If You’re Afraid Kids Will Learn Racism is Bad, Perhaps Public School is Not For You

October 14, 2021October 19, 2021 stevenmsinger Betsy DeVos, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, history, immigration, Learning, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, school vouchers, Schools, Social Justice, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized critical race theory, critical thinking, education, history, indoctrinantion, Politics, prejudice, private schools, public schools, racism, racist dog whistle, school privatization, teachers

Some people are terrified that kids will learn about racism.

Especially white people.

Especially that white KIDS might learn about it.

How would that affect a white child’s self-esteem, they say.

Imagine learning that racism existed in the United States.

A country founded by white people.

(Taken from brown people.

Made largely profitable by the enslavement of black people.)

Wouldn’t that make white kids feel bad?

It’s a strange question.

First of all, wouldn’t it make the black and brown kids feel worse than the white kids?

After all, it was their ancestors who were brutalized and subjugated.

Second of all, what does history have to do with your feelings?

This isn’t aroma therapy or yoga. It’s the past.

We never worry about how learning any other subject will impact a student’s emotional states.

It makes me wonder about all the sentiments pedagogues ignore when designing curriculum.

Does learning to read harm a happy illiterate’s self-respect?

Does learning science make a know-it-all feel less confident?

How does learning fractions dispel a person’s sense of the oneness of being?

No. We never even stop to consider such things.

We don’t bother with emotions or feelings. We just fuss over whether it’s true.

Moreover, how would one even teach American history without talking about racism?

This is the United States – a country that built much of its economy on the backs of black people kidnapped from their homes across the sea and then bought and sold here as property.

Not only that but the very land we stand on was once the domain of dark-skinned indigenous people.

People who were tricked, coerced and killed if they did not give up this land – if they did not move on to ever shrinking corners of the continent until they were almost all dead, assimilated or stashed away on reservations.


What would it do to a white child to learn all this?

Provide an accurate account of events, I suppose.

These people terrified that children will learn about racism – I don’t think it’s facts that they’re trying to deny.

I mean I’m sure they would certainly like to gloss over the ugliest atrocities committed by their ancestors, but they don’t really seem to dispute the story of conquest that makes up our founding. It’s more the way the facts are being presented.

History is written by the winners and these white people won.

That’s not what they want to hide.

It’s the TONE in which the story is told.

If we talked about the ingenuity of white people in colonizing these others, they might find that tolerable.

If we talked about how great the white people were and how bad the brown and black people were, that might be acceptable.

Even if we spun a tall tale about how subjugating these others was really in their best interests in the long run, that would be okay.

After all, that’s what they do in many private and parochial schools.

They use textbooks that frame the history of our country just like that – books from The American Christian Education group, the A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press textbooks. A Beka publishers, in particular, report that about 9,000 schools nationwide purchase their textbooks.

So it’s not the story, it’s the way it’s told.

We can’t focus on the victims.

We can’t humanize them by looking at things from their point of view.

We can’t empathize or admit wrongdoing in any way.

In fact, that’s the problem, they say, with public schools.

That’s what they object to.

Public schools teach what it was like to live as an enslaved person. How you could be beaten and murdered with no cause. How you had no rights to anything. How your own children were likewise doomed to a life of servitude and could even be taken away from you never to be seen again.

And not just that but they’re teaching about Jim Crow. They’re teaching about how even after slavery, black people’s rights were almost nonexistent. How they were denied an education, kept in menial jobs, red-lined into ghettos, and often lynched without the slightest provocation.

When children hear about all that, they start to get ideas.

Even the white kids.

It’s not just the history of racism these children are learning, but they’re starting to think that racism is WRONG.

And that’s a problem because it has an impact on how we view the modern world today.

Because there are still black and brown people in the United States.

They make up about 40% of the population and still protest the way they’re treated.

They say it’s harder to get well-paying jobs than whites with the same education and experience. They say their neighborhoods and schools are segregated. They say their right to vote is being suppressed. They say they’re incarcerated at greater rates even though they don’t commit more crimes. They say they’re being killed by police at greater rates even though they aren’t more violent.

And the facts back them up!

So if we teach the history of racism, how do we justify saying that it ever ended?

How do we not admit that it merely evolved into the status quo?

That’s really the issue.

Not the past but the present.

It’s not the racism of the antebellum South or even the pre-civil rights period North of the Mason-Dixon line.

It’s the everyday racism of today that they want to ignore.

It’s voter ID laws spreading across the country.

It’s military style policing, especially in neighborhoods housing mostly people of color.

It’s providing less education funding to schools serving mostly brown and black students than those serving mostly white kids.

The people complaining about teaching the history of racism don’t want to have to do anything about all that.

They want to ensure that the extra rights and privileges given to people like them don’t come to an end. Especially as more black and brown people are born and white skin becomes less common.

This is not about educational transparency.

It’s not about history, truth or pedagogy.

It’s about indoctrination.

They want to ensure that white kids ARE indoctrinated into the world view of their parents – a world of white nationalism.

We can do two things about this.

One, we can give in to them and water down the public school curriculum until it contains nothing of any importance about our history of racial subjugation and white hegemony.

Two, we can ignore them and teach the truth.

The way I see it, the second is our only real option.

There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most obvious is representation.

Everyone doesn’t want to whitewash our history. Most people want us to actually teach the facts.

Some of these people even have white skin.

Moreover, public schools serve a large population of students of color. They certainly don’t want to be denied an accurate record of how we got to this time and place.

Public schools serve the public, and these history censors are a small minority of the whole.

Moreover, even if we gave in to them, it wouldn’t be enough.

At their best, public schools don’t actively inculcate kids. We don’t tell students what to think. We tell them the facts and then exhort them TO think.

The conclusions are all up to them.

Even if we did as these people want, it would still be up to their kids to make the same twisted conclusions as their parents. They don’t just want us to refrain from pointing in any given direction, but to stop providing counter examples and facts so their kids can’t come to an educated decision.

And that is unacceptable.

As a public school system, it is our responsibility to provide those facts.

We must provide children with the truth about what came before them. We must show them how things were and what injustices occurred.

We must even point out how the inequalities of the past lead to the wrongs of today.

What kids make of all this is up to them.

If after knowing the truth, they still decide that today’s racist practices are acceptable, that is their right.

But we cannot hide the reality from them.

If that is objectionable to some people, then perhaps public school is not for them.

Perhaps a system of education where truth is considered a human right is not what they’re looking for.

In that case, there are plenty of private and parochial schools that will indoctrinate their children into whatever shape they’d like.

That’s where they’ll probably send them anyway.

And public schools are foolish to try and court the kinds of people with value systems antithetical to them.

If you want to abolish public schools, if you don’t share the community values of truth and independent thinking, perhaps public school is not for you.

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Top Five Actions to Stop the Teacher Exodus During COVID and Beyond

October 7, 2021 stevenmsinger Accountability, Charter Schools, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Common Core, Compassion, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, edtech, Education, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, principals, privatization, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, standards, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized, union busting, Unions administrators, communication, coronavirus, COVID-19, education, lesson plans, pandemic, planning, Politics, Respect, school directors, schools, self care, Students, supply and demand, teacher shortage, teachers, unions

As the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, schools across the United States are on the brink of collapse.

There is a classroom teacher shortage.

There is a substitute teacher shortage.

There is a bus driver shortage.

There is a special education aide shortage.

The people we depend on to staff our public schools are running away in droves.

It’s a clear supply and demand issue that calls for deep structural changes.

However, it’s not really new. We’ve needed better compensation and treatment of school employees for decades, but our policymakers have been extremely resistant to do anything about it.

Instead, they’ve given away our tax dollars to corporations through charter and voucher school initiatives. They’ve siphoned funding to pay for more standardized testing, teaching to the test, and ed tech software.

But the people who actually do the work of educating our youth. We’ve left them out in the cold.

Now with the smoldering pandemic and increased impacts on the health, safety and well-being of teachers and other staff, the exodus has merely intensified.

Frankly, I’m not holding my breath for lawmakers to finally get off their collective asses.

We need a popular, national movement demanding action from our state and federal governments. However, in the meantime, there are several things our local school districts can do to stem the tide of educators fleeing the profession.

These are simple, cheap and common sense methods to encourage teachers to stay in the classroom and weather the storm.

However, let me be clear. None of these can solve the problem, alone. And even ALL of these will not stop the long-term flight of educators from our schools without better salaries and treatment.

1) Eliminate Unnecessary Tasks

The list of tasks an average teacher is expected to accomplish every day is completely unrealistic.

Think about it. Just to get through a normal day teachers need to provide instruction, discipline students, grade papers, facilitate classwork, troubleshoot technology, provide written and verbal feedback, counsel disputes, role model correct behavior, monitor the halls, lunches, breakfasts and unstructured time, meet with co-workers, follow Individual Education Plans, scaffold lessons for different learners and learning styles…

The list is truly staggering.

And it never stops.

Researchers have estimated that on average teachers make at least 1,500 decisions a day. That’s about 4 decisions a minute.

No one can keep up that pace, day-in, day-out, without strain. No one can do it without their work suffering.

