Upon receiving information Monday afternoon that someone had threatened someone else with a weapon in the school parking lot, Aberdeen Central High School locked down its campus. The school detained hundreds of students in their classrooms and prohibited them from leaving school at the normal time. The liberty of every student present on campus, as well as the liberty of parents, employers, and others expecting students to be free to leave the building at the assigned time, was significantly restricted Monday… even though there was no weapon and no “credible” threat to students and staff. Aberdeen police did arrest one individual for false reporting and disrupting school.
Meanwhile, an actual, well-evidenced threat to students and staff has been raging since school started in August. Aberdeen Central has reported coronavirus cases on its campus almost weekly. Yet the school district has not required students or others on campus to wear masks to prevent this real threat from spreading and doing harm to others. The school district has provided substandard online lessons outsourced to an out-of-state vendor for students who choose to take action to reduce their risk by studying at home, but it has not provided the local support it promised to students taking that option in response to this real public health threat. And the school district has continued to host spectator events indoors with no required masks or temperature checks or other precautions to ensure that no one is bringing and spreading a real threat to student and staff health into the building.
When the school received its unsubstantiated report of a security risk in the parking lot, the principal sent out a mass phone call immediately alerting parents to the imagined threat. The principal provides no such immediate or detailed alert to parents when (if) the school receives information about coronavirus cases on campus; instead, the school sends out the same vague, canned phone call maybe once a week saying an unspecified number of individuals have tested positive and leaving it to parents and students to decide what action if any they will take to keep themselves safe from this real public health hazard.
Coronavirus has killed 644 people in South Dakota this year. That’s 643 more people than have been killed in school shootings in South Dakota ever. Yet while we continually restrict our children’s liberty with the over-reactive and spiritually corrosive security theater of lockdown drills and cops on campus, our Aberdeen school district takes far more tempered action to prevent the spread of the coronavirus that is killing our kids’ grandparents and putting the kids and the their teachers at daily risk.
Good point.
Our schools have a serious problem with prioritizing real risk.
can you give me a name of a child who has died of covid?
Not without parental release of that information… but I’ll bet my readers can find some examples in the press…
i’ll bet not
I am not why pat mcgarry wants names unless to imply that if names aren’t given no children died from COVID. According to the Center for Disease Control such an inference is mistaken:
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/09/16/913365560/the-majority-of-children-who-die-from-covid-19-are-children-of-color
Perhaps knowing ages of some specific kids who have died from COVID might be of assistance to pat mcgarry:
https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/michigan/2020/09/16/2-month-old-child-dies-from-coronavirus-covid-19-in-michigan/
And in Florida,
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-florida-6-year-old-girl-youngest-death/
From the Intercept….
As with adults, some of the children who suffer the worst effects of coronavirus seem to have particular vulnerabilities. Among those who have died from the infection are two infants and a 16-year-old girl in Denver named Jaqueline Paisano, who had lost the ability to walk and talk at an early age after having a brain tumor. The youngest publicly identified victim of the coronavirus in Detroit, a 5-year-old named Skylar Herbert, did not appear to have any underlying conditions before she was diagnosed with the infection after complaining of a headache.
https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-black-and-brown-children-dying-from-the-coronavirus-2020-9
https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/coronavirus/2020/09/26/atlantic-beach-family-grieving-covid-19-death-daughter-12/3545966001/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-florida-6-year-old-girl-youngest-death/
cnn.com/2020/07/23/health/florida-coronavirus-child-death/index.html (this lists 5 children in Florida who died.)
Of course, if Pat McGarry is a Sandy Hook denier as well, all data, reporting, or conversation will be useless.
AND HOW EXACTLY COULD THE ABDN SCHOOL SYSTEM HAVE PREVENTED THE INFANTS DEATH? YOUR ARGUMENT CHANGES AS YOU BEGIN TO LOSE. TRY AGAIN.
pat mcgarry, it seems you are arguing with yourself as this is the 1st mention of a school by you. No wonder you keep winning – well done champ.
Given your outstanding debate abilities I will henceforth avoid arguing with you. Instead, I will simply offer corrections to mistaken factual statements when it seems appropriate to do so and leave the brilliant arguments to those like yourself that with much greater skills than me.
did you bother to read MR Heidelbergers article? It was he to whom i was responding, not you. You certainly have an inflated sense of self worth.
pat mcgarry, yes I did read Cory’s article. The only “infant” that I recall being mentioned in either Cory’s article or by anyone else commenting on Cory’s article before your last comment at 18:16 was the two month old mentioned in my comment at 00:48 referencing the report of the death of a child in Florida.
And since Cory’s post only dealt with Aberdeen, it never occured to me that anyone would ask how the Aberdeen school district in South Dakota school district could have prevented an infant’s death in another state, such as Florida.
Plus, I saw no comment from Cory discussing this or any other infant death, hence I totally missed the argument that Cory made or changed that you were referencing in your statement that “It was he to whom i (sic) was responding, not you” with your statement in caps:
Thank you for clarifying what you meant. For what it might be worth, however, I am unaware of anything that the Aberdeen school district could have done to prevent the death of the infant in Florida, and thus agree with you if that was your point.
But I only speak for myself and leave it to Cory to state his position if he cares to engage.