even normal). I mean, get some empathy at the very least.

You really need to take a step back and catch your breath. I have no idea how you can draw all of those conclusions based on what I said. I'm not going to engage with a crazed lunatic like you point by point. All I will say is that many of your conclusions about how the school closures affected our family are wrong.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The desire of some of you to simply turn the page on a failed policy that has been PROVEN to have been a mistake is amazing. School stayed open all over the world through the entire pandemic, and not only did it not cause worse outcomes in the pandemic, there is some evidence that keeping schools open may have lowered Covid rates in some cases.

Everyone gets this wrong sometimes. It's been a tough couple years and none of us handled it perfectly. But if you are still clinging to this idea that closing DC schools for a full year was a good and justified decision, I can't respect you anymore. You have shown an unwillingness to actually grapple with facts and admit error. I don't even like Bowser but those of you who think you would have done a better job on schools while also arguing that the school closures are no big deal are insane.

Found the strawman!

Real question: do you know what that word means?

I voted for Trayon.

And I'm white, UMC.

I love a train wreck.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Somebody is really freaking out lol.

It's multiple people and I am one of them. We are exhausted of being told that school closures "don't matter" and that we should "get over it." People tend to freak out when you gaslight them for two years. The fact that you STILL don't understand that parents need schools in order to function, and that simply taking them away without justification for a year was going to have political ramification, is the part that floors me.

Who took them away? Who was our Mayor again?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Somebody is really freaking out lol.

It's multiple people and I am one of them. We are exhausted of being told that school closures "don't matter" and that we should "get over it." People tend to freak out when you gaslight them for two years. The fact that you STILL don't understand that parents need schools in order to function, and that simply taking them away without justification for a year was going to have political ramification, is the part that floors me.

Still in denial while wondering why White didn't win! Ha ha. Sadly will be shocked when Trump/DeSantis gets elected as well.