To School or Not to School, That is the Question.
School is starting up, differently yes, but at least we have something normal, right? No. Education from kindergarten to college is looking different across the country. Should we reopen schools, or should we wait another half year to get through the pandemic? Does opening school mean we are actively exposing kids as young as five years old to COVID-19? Is that okay?
For ease, I will be talking about k-12 when I say "school."
The CDC proclaims, "children and adolescents under 18 years old account for under 7 percent of COVID-19 cases and less than 0.1 percent of COVID-19-related deaths." 0.1% of deaths is still too many. I am by no means saying this is an "acceptable" number of deaths. No number of deaths is an acceptable number. However, when we compare the number to the common flu, which still has its "season" and runs through schools, we get shocking results.
From 2018-2019 187 children died of the flu during the common flu season, which is during school, normally as school comes back into session. If you make a similar comparison, during H1N1, we sadly saw 358 pediatric deaths. Let us compare these death numbers to COVID-19, which currently, Sunday, September 20th, 2020, is 64 pediatric deaths. According to the CDC, the deaths due to COVID-19 are less than the last five flu seasons.
Suppose we keep schools shut down and suppress learning to online-only. In that case, we are potentially depriving a generation of future Americans 2.3-3.7% of their potential earnings later in life, due to this current loss of learning. As common sense would dictate, schools should not open if a city is currently going through what New York City went through at the beginning of the pandemic. However, it is irrefutable that keeping the nation's kids away from their peers and away from a safe place to learn will have a good affect.
The most current data indicates that 1 in 7 children have experienced abuse and/or neglect in the past year. This is an unacceptable statistic. I don't know about you, but I have met more than seven children. With the above static, you know at least one kid who has experienced abuse and/or neglect during the pandemic. What outlet do these kids have to help them with this? Are we to leave these kids on their own in this situation? They are stuck at home day in and day out.
We have taken away these kids' outlets, their sense of routine, and cannot give them an answer to "when can it go back to normal?" A question many of us adults struggle with, imagine being nine, powerless, and not able to comprehend what has/is happening, taken from school one day, taken away from their friends and their normalcy, not allowed to return.
Without even mentioning the impact that having kids at home has on a family dynamic, we can say without a shadow of a doubt that statistically, we can see this will have an adverse effect on our children academically.
So why are we not reopening the schools? You may argue that we are forcing teachers to risk their lives because we open schools, which is an entirely valid argument. This can be easily solved by having kids perform socially distanced activities and work in socially distanced desks. The teacher should not, however, be forced to wear a mask when teaching in a classroom setting. Kids need to be able to read the expressions of teachers.
If the school system offers up, as they should, socially distanced desks, this adds another problem, space. Schools do not have enough space to expand their classrooms magically. This ultimately needs to fall on local health departments to create a localized plan. This could include having the desks farther apart, but not quite six feet. However, they would have a transparent sheet of plastic, as if you would prop up a tri-fold menu in front of you. Using the school gym and cafeteria are options if space is an issue.
Other than the academic struggles, as discussed earlier, the effect that the school shut down has on kids is astronomic. In 2018, the earliest data we have access to from the CDC, 2,388 kids under 18, committed suicide. That is 4.94% of all suicides. This was in a time where the world was "normal." Frankly, I am scared to see what the 2020 stats will be. All year this year, we have been flattening the curve; we still have a chance to flatten the inevitable rise in this stat.
Kids need everyday social interactions to function effectively. We have all seen that awkward homeschool. The one you meet, and he acts like you're the first person he's seen in a year. Kids need to interact with one and other, and we have a responsibility to help make this a reality.
Another topic that I will touch on quickly, but truly needs more time than a few paragraphs, has been on almost every news website in the last week. Justine Coleman wrote through The Hill that "Teachers in at least five states have died from COVID-19 since the fall semester started. The media has struck a chord of fear by implying that these teachers got COVID-19 while at school. However, they conveniently place this little sentence at the end of their narrative. It "is unknown whether these teachers became infected at school." Diving into the specific cases, we see this trend play out fully. The tragic death of Teresa Horn, who worked as a special education teacher a Tahlequah High School in Oklahoma, hit the community hard. It was reported that Horn, on August 20th, 2020 she called in sick, as we have all been asked to do. Eight days later, COVID-19 struck again, taking the life of Horn. With the CDC's new recommendation, where they recommend ten days instead of fourteen days of quarantine, we can compare the timeline lines. the school did the right thing. They started online classes for two days and then transitioned.
The main thing we need to all have is adaptability. Plain and simple; planning anything during COVID-19 cannot be done traditionally. Three, sometimes more, fully developed plans with transition periods that can be accessed at any point, between any plan, need to be the norm. In the last year, we have seen brilliant individuals step up and create this. Now, with the ability that no one else had, it is the school's turn. Online classes will have to happen; there is no way around this. In the classroom, risk will be there; at what level are we as a society willing to accept. "we need to find a new normal" has been a statement that has been going around. While I think this is true, I think it is just the surface. We need to find what our level of risk is willing to be. If we all sit inside and socialize with each other via video calls, we would be "safe" from a virus, but this has its downfalls. We are designed to have contact with people, and until that can be achieved, society will keep pushing for it; we will build up steam, and at the slightest thing, we will blow out that steam. Instead of finding a new normal, we need to find a level of risk we are okay with, to have school in a low-risk environment, not no risk. This will never exist. It has never existed.