If we truly want to help teachers feel empowered to stay in the profession, we need to reduce the burden. And the best way to do that is to eliminate everything unnecessary from their plates.

That means no staff meeting just to have a staff meeting. No shotgun scattered initiatives that teachers are expected to execute and we’ll see what will stick. No reams of paperwork. No professional development that wasn’t specifically requested by teachers or is demonstrably useful.

Nothing that isn’t absolutely necessary.

2) No Formal Lesson Plans

The number one offender is formal lesson plans.

I’m not saying we should tell teachers they don’t have to plan what they’re doing in their classes. I’m not sure how an educator could realistically enter a classroom of students and just wing it.

However, the process of writing and handing in formal lesson plans is absolutely unnecessary.

Teachers gain nothing from writing detailed plans about what they expect to do in their classes complete with reference to Common Core Academic Standards. They gain nothing from acting as subordinates to an all knowing administrator who probably has not been trained in their curriculum nor has their classroom experience teaching it.

For educators with at least 3-5 years under their belts, formal lesson plans are nothing but an invitation to micromanagement.

Should administrators monitor what their teachers are doing? Absolutely. But the best way to do that is to actually observe the teacher in the classroom doing the work. And to conference with the teacher before and after the observation with the goal of understanding what they’re doing and how to best help them improve.

Forcing teachers to set aside time from their already overburdened schedules to fill out lesson plans that administrators don’t have time to read and (frankly) probably don’t have the training or experience to fully comprehend is top down managerial madness.

3) More Planning Time

Teachers need time to plan.

It’s pathetic that I actually have to explain this.

Education doesn’t just happen.

Parents need called. Papers need graded. Lessons need strategized. IEP’s need to be read, understood and put into practice.

All this can only happen within a temporal framework. If you don’t give teachers that framework – those minutes and hours – you’re just expecting they’ll do it at home, after school or some other time that will have to be stolen from their own families, robbed from their own needs and down time.

Every administrator on the planet preaches the need for self-care, but few actually offer the time to make it a reality.

Even if we could discover exactly how much time was necessary for every teacher to get everything done in a given day – that wouldn’t be enough time. Because teachers are human beings. We need time to process, to evaluate, to think and, yes, to rest.

I know sometimes I have to stop wrestling with a problem I’m having in class because I’m getting nowhere. After two decades in the classroom I’ve learned that sometimes you have to give your brain a rest and approach a problem again later from a different vantage point.

I need to read a scholarly article or even for pleasure. I need to watch YouTube videos that may be helpful to my students. I need to get up and go for a walk, perhaps even just socialize for a moment with my coworkers.

None of that is time wasted because my brain is still working. My unconscious is still trying untie the Gordian knot of my workday and when I finally sit down to revisit the issue, I often find it looser and more easily handled.

Administrators must prioritize teacher planning time.

There is no simpler way to put it.

Do not ask your teacher to sub. Do not ask them to attend meetings. Do not ask them to help you plan building wide initiatives – UNLESS you can guarantee it won’t interfere with their plans.

I know this is difficult right now with so many staff falling ill or being so plowed under that they simply can’t make it to work.

However, the more you push them to give up their plans, the more you diminish returns.

Not only will their work suffer but so will their health and willingness to continue on the job.

Some districts are finding creative ways to increase planning time such as releasing students early one day a week. We did that at my district last year and it was extremely helpful to meet all the additional duties required just to keep our building open. However, as the new school year dawned and decision makers decided to simply ignore continuing pandemic issues, this time went away.

Most teachers are in the profession because it’s a calling. They care about doing the best job they can for their students.

If you take away their ability to do that, why would they stay?

4) Better Communication/ Better COVID Safety

Communication is a two way street.

You can’t have one person telling everyone else what to do and expect to have a good working relationship.

Administrators may get to make the final decision, but they need to listen to what their teachers tell them and take that into account before doing so.

This means setting aside the proper time to hear what your staff has to say.

Many administrators don’t want to do that because things can devolve into a series of complaints. But you know what? TOUGH.

It is your job to listen to those complaints and take them seriously.

Sometimes just allowing your staff to voice their concerns is helpful all in itself. Sometimes offering them space to speak sparks solutions to problems – and a whole room full of experienced, dedicated educators can solve any problem better than one or two managers locked away in the office.

However, not only do administrators need to listen, they need to speak.

When issues crop up, they need to make sure the staff is aware of what is happening.

This is especially true during the pandemic.

We are so sick of half truths about who has Covid, who is quarantined, what is being done to keep us safe, etc.

No child should return to the classroom after a negative COVID test without the teacher already being appraised.

No child should be placed in quarantine without the teachers knowledge.

No teacher with a prior medical condition should have to serve lunch duty while students eat unmasked.

Safety protocols should be the product of the entire staff’s input. If everyone doesn’t feel safe, no one feels safe.

5) Respect

This is really the bottom line.

Teachers need to feel respected.

We need to know that administrators and school board members understand our struggles and are on our side.

I don’t mean taking a day or even one week out of the year to celebrate Teacher Appreciation. I don’t mean free donuts or coupons to Sam’s Club. I don’t even mean a mug with an inspirational message.

I’m talking about every day – day-in, day-out – respect for teachers.

No union bashing.

No snide comments at school board meetings.

No gossipy whispering in the community.

Being a teacher should mean something to district leaders. And they should prove it in every thing they do.

The items I mentioned here go some ways to showing that respect.

Eliminating unnecessary tasks, not requiring formal lesson plans, respecting our planning time, better communicating and safety measures are all necessary to keeping your teachers in the classroom.

But they are not sufficient.

As a nation we need to change our attitude and treatment of teachers.

No profession exists without them. They create every other job that exists.

We need to start paying them accordingly. We need to start treating them as important as they are. We need to ensure that they have the time, tools and satisfaction necessary to be the best they can be.

No district can do that alone. No school director or administrator can do that.

But these are some ways you can start.

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My Students Haven’t Lost Learning. They’ve Lost Social and Emotional Development

September 30, 2021 stevenmsinger absenteeism, Accountability, capitalism, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Credibility, Data, edtech, Education, growth mindset, Healthcare, Labor, Learning, literature, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, school closings, Schools, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized behavior, coronavirus, COVID-19, development, education, emotional, Learning, Politics, schools, social, Students, teachers

There is a student screaming across the hall.

He is holding his gut and rocking back and forth in cries of wordless emotional pain as the rest of the class looks on in bewilderment.

Students from other rooms start to cluster around the door until a security guard makes them go away.

I close the door to my own classroom and try to settle my students down – but we can still hear him through the walls.

And then:

“Shut up!”

“You’re stupid!”

“Why don’t you make me!?”

Believe it or not, this is not what teaching middle school used to be like.

Eighth grade students were never perfect angels, but at least by then they used to know how to talk to one another. They could usually interact without constant sniping. They knew what was expected to get respect from each other and at least tried to do it.

But things have changed.

After 18 months of a pandemic, even when they aren’t infected with disease, children still are suffering tremendously from the effects of Covid-19.

Adolescents are dealing with higher rates of anxiety, depression, stress, and addictive internet behaviors.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that children between the ages of 5 and 11 visiting an emergency department because of a mental health crisis increased 24 percent from April through October of 2020 compared to the previous year. Among 12- to 17-year-olds, the number increased by 31 percent.

Suicide attempts among 12- to 17-year-old girls increased by about 50 percent over winter 2019, according to the CDC.

And these numbers are probably under reported since these increases took place at the height of a pandemic when many people were hesitant to seek medical attention.

As usual, the place where these issues are most visible is our public schools.

When Covid-19 swept our shores last year, much of the benefit of formal education fell through the cracks.

Consistency went out the window. Many schools went to on-line learning or a hybrid model of in-person and on-line offset with increasingly common periods of quarantine.

These were often necessary to keep kids and their families safe – and in some cases still are. As a society, we could have done more to blunt the blow such as paying parents to stay safe at home as well as supervise their children, but economic concerns took precedence to human ones.

And now we’re seeing the cost.

Many students attended school haphazardly and their parents often weren’t around to give them the kind of stability, role models or attention they’d normally get at school.

Today, as the pandemic still smolders on, and schools struggle to function as if the danger had passed, the result is classes of emotionally needy and socially awkward children.

There were so many fights in the halls of my building last week, we’re now operating on a soft lockdown to decrease unstructured time between classes.

And you know what – it’s not really kids’ fault.

They’re just trying to live in the world we’ve built for them.

More than 674,000 Americans have died from COVID.

According to the CDC, more than 140,000 children in the U.S. lost a primary or secondary caregiver such as a live-in grandparent or another family member to the virus.

Globally, that’s more than 1.5 million kids who have lost a parent, guardian or live-in relative to the pandemic, according to the Lancet.

No wonder kids are having trouble dealing with their emotions! Their support systems are shot!

My students are bright, caring, energetic and creative people. They have the same wants and needs as children always have. They just have fewer tools with which to meet them.

Administrators often focus on academic deficits.

They worry about learning loss and what the kids can’t do today versus students in the same grades before the pandemic. But I think this is a huge mistake.

My students are not suffering from a lack of academics. They’re suffering from a lack of social and emotional development.

