Instead of developing new schedules and delivery methods and deploying more resources to make education safer for kids, South Dakota’s schools seem hell-bent on protecting the status quo model of assembly-line education and simply lowering the already meager standards of protection they’ve adopted to keep staff and students safe. South Dakota schools are declaring teachers “critical infrastructure” to justify not sending them home to prevent coronavirus spread; now the Sioux Falls school district is considering doing the same with kids, rejecting the notion of quarantining close contacts so we can cling to the too-literal ideal of keeping kids in school:
The Sioux Falls School District just released a proposal to update its COVID-19 plan. The board plans to vote on the changes on Wednesday. Here’s a look at the proposal. If everyone is wearing a face mask, only the person who tests positive will need to isolate. Any students or staff members who had close contact may return to school and monitor for symptoms. But if not everyone is wearing a mask, some students and staff members who had close contact will still need to quarantine at home [Brady Mallory, “School Board Looks at Quarantine Policy Change,” KELO-TV, 2020.09.29].
Keeping close contacts in the classroom, mask or no, is only really safe if we are testing all of them, every day, and getting same-day results. Half of the time, coronavirus spreads from people showing no sign that they are sick. Masks help a lot, and students have shown much more resilience in adapting to masks than some prominent grown-ups, but they aren’t as sure-fire a solution as staying away from each other for a couple weeks. Keeping close contacts together inevitably means there will be more kids and teachers who get sick.
But Sioux Falls school board president Cynthia Mickelson shrugs at that risk, appealing instead to what some people would like to do:
“Basically, two masks, one’s positive the other’s a close contact. As long as a close contact is asymptomatic, they may self monitor and be in the building and wear a mask, is my understanding of how these states have done it,” Mickelson said.
Mickelson says that would change if a student starts showing symptoms.
“All COVID positives do have to isolate and that’s a ten day window of isolations,” Mickelson said.
Brady: “Any concern this tweak could get people sick? How would you respond to something like that?”
CM: “Well, what I would say is, right now, it is an unknown. Change is unknown.”The school board will continue to monitor the data and re-evaluate as the month’s progress. Mickelson says it’ll be an important balancing act.
“We need to, the amount of students and could be staff in the future, too, that are out of the building who would like to be in the building who are not sick but were close contact is an issue we need to address. We also need to make sure we keep our students and staff safe,” Mickelson said [Mallory, 2020.09.29].
Good grief, Cynthia. I’d like my daughter to be in the classrooms with her teachers every day. But we don’t fight a pandemic based on what we’d like to do. We fight a pandemic based on what we need to do, and what we need to do is identify, notify, and isolate close contacts. Instead of lowering our public health standards—and tacitly accepting more sickness and death—we can build a robust system of hybrid learning, with additional teachers and meeting times to spread kids out in face-to-face meetings combined with better technology, practices, and support for online learning.
Those of us in the Dakota’s are as poorly led as are those in Florida. The trump virus outbreak now in North Dakota is as bad as the outbreak was in Florida in July.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-29/north-dakota-s-outbreak-is-as-bad-as-florida-arizona-in-july
The longer I live the more I begrudging think that most people are incapable from learning from history. This inability to collectively, and individually, stand on the shoulders of those who’ve gone before us relegates us to the misery of (re)learning former lessons. The trump virus is political because folks want it to be political. Theoretically one can excuse the Spanish Flu becoming political. Medical science was in its infancy. Ignorance and illiteracy were rampant. Unfortunately in 2020 we’re seeing that 102 years of public education failed making a more enlightened population.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/28/comparing-1918-flu-vs-coronavirus.html
More child murder being attempted in South Dakota. Other states have figured out you can’t play Russian roulette with Covid.
And more accessory’s to murder committed by the unsuspecting school children who will infect their parents, grandparents and many other innocents. These boards are beginning to look like those in the accused boxes in Nuremberg, Germany.
Isn’t the Trumpist theory that no need to worry because only about 10 per cent of SD children will get the virus and of that group not even all of the infected kids will die.
https://services.aap.org/en/news-room/news-releases/aap/2020/american-academy-of-pediatrics-and-childrens-health-association-find-rapid-rise-of-pediatric-covid-19-cases-over-5-month-period-study/
And when McConnell’s new SCOTUS Justice is approved by our Senators, Rounds and Thune, she can provide the deciding vote that the ACA is unconstitutional in its entirety, ending any legal obligation for insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions. In turn, South Dakota’s insurance providers will then be able to exclude most future coverage for all these young survivors due to their pre-existing” COVID 19 illness.
A real Trumpist win-win result for South Dakotans, wouldn’t you say Senators Thune and Rounds?
Bear, that’s a useful article. Consider this line on the timeline of those rising child infections:
It helps us see the obvious point that the Trumpists ignored when telling us it was safe to reopen the schools: they were basing their assumptions on data from a period when we shut down the schools. Kids had lower infection rates specifically because we socially distanced almost all of them in South Dakota and around the country for the two months when the pandemic was taking off in most of the population. Their advantage in low infection numbers came from their advantage in social distancing. Take away the social distancing—throw them back in school—and kids start posting higher infection rates. Duh.
Child murder, Donald, or just an inability to think creatively and innovate in our educational system?
Why has no school district in South Dakota sought an opt-out to raise money to deal with pandemic needs?
Look, my first knee-jerk reaction is “this is stupid – the current policy is working and keeping COVID levels down.”
However, the science tells us universal mask wearing dramatically reduces the risk of transmission. Keep in mind the example of the two hair stylists in Missouri who both had COVID, but didn’t transmit to any of their clients due to universal mask wearing. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6928e2.htm
The risk of transmission is low enough among those who wore masks to warrant allowing students to stay in school. The challenge, though, is how do you ensure students are always wearing their masks?
In late July, when the SFSD flip-flopped on masks, and then decided to expect them and not just highly recommend them, all of the members of the board wore masks at that meeting where they decided to make this mask policy change; which was a first for them, all wearing masks that is in attendance. But now, two months later, the board is back to not wearing masks in the case of most of the board members, while hospitalizations and cases of COVID are going through the roof in South Dakota. Thus, I am afraid for some, COVID politics has been a very phony reality and void of any true leadership or understanding of the threat which COVID presents.