Georgia’s Largest School District Shows Challenges in Opening Schools.
It took all of one day for the challenge of opening schools to become very clear in Georgia’s largest school district, and this was just staff, not the 180k students of Gwinnett County.
On Wednesday, teachers in Georgia’s largest school district returned to elementary, middle and high school campuses to start in-person planning for the fall semester.
By the next day, 260 district employees had been barred from entering their schools, either because they tested positive for the coronavirus or had been directly exposed to someone who had.
Sloan Roach, spokeswoman for Gwinnett County Public Schools, which serves more than 180,000 students, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that most of the cases were tied to community spread, rather than being spread at the schools. Some of the employees who reported exposure to the virus had not come to work yet, Roach added.
“Given the number of [covid-19] cases in Gwinnett, we would expect to see positives among our employees based on the community spread in our county,” Roach told the newspaper.
The outbreak has complicated the return to school in Gwinnett County, which this week had the highest number of new coronavirus cases in the state. Georgia has reported 195,435 cases and 3,842 deaths to date. But Gwinnett County’s teachers and school administrators are hardly alone in dealing with the fallout of an early outbreak as they try to launch a digital-only return.
I don’t have kids so I suppose I don’t have a bone in this fight but it seems to me that there is no good solution here and the best thing to do from a public health standpoint is remote learning for the fall at least. Possibly much longer. A normal and functional Presidential admin would help schools figure out all the logistical issues but we have President Syphilis who likes to punish blue states along with his 40 percent troll-asshole army so….
That being said, distance learning runs into these issues:
1. Employers seem incapable of understanding that it is essentially impossible to be a parent and work at full capacity at the same time but refuse to budge on their expectations because “why can’t everyone else get a nanny like me?” I know some people with nannies and even they have to do negotiation if both of them have jobs that people expect to end at 7 or 8 and the nanny leaves at 5:30.
2. Not all kids have reliable computing or internet access.
3. Remote learning seems less than ideal for many subjects and younger kids.
2.Report
I have three elementary aged kids. There are no good choices. There are better bad choices, but many districts and jurisdictions are not taking those.
Schools provide a variety of social and economic services besides education and childcare. All those services can and probably should continue to be delivered. People should get paid to deliver them. Special needs kids, for instance, will be hard hit by virtual learning. Kids who eat free breakfast and lunch will be hard hit. kids who escape abuse during school will – literally – be hard hit.
We can mitigate many of these issues. But we lack leadership at all levels, especially in Republican led states. MIssissippi has the nation’s fastest growing case counts, has its ICU’s at 98% occupancy, and yet our governor – just today – issued an order delaying only 7th-12 grade school in hotspot counties; mandating masks statewide for teachers and students; and reimposing a mask mandate on public gatherings state wide. He’s not delaying school otherwise, not mandating virtual learning, and not doing anything to free up resources for poorer districts to get virtual resources in place.
People are going to die who don’t need to die.
On the economic front – we have spent decades creating an economy that require a certain percentage of people to spend money in a consumer way, and a certain number of employees to be in “service” industries – who can’t serve people if there ar eno customers. Many of those jobs are probably now permanently gone.Report
One of our local school districts doesn’t start school for three weeks, doesn’t start in-person schooling for eight.
Someone has already tested positive for COVID-19 with the most likely source traced to a school event. (Distribution of material to incoming students. Done ‘drive-through’ style with every school employee social distanced and masked. Parents driving up to get the material were ‘encouraged’ to wear masks, but many did not).Report
The UK did a thing for a while where the children of “essential workers” (doctors and nurses being the ones mentioned) or special-needs or otherwise in precarious positions were advised to attend school; other kids, if they could at all be schooled from home, were.
I’d suggest we try that here but given that people printed up fake cards claiming that they were exempt from masks because of a “disability” the store asking them to mask up wasn’t allowed to ask about, and that they could sue the store if kept out – well, I don’t think it would go well here. (To paraphrase Mencken, no one ever went broke underestimating the community spirit of a modern American)
I dunno. If I had a kid, and could teach them at home? I’d already be doing it.
I’m also kind of dreading what happens with universities, given that I teach at one. I am trying to do my small classes (masked) face to (masked) face, but I feel like even that will be a bit of a gamble. We’ve been warned to be prepared to “pivot to online” with three days notice….less than we had in the spring (we had 2 weeks then)
If I had enough seniority to retire and have something like a tolerable pension, I would, but I don’t, so I won’t.Report
There are great examples of how to do this,both domestically and abroad. We have spent our national summer sticking our heads in the sand on that, and many if not most district reopening plans are uninformed by that data.Report
Well, obviously these people didn’t get sick AT school. They got sick elsewhere. Are we going to close all the other elsewheres where they got sick? Or just schools? Why?Report
Speaking of Georgia schools. Did anyone predict this would happen? Wait, almost everyone predicted this would happen:
https://www.ajc.com/education/9-cases-of-covid-19-reported-at-north-paulding-high-school/OWH6MN7DZ5A2XDQMXX337AQEWI/Report