I teach Language Arts and, sure, my kids may not have been exposed as deeply to certain concepts as those who came before them. They may not have written an acrostic poem or read Dickens or had as much experience writing. But that doesn’t mean they’re deficient.

Every child – every PERSON – learns at an individual rate. Some take longer than others. Some take more exposure, experience and practice. But learning is never lost.

Teachers know this. That’s why we scaffold our lessons. We get to know our kids and where they are before we can gauge what they still need to learn.

My students may not have read the play they would have in 7th grade, but I can help them understand the components of drama when we read a play in the curriculum for 8th grade. They may not have written a particular type of poem last year, but we can still read one and understand it this year.

Many students have difficulties with spelling and punctuation. That’s true this year as well as any other. That doesn’t mean they’ve lost anything. It means they need more instruction and practice.

I’m not worried about that. It’s really pretty similar to any other year.

What does concern me is the level of immaturity and social awkwardness I’m seeing.

People aren’t machines. You can’t flip a switch and they just learn.

You have to create an environment that is conducive to learning.

Part of that is creating a class culture where everyone feels respected and safe. That’s difficult to do when kids don’t know how to communicate without conflict.

That’s difficult when their sense of safety has been deeply impacted. Community members whining about security measures like wearing masks and getting vaccinated don’t help this – not at all.

In schools, we’re trying to instill a sense of consistency and care. We’re trying to teach kids the basics of human interaction again – something even some adults are having to relearn.

And let me tell you – it’s extremely hard in large, anxious groups dealing with the continuing uncertainty of our times.

My own health has suffered under the pressures with which educators are forced to contend. Unnecessary paperwork, increased expectations, lack of respect and compensation have teachers stretched to a breaking point.

I was in and out of the hospital all last week and the district had great difficulty finding an adult to sub for me.

For two days they resorted to hiring parents from the community to watch my classes. I’m told that one of them reported to the office at the end of the day and promptly told the secretary not to call her tomorrow, that she was never coming back.

It’s hard for professional educators, too.

According to a 2020 survey by the New York Life Foundation and American Federation of Teachers, only 15% of teachers feel comfortable addressing grief or trauma tied to the pandemic.

My kids are not demons.

They are not monsters or evil or incorrigible.

They’re just kids who really need our love and support.

I feel for them. I really do.

When I’m here, I do everything I can to help them feel safe, secure, respected and cared for.

It’s certainly not easy.

At lunch the other day, one student came to my door and scratched on the window. He was in tears.

I let him in and asked what was wrong.

He was at his wits end about his home life and felt lost. I sat with him, we talked it out and I asked if there was anything else I could do for him.

He said, “Yes. Can I have a hug?”

So even now, with COVID out there in the community and my mask securely fastened, I did it. I gave him a hug.

That’s the need I’m seeing in schools right now.

It’s not academics. That will be fine if we can take care of the emotional and social needs of our students.

But this can’t be accomplished by teachers alone – nor even administrators, school boards and districts.

We need to build a world that cares about children.

We need to value their lives and needs.

It’s not enough to care whether a child is born. We have to care whether a child is taken care of, healthy and loved.

And that means looking out for their parents, too.

If parents didn’t have to sacrifice themselves to their jobs, they could spend more time with their kids.

When your job constantly demands more time, at all times of the day and night, you can’t be there effectively for the ones you love.

We talk about family values, but we do little to value families. Only their credit score and earning power.

This is a problem that won’t be solved overnight.

It may far outlast the pandemic, itself.

To heal our kids, we have to heal our society.

In fact, we can’t do one without doing the other.

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Lack of Trusted Authority is Why Covid-19 is Kicking Our Butts

September 10, 2021 stevenmsinger Accountability, bloggers, Child Safety, COVID-19, Credibility, Data, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Healthcare, history, Joe Biden, Journalism, Junk science, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Media, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, Propaganda, Republican, Schools, Students, Teachers authority, cdc, COVID-19, Credibility, federal authority, masking, media, Politics, schools, teachers, trust, vaccine

We have faced tough times before.

World wars, famines, pandemics, economic ruin.

But in each of these disasters, the majority of people thought they had somewhere to turn for knowledge and advice.

We had trusted authorities to tell us what to do, to counsel us how to handle these seemingly insurmountable disasters.

Today many of us face the Covid-19 pandemic feeling there are few sources to believe in – and that more than anything else – is why we are having such a difficult time coming together to overcome this crisis.

The media, government, science, religion – none hold a central place of confidence in most people’s lives. So when tough decisions about health and safety come into play, many of us aren’t sure what to do.

This wasn’t always the case.

Look back to World War II.

Not only did we defeat fascism but new vaccines put a wallop on illness and disease.

When we entered the fray, the US government organized new research initiatives targeting influenza, bacterial meningitis, bacterial pneumonia, measles, mumps, neurotropic diseases, tropical diseases and acute respiratory diseases.

And because there was an immense trust in government – after all, as a nation we had been attacked together as one at Pearl Harbor – there was enormous trust in these initiatives.

Before World War II, soldiers died more often of disease than of battle injuries. The ratio of disease-to-battle casualties was approximately 5-to-1 in the Spanish-American War and 2-to-1 in the Civil War. In World War I, we were able to reduce casualties due to disease through better sanitation efforts, but we could not protect troops from the 1918 influenza pandemic. During that outbreak, flu accounted for roughly half of US military casualties in Europe.

Much of the groundwork for innovation in vaccinations had already been laid before WWII. However, it was the organization of the war effort and the trust both the civilian and military population had in government that catapulted us ahead.

I’m not ignoring that some of this trust was misplaced. The US government has never been fully trustworthy – just ask the Asian American population forced into internment camps. However, the general feeling at the time that the government was a force for good, that we were all in this together and we all had to do our part had a vast effect on how we handled this crisis.

Today that kind of trust is gone.

In some ways that’s a good thing. It could be argued that “The Greatest Generation” put too much faith in government and the following years showed why too credulous belief in the good will of our leaders was unearned and unhealthy.

From Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal to Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct to George W. Bush lying us into a war of choice to Barack Obama’s neoliberalism to Donald Trump’s gross mismanagement and blatant racism – we can never go back to a WWII mentality.

Skepticism of government is kind of like seasoning. A certain amount is a good thing, but the inability to trust even government’s most basic ability to take care of its citizens and function in any meaningful way is hugely detrimental.

And this earned distrust has seeped into just about every source of possible certitude that might have helped us survive the current crisis.

The media used to be considered the fourth estate – one of the most important pillars of our society. After all, the freedom of information is essential to the free exercise of democracy.

However, the erosion of impartiality has been going on since at least the 1980s when the FCC under President Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine. Since 1949 this had required the media to present both sides’ of opinions. In 1987 a Democratic Congress passed a bill to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine but it was vetoed by Reagan.

This, along with the rise of talk radio and the insistence that news departments turn a profit, lead directly to the creation of more biased reporting skewed to a particular audience – Fox News and Sinclair Broadcast Group being the most prominent.

The fact that just six corporations own 90% of the media outlets in the country skew coverage to what’s in the best interests of big business. These corporations are GE, Newscorp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner and CBS.

Finally, the loss of local newspapers and the purchase of those few that do exist by large media conglomerates further increase bias.

Few people feel they can trust the news anymore. They turn to the Internet, social media, Twitter and other sources that often are just echo chambers for what they already believe.

The irony is not lost on me that you are reading a blog by a public school teacher, not a professional journalist. But my aim is to use my experience in education to inform the debate.

It’s just too bad that I’m often forced to report the news when traditional news sources drops the ball.

Again skepticism of mass media is a good thing, but we should at least be able to count on the press as a reliable source of facts. However, these days few facts are free from bias, spin and editorial comment.

Even science is not immune.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) made several blunders handling this pandemic which hurt the organization’s credibility.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the organization refused to acknowledge and later emphasize the airborne spread of the virus. It took until May 2021 for the organization to fully recognize that fact.

Another blunder was the guidelines on what counts as “close contact.” It went from “within 6 feet” to “within 3 feet”, and the duration went from 30 minutes consecutively to 30 minutes cumulatively. It’s not so much that the evidence changed, but that political pressure forced the CDC to lower its standards.

World scientific consensus now is that the coronavirus is capable of airborne spread without close contact between two people. Airborne droplets can linger in the air indoors and infect any number of people from one superspreading host subject.

The CDC’s advice on close contact is based on old scientific research that just isn’t as good as modern experiments.

And the organization has misjudged so much more from the importance of masking (at first they said it wasn’t important, now they say it is important), whether children can catch the virus (at first they said this was unlikely and now they admit it happens but is often asymptomatic), whether Covid spreads in schools (they used to say the limited protections in place at schools made this unlikely and now they admit it is happening), etc.

One could argue that these were simple mistakes that have changed as better science comes in. However, in each case they appear to have initially been politically motivated and justified with limited or flawed studies that could not continue to be supported as new data came in.

At first the CDC told us that masking wasn’t important not because it was true, but to hide a shortage of masks that needed to be prioritized for medical staff. These needs are understandable, but hiding the truth and then changing your messaging doesn’t engender trust.

