Think positive: 98% of Americans haven’t gotten coronavirus yet. Similarly, 87% of South Dakota K-12 schools haven’t reported coroanvirus cases yet this fall:
Most of South Dakota Schools did not have a coronavirus case as of last week, according to the South Dakota Department of Health.
There were 195 COVID-19 cases in schools with 138 student cases and 57 staff cases. Twenty school districts have three or more cases, 94 have one to two cases and 772 schools have no cases, according to the DOH.
There were 124 cases reported in public and private K-12 schools during the week of Aug. 23-29 [Rae Yost, “Most K-12 Schools Had No Reported Covid-19 Cases Last Week, S.D. DOH Says,” KELO-TV, 2020.08.31].
Good job, KELO, keeping our spirits up!
But you decide which number is more important: the snapshot or the trend:
Double, then more than double… keep that growth rate up, and every K-12 student, teacher, and lunch lady in the state will test positive by Election Day.
Meanwhile, every college campus in the state has reported coronavirus cases since reconvening:
Such, apparently, is the power of positive thinking: just think positive, and soon enough, everyone will test positive!
“Kim Malsam-Rysdon, the Department of Health secretary, said fatalities in the previous week were 33% lower than the week before.
“Our death rate is, in fact, on a downward trend,” she said. ”
Published SFGate, 31 August 2020, although not known when she said this, nor the timeframe she invoked since it was not specified to anyone’s satisfaction.
Fast Company magazine has been running a series on the premise that the pandemic presents an opportunity to reinvent schools in a more equitable manner.
https://flip.it/XBXwuc
From Numlock News by Walt Hickey:
“A new report from the city council of Kansas City, Missouri identifies just how significantly tax breaks to corporations have gouged their local students. The overall data revealed that in the aggregate the tax incentives cost school districts an average of $650 per K-12 student, but it’s actually worse in the Kansas City School District in particular, with that district losing out on $2,052 per student given the property tax reductions doled out to companies in their territory. Nationwide, the corporate property tax cuts cost schools about $1.8 billion annually, and since those programs can more regularly be targeted at poorer neighborhoods in the name of economic revitalization, typically it’s the schools that are already working with the least that get disproportionately deprived of funding.”
Pat Garofalo, Boondoggle, Cortlynn Stark and Kevin Hardy, The Kansas City Star