Misinformation about the impact of Covid on children was an attempt to keep schools open and stop the economy from shutting down as parents were unable to work. Not only did this put children at risk for economic gain, it has contributed to the current refusal of so many people to follow CDC guidelines about reopening schools.

Why do so many people refuse to have their children wear masks at school? Why is there so much vaccine hesitancy? Why anxiety about reopening plans that focus on close contacts?

The CDC owns a lot of the responsibility because it has repeatedly earned our distrust.

This isn’t to say everything coming from them is dubious. I think the guidelines the CDC has put in place for the current school year are supported by the facts.

I think there is evidence that people need to wear masks in schools. I think we need to vaccinate as many people as possible.

But these are just bare minimums.

I think the CDC is still focusing too much on the economic impact of its guidelines when it should be solely focused on the health and safety of students, staff and the community.

This is not a time for scientists to be playing politics.

We need them to be as transparent as possible – as trustworthy as they can be.

Unfortunately, the erosion of institutional credibility at so many levels has become a cycle to itself.

At multiple levels, sources that should be bedrock have become wet sand.

The federal government has not taken enough action to keep people safe. State governments have not taken enough action – and some have even taken action to prevent safety.

Even at the local level, many school boards have cowardly refused to put in place mask or vaccine mandates.

It is the systematic breakdown of a society.

We have few places left we can trust.

And that is why we are fractured and scared.

We don’t know what to do to keep our loved ones safe.

People seem forced to choose between taking the virus seriously and ignoring it.

Many refuse to admit that it could hurt them. They think it’s just the sniffles. Few healthy people die and they discount the potential longterm effects of catching it.

The US has only 4% of the world population but nearly a quarter of all Covid cases.

That’s not a coincidence.

In large part, it’s because we don’t know how to combat the virus because we don’t know who to trust.

And the resulting credibility vacuum has enabled unscrupulous politicians, agents of chaos and other charlatans to position themselves as experts.

When all information is equal, disinformation is king.

The solution to the pandemic may end up being easier than this riddle.

How our institutions can regain their credibility.

Especially when our politics doesn’t allow them to be honest, and fewer people are even listening to them every day.

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Thank you, Gov. Wolf, for Reissuing a Mask Mandate for PA Schools. Time for Next Steps

September 1, 2021 stevenmsinger Accountability, Allegheny County, Budget, Child Safety, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Democrat, Education, Election, Harrisburg, Healthcare, Learning, Local Control, McKeesport Area School District, Pennsylvania, Politics, Prejudice, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, Schools, small class size, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Tom Wolf, Uncategorized child safety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Governor Tom Wolf, mask optional, masking, masks, pandemic, Pennsylvania, Politics, safe schools, safety, school directors, schools

My daughter’s school has been open for seven days so far this year.

The school where I teach has been open three days.

Masks optional at both.

Do you know how terrifying that is for a father – to send his only child off to class hoping she’ll be one of the lucky ones who doesn’t get sick?

Do you know how frustrating it is for an educator like me trying to teach while unsure how long your students will be well enough to stay in class? Unsure how long you will?

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) warns we should wear masks in school to protect from Covid-19, especially the more virulent delta variant.

So does the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Nationwide Children’s Hospitals Care Connection, the Allegheny County Department of Health…

And just about every doctor, immunologist and specialist at UPMC as well as the Pennsylvania State Education Association, and the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

Heck! Even the Pittsburgh Post Gazette’s editorial board – not always a bastion of good sense – called the decision to mask in schools a “no brainer.”

But somehow my duly elected school board couldn’t find the courage to enact that advice.

The school directors where I work refused to even explain their reasoning behind denying the precaution.

But BOTH groups promised to abide by any mandates handed down from on high.

It seemed that neither group had the courage to make the decision, themselves. They just passed it on to parents knowing full well that there would be no consistency.

Gather together a large enough group of anyone and it’s doubtful they’ll all agree on anything. And all it takes is one or two people to come to school unmasked to infect everybody there!

Thank goodness for Governor Tom Wolf.

Today he announced a mask mandate at all preK-12 schools, both public and private, and licensed child care centers beginning next Tuesday.

The mandate comes after three weeks of Wolf refusing to take this step.

At first, he said he was going to leave this up to the individual school boards – but they dropped the ball.

Only 36.8% of districts throughout Pennsylvania enacted some form of mass mandate on their own, though they serve 53.25% of students.

That’s 184 districts with some form of mask requirement, 307 optional and 9 unknown.

What a disgrace!

It just goes to show that the great majority of school directors in the Commonwealth are cowards, stupid or both.

If the voters don’t rise up and replace these fools, we will only have ourselves to blame.

They have betrayed the public trust.

They should be hounded from our midst, unfit to even show themselves in society.

To put kids lives at risk because you haven’t the guts to take the responsibility! Or worse, to be so idiotic as to distrust nearly every medical professional, scientist, immunologist or specialist!

As a state, and as a country, we have been given an intelligence test – and our leaders have mostly failed.

I am thankful Governor Wolf acted.

Finally.

Wolf’s emergency powers to sustain a state disaster declaration were curtailed by voters in the May election.

Another failure of voters to turn out and support one of the few people with the courage to protect our children.

However, May’s referendum did not affect the Wolf administration’s ability to implement a masking order or other public-health rules under the state’s disease-control law. The Pennsylvania Department of Health has the authority to issue a statewide mask order for K-12 schools under a state law that empowers the department to take appropriate measures to protect the public from infectious diseases.

To his credit, Wolf tried to work with the legislature to get this done.

He asked the Republican-controlled state House and Senate to come back in session and vote on the matter. But since they prefer politics to safeguarding children they refused.

We are fortunate to have at least one adult in Harrisburg – and he lives in the Governor’s mansion.

However, we can’t get complacent.

This mask mandate is only step one of what needs to be done.

As many other states have done, we need to require all school employees to get the Covid vaccine or provide proof of regular negative COVID tests just to enter educational buildings.

Right now children younger than 12 are not eligible to be vaccinated. We need to require those young people who are eligible to get the vaccine or provide them with an alternative like remote learning. And when the vaccine has been cleared for all children, we need to add it to the long list of other vaccines children already need to get to enter school.

We need an influx of funding to make it possible to keep kids in school and still keep them socially distanced. As it is now, this is nearly impossible – I speak from experience.

The school where I teach has hardly any social distancing, and frankly we can’t have in-person school without more classrooms, more teachers, more space.

We need to bring back cleaning protocols to make sure every classroom is properly disinfected between periods. We need to ensure that school buildings are properly ventilated.

Will this be expensive? Probably, but if we could waste $300 million a day for two decades in Afghanistan that resulted in NOTHING, we can afford to properly fund our schools for once!

But most of all, we have to come to an understanding – the pandemic is not over – and it will not be over until enough of the general population is vaccinated.

Are you frustrated by masks? Are you frustrated we have to keep going back to these safety precautions?

Me, too.

But these precautions can’t go away just because we’re frustrated. People have to understand that the only way they will go away is if everyone does their part.

Going out in public unmasked should bring severe social consequences.

People who recklessly put the lives of others in danger just because they don’t feel like being bothered deserve the cold shoulder.

They should be stigmatized, rebuffed and ostracized.

Let me be clear. I’m not talking about physical violence. I’m talking about social consequences for acting like an Asshole.

We need to grow up.

Actions have consequences.

We need a functioning society.

And communities that can’t even come together to protect their own children are nothing of the sort.

It’s way past time we took action.

Gov. Wolf has put us on the path, but this is not over.

This is just the beginning.

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School Leaders Refusing to Mandate Masks Are Responsible for the Coming Storm

August 27, 2021 stevenmsinger absenteeism, Accountability, Allegheny County, capitalism, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, COVID-19, Credibility, Data, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Healthcare, Learning, Local Control, McKeesport Area School District, Parents, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, Prejudice, protest, Republican, School Choice, school closings, Schools, security, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Tom Wolf, Uncategorized Allegheny County, child safety, coronavirus, COVID-19, mask optional, masking, masks, pandemic, Pennsylvania, Politics, school directors, schools

I would love for this to be a normal school year.

I would relish the opportunity to teach my classes of middle school students without a mask covering my face and obscuring my voice.

I would enjoy being able to see the expressions on their faces as I welcomed them to class and got to know them.

But I am not stupid.

I know that doing so would not be worth the cost.

The pandemic is not over – not in Pennsylvania. Covid-19 cases are on the rise in my community and an increasing number of children have gotten sick, been hospitalized or died.

Forgoing masks would risk more. It’s just not worth it.

Only a month ago child Covid cases numbered in the zeroes or low single-digits each day in my home of Allegheny County, according to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. During the past two weeks there have been as many as 30 to 40 new child cases a day.

Some of these are kids 11 and younger who are not eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine. Some are those 12 and older who have not been vaccinated. And a few are break-through cases among vaccinated kids, said Dr. Andrew Nowalk, clinical director of infectious diseases at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) are recommending everyone in schools – students, staff, visitors, etc. – wear masks whether they’ve been vaccinated or not.

As a school director, why would you take a chance with the children in your care?

There are so many questions I have about this situation that all seem to boil down to variations on that one.

Dr. Todd Wolynn, CEO of Kids Plus Pediatrics, an independent pediatrics practice with several locations in the region, put it this way:

“We’re here to ask one question to school districts not doing universal masking: Why is your situation safer [without a mask mandate] than what is recommended by the AAP and the CDC?”

Why is it safer to forgo this precaution?

Wearing a mask is not all that hard. We all did it throughout most of the last year and a half.

Why is it so hard to just continue doing it a little while longer?

I asked a similar question of Bryan Macuga, Assistant Superintendent of Steel Valley School District where I work.

He mentioned at a district wide meeting that the new health and safety plan approved by the school board makes masks optional this year. I asked him why.

He refused to give me an answer. He simply said that’s what’s been decided and would say no more.

Superintendent Ed Wehrer was there at the meeting wearing a mask to – as he put it – “model” that behavior. Wehrer said he was empowered by the school board to mandate masks if it became necessary. He hasn’t done so nor did he find it necessary to answer my question, either.

I can’t imagine it.

If these leaders really think it is better not to mandate masks, why not explain their reasoning. We may agree or disagree with them, but they can’t even show us the courtesy of a straight answer to a fair question.

Whatever their reasoning, most Allegheny County school directors must disagree with it.

The majority of the county’s 43 school districts – 70% – have mandated masks in their schools. It’s heartening to see so many school leaders putting children over politics this way. I just wish I lived and worked in one of their communities.

Only 13 county districts are making masks optional and most of those are clustered on the southeastern border with more rural (and Republican) Westmoreland County.

I don’t understand how ideology makes people risk the lives of their own kids.

Masks and vaccines should not be political.

They should be the purview of science and reason.

Throughout the rest of the state, the situation seems even worse.

Pennsylvania has 500 school districts. Of 474 that submitted health and safety plans by July, only 59 reported plans to mandate masks for the 2021-22 year. This number is certainly higher now as districts changed their plans based on increases in Covid cases through August. But the situation is still incredibly frustrating.

This week Gov. Tom Wolf called on the legislature to reconvene and pass a motion to mandate masks in Commonwealth schools.

However, Wolf is a Democrat and the legislature is controlled by Republicans so this request was soundly rejected.

It’s unclear whether Wolf will try to do this on his own under his authority as governor especially since voters just limited his ability to do so in a referendum in May.

Politics. Stupid politics while our children are in danger.

Elections have consequences but so do boneheaded decisions by elected leaders.

The choice to make masks optional needlessly puts so much in jeopardy.

Not just healthy and safety but the ability of schools to function well.

One of the major takeaways of the last pandemic year was how ineffective and frustrating remote schooling is. Even under the best of circumstances in-person classes are far superior.

However, refusing to put in place safety precautions like universal masking puts in-person learning at risk.

If Covid infections are high enough, schools must close and go back to remote instruction.

Why would school directors risk that?

If their main concern is academics, why not install the kinds of provisions that at least allow for the best method of instruction?

There seems to be a cynical calculus here – various games of chicken with local government against higher state and federal authorities.

Republicans refuse to legislate safety precautions. Democrats often are too afraid to do so.

The result is our current fractured map of diverse reactions to the same disaster.

In short, it may take a larger disaster to break the political gridlock.

Certainly kids will get sick. Without a doubt they will bring the virus home to parents, friends and family.

But will the net result be bad enough to force – and I do mean FORCE – lockdowns, quarantines and remote schooling?

I don’t know the answer. And neither do anti-maskers, but they are recklessly betting that the consequences won’t be bad enough to force their hand.

Honestly, in a sane society this careless attitude endangering children and families would be enough to bring condemnation and shame.

But in our broken system it will take a true catastrophe of epic proportions. Judging from last year, mask optional districts will do whatever they can to obscure the level of damage their policies are doing and stay the course unless the explosion is so big as to be impossible to hide.

We’re talking kindergarten classes full of Covid patients, tiny tots attached to ventilators, lawsuits and funerals in equal measure.

I don’t know if it will come to that, but if it does, we know who to blame.

Any disruptions in education, any illnesses, any long-term effects must be laid at the feet of the decision makers who could have protected us from it but refused to do so.

They have a responsibility that is being ignored.

I can only hope that one day they receive the justice their actions today make them so richly deserve.

The following is a list from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette of public school districts in Allegheny County and their position on universal masking for the 2021-22 school year (as of Wednesday, Aug. 25):

MASKS REQUIRED

Allegheny Valley (Cheswick and Springdale boroughs; Harmar and Springdale townships)

Avonworth School District (Ben Avon, Ben Avon Heights, Emsworth, Kilbuck and Ohio Township)

Bethel Park

Carlynton (Carnegie, Crafton, Rosslyn Farms)

Clairton City

Cornell (Coraopolis, Neville Island)

East Allegheny (East McKeesport, Wall, Wilmerding, North Versailles)

Fox Chapel Area (Fox Chapel, Sharpsburg, Aspinwall, O’Hara, Blawnox, Indiana Township)

Gateway (Monroeville, Pitcairn)

Hampton

Keystone-Oaks (Dormont, Castle Shannon, Green Tree)

Montour (Kennedy Township, Robinson Township, Ingram, Thornburg, Pennsbury Village)

Moon Area (Crescent, Moon)

Mt. Lebanon

North Allegheny — (Marshall, McCandless, Bradford Woods, Franklin Park); masks required as a result of legal action.

Northgate — (Bellevue, Avalon)

North Hills (Ross, West View)

Penn Hills

Pine-Richland

Pittsburgh Public Schools (Pittsburgh, Mount Oliver)

Quaker Valley (Sewickley, Leetsdale, Edgeworth, Glen Osborne, Sewickley Hills, Sewickley Heights, Bell Acres, Haysville, Glenfield, Leet, Aleppo)

Riverview (Oakmont, Verona)

Shaler Area (Shaler, Etna, Millvale, Reserve)

South Fayette

Sto-Rox (McKees Rocks, Stowe)

Upper St. Clair

West Allegheny (Findlay, North Fayette, Oakdale)

West Mifflin Area (West Mifflin, Whitaker)

Wilkinsburg

Woodland Hills (Braddock, Braddock Hills, Chalfant, Churchill, East Pittsburgh, Edgewood, Forest Hills, North Braddock, Rankin, Swissvale, Turtle Creek, Wilkins)

OPTIONAL

Baldwin-Whitehall

Brentwood

Chartiers Valley — Optional but “strongly recommended”; (Bridgeville, Heidelberg, Collier, Scott)

Deer Lakes (West Deer, Frazer, East Deer)

Duquesne City

Elizabeth Forward

Highlands (Tarentum, Brackenridge, Fawn, Harrison)

McKeesport Area (McKeesport, Versailles, South Versailles, Dravosburg, White Oak)

Plum

South Allegheny (Port Vue, Liberty, Glassport, Lincoln)

South Park

Steel Valley (Homestead, Munhall, West Homestead)

West Jefferson Hills (Jefferson Hills, West Elizabeth, Pleasant Hills)

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Why Does Your Right to Unmask Usurp My Child’s Right to a Safe School?

August 17, 2021 stevenmsinger Accountability, Allegheny County, Child Safety, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Credibility, Data, Democrat, Education, Healthcare, home school, Junk science, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, protest, Republican, school closings, Schools, Social Justice, Student Mobility, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized, Unions child safety, children, Civil Rights, coronavirus, COVID-19, mask optional, masking, masks, pandemic, parents, Politics, right to education, right to life, safe schools, Students, teachers

“Daddy, I’m afraid.”

My 12-year-old daughter just had a nightmare, and I was sitting on her bed trying to calm her down.

“What’s wrong, Sweetie?”

“I’m worried about school.”

That’s something with which I can certainly relate.

Even after teaching for 18 years, I always get anxious before the first day of school, and I told her as much.

“Really?” She said.

“Yeah. But I can understand why you might be even more nervous than usual. I’ll be teaching the same thing I’ve taught for years. I’ll be in the same classroom working with the same adults. Only the students will be different. But you will be in a new building with new teachers…. And you haven’t even been in a classroom in over a year.”

“That’s just it, Daddy. What if the other kids make fun of me for wearing a mask? What if I get sick?”

Our local district is reopening in a week with a mask optional policy and no vaccine requirements.

Her question was expected, but I had been dreading it.

I knew my answers and they sounded inadequate – even to me.

I explained how she would be wearing a mask and is fully vaccinated so it will be extremely unlikely for her to get sick. And even if she does, it will be extremely unlikely she’ll get VERY sick.

“And if the other kids make fun of you, just ignore it. You are going to be safe. If they take chances, they’ll just have to suffer the consequences.”

It seemed to satisfy her, but I left her room feeling like a bad parent.

Covid-19 cases are on the rise again.

Nationwide, nearly 94,000 new child Covid cases were reported last week- a substantial increase, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA).

Even in the Pittsburgh region where we live, the number of kids hospitalized with Covid at UPMC Children’s Hospital has nearly doubled in the last week, according to KDKA. That’s 50 hospitalizations in the past month including 20 in the last week.

My daughter is scared? So is her daddy.

I went to the local school directors meeting and asked the board to follow recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Allegheny County Health Department by requiring masking and vaccinations for eligible students and staff. They refused.

Now I’m stuck in the position of keeping my little girl at home for another year by enrolling her in the district’s terrible on-line program, Edmentum, or rolling the dice with in-person schooling.

I’m told there will be more synchronous teaching this year in the remote program, but I don’t trust it.

Last year, she only made it through because my father-in-law – a former math teacher – and myself basically taught her everything the on-line program struggled to get across.

We just couldn’t do it again this year. It was a full time job – several full-time jobs – too hard on him and me both.

I hope we won’t regret it.

And then there’s my own work situation.

I teach at a neighboring district that looks like it will reopen the same way with masks and vaccines mere options.

I’m fully vaccinated but immunosuppressed. Might I be putting my own health at risk teaching under these conditions?

Last year, even with masks a requirement, students and staff at both districts came down with the virus nearly every week.

With the more infectious and deadly delta variant on the rise, might it be even worse this year – especially if we are lowering precautions?

Last year I burned my sick days waiting to be vaccinated before returning to the physical classroom. This year I could take a leave of absence, but once again my district is making no accommodations for people like me. I have to work or else try to survive on a reduced salary.

When you’re already living paycheck-to-paycheck, that’s not much of an option.

I just don’t understand it.

Don’t my daughter and I have rights?

We hear a lot about the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers. A lot about their rights. What about our right to safe schools?

Why is it that the right NOT to wear a mask supersedes the right to go to a school where everyone is required to wear one?

Because it isn’t – as I told my daughter – a matter of everyone having to deal with just the consequences of their own actions. My daughter and I have to deal with the consequences of everyone else’s actions, too.

Or to put it another way – if one person pees in the pool, we’re all swimming in their urine.

If someone else doesn’t wear a mask, hasn’t been vaccinated and hasn’t taken the proper precautions, they can spread the Covid-19 virus through the air and infect whole classrooms of people.

Everyone else could be wearing a mask. It just takes one person who isn’t.

Is it fair that everyone else has to pay the price for one person’s carelessness?

We talk about rights so much we seem to have lost entirely the idea of responsibilities. They go hand-in-hand.

Yes, you have the freedom to do whatever you like so long as it doesn’t hurt another person.

When your actions do hurt others, you have a responsibility to stop. And if you won’t do that, the government has a responsibility to stop you.

But in this anti-intellectual age, we’ve almost completely given up on that idea.

If people take precautions by masking up and getting vaccinated, the worst that will happen is they’ll be unduly inconvenienced. If my daughter and I are forced to exist in the same spaces with people not taking the proper precautions, we could get sick and die.

It’s not like we’re talking about two equal sides here. This is people who believe the overwhelming scientific majority vs. those who get their answers from YouTube videos and political figures. It’s doctors, researchers and immunologists vs. conspiracy theorists, internet trolls and the MyPillow guy.

I’m not even judging – believe what you like so long as it affects only you. But when it affects me, too, then we have a problem.

The lowest common denominator is allowed to run wild. They can do whatever they like and the rest of us just have to put up with it.

That’s why we’re beginning year two and a half of a global pandemic! Not enough of us got the vaccine by the end of the summer.

Now infections are rising and few policy makers have the courage to take a stand and protect those of us who took precautions from those of us who did not.

And don’t tell me our lawmakers don’t have the power. There is a mountain of precedent showing they have.

On the highway, you can’t just go wherever you want, whenever you want. There are lanes, speed limits, traffic lights.

Even vaccines! To enroll in Kindergarten, parents already have to prove their kids have been vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella and a host of other diseases. Why is Covid-19 any different?

Public safety is a PUBLIC issue not a private one.

It just makes me feel so helpless.

I can’t do anything to protect my students.

I can’t do anything to protect myself.

I can’t do anything to protect my baby girl.

And I can’t wait for the school year to start!

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McKeesport School Board Makes Masks Optional as Covid Infections Rise Among Children

August 12, 2021 stevenmsinger Accountability, Allegheny County, Child Safety, Compassion, COVID-19, Credibility, Data, Education, Learning, Local Control, McKeesport Area School District, Parents, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, Prejudice, protest, school closings, Schools, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Tom Wolf, Uncategorized, voting child safety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Mark Holtzman, mask optional, masking, masks, McKeesport, McKeesport Area School District, pandemic, Pennsylvania, Politics, safe schools, safety, vaccine

When I got to the McKeesport School Board meeting last evening, I was relieved to see a vote to follow the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Pennsylvania and Allegheny County Health Department mandates about wearing masks in schools.

“Finally,” I thought. “The board is doing something sensible to keep our kids safe from Covid-19.”

Later I found out this motion didn’t mean what I thought it meant.

The district wasn’t mandating masks to protect kids during a global pandemic. It was vowing to follow any mandates put forth by higher authorities IF such mandates were passed.

In the meantime – in the absence of such mandates – the district passed a health and safety plan where masks would be entirely optional for students and staff.

The motion was approved 6-3, with only Mindy Sturgess, James Brown and Steve Kondrosky voting against it. Joe Lopretto, Diane Elias, Dave Donato, Tom Filotei, Ivan Hampton, and Jim Poston voted in favor.

I spoke to the board before the vote, during the public comment section, asking them to BOTH mandate masks and require eligible students and staff to be vaccinated.

Here are my comments in full:

“Thank you for allowing me to speak today.
Being a school director is a hard job. You give up time with friends and family every month to consider what’s best for the community’s children.
It’s especially hard during Covid-19. Decisions concerning public health should be made by the
President, the Governor and – honestly – scores of people before it gets to you. But during this global pandemic, the big dogs have continually passed the buck on down the line until it was on your desks.
It’s unfair.
You may all be nice people, but you aren’t experts on immunology or public safety. Nor do you have ready access to those experts.
But you are tasked with making decisions that directly impact the health and safety of district students and staff. You have an OBLIGATION to safeguard every child and adult.
So what is the best way to reopen schools this year?
Don’t ask me. I’m not an expert, either.
But I have heard from those experts.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends all schools mandate masking and require vaccinations for all people 12 and older. The US Department of Education recommends the same. As does the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and a host of other organizations in prime positions to know what is best.
You have an obligation to listen to them.
Only 63% of Pennsylvanian adults are vaccinated against Covid-19.
Less than 30% of Americans ages 12 to 15, and only 41% of Americans 16 to 17 are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. And since they are not eligible yet, all children 11 and younger are not vaccinated.
This means our kids are in danger of catching this virus. Every elementary student and many in middle school are completely unvaccinated. And a good percentage of those older.
According to the district’s own Covid Tracker, 132 students and 89 staff were diagnosed with Covid since the pandemic began.
That’s 221 people. Far too many if you ask me – and with the more infectious delta variant, we can’t allow such numbers to continue.
Nearly 94,000 new child Covid cases were reported last week- a substantial increase, according to the AAP and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA).
That’s not just Texas and Florida. That’s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, too.
According to KDKA, the number of kids hospitalized with Covid at UPMC Children’s Hospital has nearly doubled in the last week.
That’s 50 hospitalizations in the past month including 20 in the last week.
“The only way to protect these younger children under 12 is for those of us over 12 to get vaccinated and wear masks,” said Dr. John Williams, UPMC Chief of Infectious Diseases.
“The decisions that those who are leading our schools’ policies, I want them to think about masking and distancing together as possibilities for keeping people safe,” said Dr. Graham Snyder, UPMC medical Director of Infection Prevention and Hospital Epidemiology.
Don’t listen to me.
Listen to these people.
Mandate masks in McKeesport Area School District (MASD). It is not difficult. You did it last year. You can do it this year, no problem.
It is absolutely the LEAST you can do.
You should also mandate that all people 12 and older in district buildings be vaccinated and submit proof of vaccination.

If they refuse, you have remote options available.
Please put your politics and pride aside. This is not about which school district is tougher or proving a point about your independence and autonomy.
This is about keeping children safe.
Please do the right thing. Mandate masks and vaccinations at MASD.

When I was done, there was absolutely zero response.

They just went on with the meeting.

Every other person who spoke during public comments got some kind of response. For me – nothing.

I was still under the impression that the board was going to vote in favor of a mask mandate. I thought I had been too hard on them even bringing it up.

Ha!

The issue was finally addressed when the health and safety plan came up for a vote. Board member Sturgess asked Superintendent Dr. Mark Holtzman to address the issues and my comments.

It lead to the following interaction between Holtman and Sturgess before the vote:

Holtzman: “We will continue mitigation strategies, social distancing, managing the way in which children transition into the building, the way they eat lunch, things of that nature. It is recommended in the plan that masks are highly recommended for staff and students but they are optional so it’s the family’s choice, the students choice to wear a mask if they so choose, and if a mandate comes down from the Allegheny County Health Director then obviously we’d have to shift gears at that point. Masks also must be worn on transportation. That is part of a mandate that exists – children riding school transportation must wear masks. Approximately half of Allegheny County Schools at this point are providing optional opportunities for staff and students to wear masks based on the needs of the community. We have not seen the numbers rise in Allegheny County yet above the substantial level. That may change or shift the mandate so at this particular point that’s what’s recommended so we will continue to provide hand sanitizer, one way hallways, forward facing children in the cafeteria, and do everything that we can to continue to socially distance children based on how many children are in the classroom.”

Sturgess: “[Director of Allegheny County Health Department] Dr. [Debra] Bogen did highly recommend masks. If masks are not required and we are not able to maintain social distancing what does a close contact look like? Are we going to be putting a lot more of our students and teachers in isolation without having a backup plan?”

Holtzman: “The CDC’s recommendation is 3 feet right now. We’re able to provide 3 feet between children in our classrooms whether they’re full or not. So that’s helpful. Also if children and staff are vaccinated, they do not have to quarantine. Also if children choose to wear a mask, they don’t have to quarantine. So the rules have shifted and changed a little bit. Because we’ve had the best practice of probably any school district in Pennsylvania. I think we’ll be able to manage. I think we may run into a problem where it does become a big deal, but now Allegheny County Health Department has decided that they are going to manage the contact tracing, and we know how that’s going to turn out. That’s overwhelming for them. At some point they’ve given up on some things.”

“The other thing is when you ask for vaccinations, you don’t have a right to ask for vaccinations so… if you ask for a vaccination and someone is dishonest with you there’s no way to prove that. They have a right to do how they see fit. So even our staff members we don’t have a document that says who’s vaccinated, who’s not, who ignored the round that was available at the AIU, who decided to do it over the summer. So there’s also lots of examples of people vaccinated that become ill anyway. I think we have a number of different equations and a number of different views. Dr. Debra Bogen is outstanding. Allegheny County Health Department is outstanding, and we’re going to continue to talk with them every Thursday in our superintendent group. They’re going to continue to guide us…”

Sturgess: “What was her recommendation last week?”

Holtzman: “Recommending masks. I think from her explanations of it, they don’t know enough. So there’s not enough studies or details but they will admit or say it’s not impacting children the way it impacts adults…”

Sturgess: “She kind of backtracked that a little bit… Something I like about this [health and safety plan] that we did not have last year is the opportunity for that synchronous live instruction for students who choose the virtual option. I know as an educator I’m much more comfortable with having that available to our students when we didn’t have that available last year… K through high school – there’s been some arrangement for that live instruction to occur.”

Holtzman: “I think one of the challenges we face was determining how much of a negative impact is the virus having on our children vs. the fact that they may have gaps in their education for the past two years. On-line experiences have not been very robust or meaningful even when you provide live instruction in synchronous learning… What’s more detrimental, the illness? Is it truly going to reach the level of hospitalizing children regularly and those types of things? Or is this something that can be overcome for a slight couple days? …Not having kids in school for two years – for most districts not McKeesport – has been more detrimental for most children. We were very fortunate that our children who did have the virus were not hospitalized. That doesn’t mean we’re always going to be that lucky but those are some of the things we have to consider.”

So they voted to make masks optional and do absolutely nothing about vaccinations.

In my opinion, it is a big mistake.

They are ignoring the recommendations of medical professionals and immunologists choosing instead to simply pass these recommendations on to parents. It makes every child susceptible to the recklessness of one or two.

It’s the cowards way out of a tough choice – simply pass it on to someone else and make them responsible.

As to requiring vaccinations, Holtzman is obviously wrong. The district already requires students to show proof of a plethora of vaccinations before they can start kindergarten. Measles, mumps, rubella… Covid is just one more.

And there IS a record of Covid vaccinations – the vaccine card you get when you are injected. I have mine, my wife has hers, my daughter has hers.

Holtzman is again taking the cowards way out.

And the worst part is he’s proud of it.

He’s proud of how long the district has stayed open during the pandemic and left it all to chance for district students.

I wonder if this reckless attitude is why a slight majority (5 of 9 members) had to resort to a special meeting last month to renew his contract early. He resigned and a day later was offered a new contract. Many of those voting for the contract are lame ducks who would not have a chance to vote when his current contract was up.

And far from showing any guilt over the matter, the same school directors did the same thing with Assistant Superintendent Dr. Tia Wanzo at this meeting. They accepted her resignation and then immediately rehired her with a new contract. The vote was nearly the same as that for Holzman – Lopretto, Elias, Hampton, Poston and Filotei voted in favor. Kondrosky, Brown, Sturgess and Donato voted against it.

Hampton, Poston and Filotei all will be replaced in January. They either lost re-election during the May primary or decided to step down. Of those voting in favor, only Lopretto and Elias will remain on the board in the new year.

Clearly many on the board are doing whatever they please and not letting issues of morality or legality stop them.

It is a sad statement on the nature of our district.

But even worse, it is the children who may have to pay the highest toll.

Video of the complete meeting:

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What I Don’t Want My School to be Like this Covid Year

August 7, 2021 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, capitalism, Child Safety, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Education, Election, history, Learning, Local Control, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, Racism, School Choice, Schools, small class size, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers coronavirus, COVID-19, pandemic, Politics, schools, Students, teachers, teaching

I’m going to confess something.

I don’t like wearing a mask.

For a few hours on Halloween it’s fine, but trying to teach middle schoolers through a piece of fabric for 8 hours a day is no one’s idea of professionalism or efficacy.

You know what else?

I hate getting shots.

When they put that vaccination needle to my arm, I had to turn my head away and think about something else. Both times.

But guess what?

I did them.

And I am still WILLING to do them again.

If teaching in 2021-22 requires wearing a mask and even getting a third booster to the Covid vaccine, I’ll do it.

You know why?

Because I am an adult.

Even if we have to go back to teaching students completely on-line (which I don’t want to do), I’ll put on my big boy pants and do it.

It’s not optimal. It causes problems for working parents, but it’s better than the alternative if infections continue to rise.

I’m not saying I like it.

I’m not saying I want to do any of this, but we have to deal with the world as we find it.

I don’t want to have to teach during a pandemic, but that’s the world we’re living in.

That’s the world we’ve MADE.

Time to face it.

After a summer where not enough people chose to get vaccinated, Covid-19 cases are on the rise again. And now we have the new more contagious delta variant that can even infect and be spread by those who got the shot.

We had a chance to turn things around in June and July. Frankly, we blew it.

Restrictions were lifted too early. Safety precautions continued to be politicized. Folks just pretended it was over.

All we had to do was be cautious and get our Fauci ouchies.

Not enough of us did.

So here we are.

I’m going to be honest with you.

I don’t want this school year to be as bad as last year.

The last year and a half has been a nightmare for classroom teachers like me.

We were teaching remote, then in-person, then BOTH at the same time! Social distancing was erratic because there just wasn’t the space, some students were chronically absent, kids and adults got sick every week but the authorities could never seem to admit anyone might have caught the disease at school…

I watched my district and most of those around me fail at almost every level.

And just when we looked to the government for support, we were told to waste whatever class time we were able to scrap together on another meaningless standardized test.

It was a year that left me feeling blamed for things beyond my control and silenced from the decision making process.

I felt unsafe, subordinate, impotent and neglected.

And I don’t want to do that again.

It’s no wonder that one in four teachers might not return to the classroom this year according to a survey given at the beginning of 2020 by the Rand Corporation.

Research from Education Week published this week had similar findings. According to Lora Bartlett, an associate professor of education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, 20 percent of teachers either have already left the profession or are actively seeking employment elsewhere.

Most years teaching has an 8% attraction rate, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Educators like me are simply sick of being ignored, scapegoated, deprofessionalized and or actively obstructed from doing our jobs.

But we didn’t make this situation.

We didn’t create Covid-19. We didn’t ignore the warnings that it was coming here, we didn’t dismantle the pandemic task force, didn’t shirk our duties to put adequate safety precautions in place, didn’t make compliance entirely voluntary, didn’t prioritize economics over public health or a multitude of other things that lead us down this deep, dark rabbit hole.

We’re dealing with the situation, and frankly the rest of the country needs to do the same.

We need universal masking in schools.

Not suggestions from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). We need government mandates, and the fact that some states have mandated exactly the opposite just goes to show that some lawmakers aren’t grown up enough to do the job for which they were elected.

Magical thinking may get you re-elected, but it could also get me and my family killed.

Time for serious solutions.

While we’re at it, we need to require vaccinations for all eligible adults and children going to school in-person. Otherwise, we can find a remote option for them.

Because if we don’t, there are only two likely alternatives – a remote option for everyone or a steady increase in Covid cases in school. The former isn’t good and the later is just not acceptable at all.

We need frequent testing to see if anyone in the building has the disease – and NO I’m not talking about contact tracing. Anecdotes from people who unequivocally have the virus about who he or she may have come into close contact with is not good enough. We need blood tests – hard data.

Speaking of which, every district should have to prove they’ve been able to adequately circulate airflow in the buildings with HEPA filters and other equipment. If they can’t, the federal government should write them a check on the spot. Make them accountable for how they spend it, and make them accountable if they DON’T get the job done.

I know, I know.

This is America and no one can tell me what to do.

Wrong.

We live in a society, not the old West.

We already have a plethora of rules people have to abide by – even list of vaccinations you already need to be enrolled in school – mumps, measles, rubella, polio, etc. Just add Covid-19 to the list.

And grow the heck up.

Too many people can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

Too many people have bought the myths and legends about what it means to be an American.

That’s why they’re having conniptions that teachers might actually be including the history of racism in their history.

We’re a country that couldn’t exist if white settlers didn’t first steal the land we’re living on from native peoples. We’re a country founded by mostly slave holders.

You think that’s not an important part of history because you believe our own bull crap propaganda.

And that’s why you don’t have the mental acuity to deal with real problems like a global pandemic.

When this whole Covid thing began, many of us hoped when it was all over we’d have changed things for the better.

We thought they’ll have to change the old way of doing things just to survive this mess, so maybe when we put it all back together, we can put it back together better.

But the reality is, we couldn’t even figure out how to change things enough just to survive this.

In the United States, about 630,000 of us haven’t survived it – more than our soldiers who died in World War II (405,000), the Vietnam War (58,000) and the Korean War (36,000) combined.

I don’t want more people to die.

I don’t want more students and staff to get sick in schools.

I don’t want us to have to go back to remote instruction.

I don’t want this school year to be as bad or worse as the last year and a half.

And I’m willing to make sacrifices to make sure these don’t happen.

I’m willing to wear a mask all day in school and require others to do so, too.

I’m willing to be vaccinated (again if necessary) and make sure everyone eligible is, too.

I’m willing to do all these things I don’t want (and more) in order to make sure worse things don’t happen.

That’s the choice we’re left with today.

And if enough people aren’t grown up enough to make it correctly, we need to make it for them.

Or else we’re all choosing to let the worst come to pass – again.

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We Don’t Need More ADVICE on How to Safely Reopen Schools. We Need RULES.

July 29, 2021July 29, 2021 stevenmsinger Accountability, Allegheny County, Biden, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Safety, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Healthcare, Joe Biden, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, privatization, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized advice, cdc, child safety, coronavirus, COVID-19, government, law, pandemic, Politics, rules, safe schools, safety, schools, Students, teachers

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is full of advice about Covid-19.

It’s safe to do this. It’s not safe to do that.

But we don’t need advice. We need rules.

This week the CDC changed its advice to all staff, students and teachers when schools reopen. Instead of wearing masks in schools only when unvaccinated, people should wear masks regardless of whether they’ve been vaccinated or not.

This is necessary to protect children who aren’t eligible for the vaccine and slow the spread of new more infectious variants of the virus, representatives said.

The problem is that too many Americans don’t listen to advice – especially if it goes against their beliefs.

And there are a significant number of Americans who believe whatever crazy nonsense talk radio, Fox News or their savior Donald Trump tell them.

Immunologists talking about infectious disease just don’t rate.

So these people aren’t going to listen to the CDC’s advice.

That presents real problems both for them and for us.

First of all, they’re literally killing themselves.

More than 99% of people who die from Covid-19 these days are unvaccinated, and they make up almost the same percentage of recent hospitalizations.

CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky calls this a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, but they aren’t the only ones paying for it.

We all are.

The Covid-19 pandemic would be effectively over in the United States if everyone who was eligible for the vaccine had received it.

About 56% of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of the vaccine, but in many places — especially in rural areas — the number is under 20% despite widespread availability of the drug.

As a result, cases of Covid-19 are on the rise again in most of the United States. In fact, this country leads the world in the daily average number of new infections, accounting for one in every nine cases reported worldwide each day.

The majority of these new cases are the more infectious delta variant, a version of the virus that could jump start cases even among the vaccinated.

And the reason the virus had a chance to mutate and become more resistant to our existing treatments was a ready supply of easy hosts – anti-vaxxers who refused to protect themselves and now have put the rest of the country back at risk.

Their ignorance and selfishness has put all of us in danger.

That makes me mad, and not just at the anti-vaxxers.

I’m mad at the federal government.

You could have done something about this. You SHOULD have done something, but you didn’t.

The Trump’s administration badly bungled the initial stages of the pandemic with late and inadequate international travel bans, failure to use federal authority to supply Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), failure to require mandatory universal paid sick leave for those unable to work due to the virus, and failure to mandate standards for the health and safety of workers.

In contrast, President Joe Biden’s administration has done better in making the vaccine readily available, but still failed to fix many of the problems it inherited and still continually neglecting to mandate anything.

“Hey, Buddy, why don’t you try this?” – is NOT good enough!

We need – “Do this OR ELSE!”

You can’t just make the vaccine available and hope people are smart enough to take it.

They aren’t. Not in America.

Not after decades of allowing lies and disinformation to infect the airwaves. In the name of freedom we’ve let Fox News and the former President poison the minds of admittedly easily lead citizens until their ignorance impacts all of us.

And the antidote to such disinformation – a robust public education system – has been stolen from too many Americans by decades of under funding, rampant school privatization and high stakes testing.

What we need now is to make vaccines a prerequisite to participate in all kinds of social congress – shopping, dinning at restaurants, movies, sporting events, schools, etc. But our government -our FEDERAL government – won’t do that.

Instead it’s a never ending cycle of passing the buck – that’s been our lawmakers response whether Republican or Democrat – to this crisis.

Authority is left it up to the states, who often refuse to allow safety precautions to be regulated or passed the decision on to someone else until it’s being made separately by every minor representative, podunk flunky and school director this side of Mayberry.

What a disgrace!

And here we are again.

The experts are telling us what we should do in the best interests of keeping our children safe. But the federal government refuses to back it up with its full authority.

Just advice. No rules.

Will people be required to wear masks in public schools?

Maybe.

It all depends on what local officials somewhere down the line decide.

In my home state of Pennsylvania, Democratic Governor Tom Wolf announced yesterday that he is not even considering a statewide mask mandate as Coronavirus cases surge nor will he require masks in schools.

Wolf said his strategy to fight the spread of COVID-19 is the vaccine, itself, – the masking mandate was for when there was no vaccine.

“People have the ability, each individual to make the decision to get a vaccine,” Wolf says. “If they do, that’s the protection.”

Meanwhile, Allegheny County Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald says he’d consider a mask mandate if infections were worse in the county, an area that includes the City of Pittsburgh. Though he suggests schools follow CDC advice, he’s not about to make that decision for them.

So it will be left to local school directors to decide what to do. Probably most of them will allow masks in school but not require them.

It’s a terrible situation with an incredible lack of leadership, but I get it.

School board directors do not have the power of the bully pulpit. They don’t have the power of Chief County Executives, Governors or the President.

If people challenge their decisions (as they probably would) that requires district finances for lengthy court battles and uncomfortable political confrontations for re-election.

None of these folks should have to make these kinds of life and death decisions.

That’s what the President is for. It’s what US Congress is for.

The buck has to stop somewhere. Right!?

But the matter has become so politicized and our representatives so spineless that our entire system hangs by a thread.

What if the federal government mandates masks and certain states or districts don’t listen?

Will its take the national guard to come in and enforce the mandate?

There was a time when lawmakers had the courage to do things like that – to legislate what was in the best interests of society and darn the consequences.

But today’s lawmakers do not have the courage to govern.

And once again, we’re paying for it.

Our society has failed to protect us. It barely functions anymore.

So get set for another rock ‘em sock ‘em school year where kids and adults will get sick.

In the few years since we discovered Covid-19, young children have rarely gotten as sick from the virus as adults. However, that is changing. Infections have increased this summer as the delta variant spread until approximately 4.1 million children have been diagnosed with the disease resulting in about 18,000 hospitalizations and more than 350 deaths.

Add to that the facts that only 30% of kids ages 12 to 17 have been vaccinated, younger children are not eligible for the vaccine and probably won’t be until the end of the year at the earliest.

It’s a recipe for disaster.

The Delta variant is 225% more contagious, contains 1,000% higher viral loads from earlier variants, and hits those levels in just 3 ½ days. Delta has a stronger bond to ACE-2 receptors in nasal passages and lung cells.

Vaccinated people can get infected if exposed to large enough viral loads. Unvaccinated kids could easily have those high viral loads. This means that everyone is a possible link in the chain of transmission.

But it’s not inevitable.

There is something we could do about it if we act now.

No more mere advice!

Pass some laws, make some rules to keep everyone as safe as possible and finally end this pandemic!

It just takes courage and common sense – two things in short supply in today’s United States.

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gadflyonthewallblog

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

Politics

Top Five Actions to Stop the Teacher Exodus During COVID and Beyond

1) Eliminate Unnecessary Tasks

2) No Formal Lesson Plans

3) More Planning Time

4) Better Communication/ Better COVID Safety

5) Respect

Lack of Trusted Authority is Why Covid-19 is Kicking Our Butts

Thank you, Gov. Wolf, for Reissuing a Mask Mandate for PA Schools. Time for Next Steps

School Leaders Refusing to Mandate Masks Are Responsible for the Coming Storm

McKeesport School Board Makes Masks Optional as Covid Infections Rise Among Children

What I Don’t Want My School to be Like this Covid Year

We Don’t Need More ADVICE on How to Safely Reopen Schools. We Need RULES.