BC EDUCATION
Saved by @jay_millerjay

For months, but especially after the new CDC school recs came out, supporters of reopening all schools now have been peddling the idea that schools across the country have been open all year successfully. This argument is used to push for ALL schools to be opened now.

A long 🧵

 Though some schools in the U.S. are open & doing well with safety protocols, many places used as examples of opening success have profoundly unsafe schools & are neglecting covid safety. Some have been lucky not to have outbreaks and other issues--it's not that they're safe.
In the last few weeks, I've been in touch with teachers in Ohio, Florida, Texas, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Utah, and Pennsylvania.

(Thanks to @eduwonkette_jen @GeoRebekah and @saribethrose for the threads and forums that have helped me meet SO MANY teachers this year).
I collected the accounts of dozens of teachers. Obviously, this isn't an exhaustive list and it isn't a study! It's what teachers on the ground in some states are experiencing. And it's easy to see why so many in our profession are so frightened this year.

Here's the list:
There are currently open schools in the US that are being hailed as "successful" that have:

▪️no safety protocols at all besides contact cleaning, in some districts
▪️some districts with no mask mandate
▪️classes in windowless rooms, some with full classes of 20-30
▪️dozens of cases at a time but no changes in (poor) safety protocols
▪️no contact tracing or quarantining of close contacts at all
▪️teachers who have to pay for all masks and cleaning supplies for their classrooms because the school/district won't
▪️cases and spread that aren't reported to anyone
▪️teachers who are threatened not to tell anyone about cases and spread
▪️teachers who have been asked to come back early from quarantine when sick with covid
▪️ventilation that was condemned decades ago
▪️districts that threw out closure thresholds when they were reached, to keep schools open
teachers who have been threatened with retaliation for asking for PPE, ventilation and/or physical distancing
▪️administrators shame mask-wearing staff for "fear-mongering"
▪️teachers who were asked to teach remotely when sick with covid
▪️teachers who got covid at school & brought it home to vulnerable family
▪️teachers who were forced to quit because the school wouldn’t accommodate their medical conditions (including cancer and heart conditions)
▪️covid denier and mask denier administrators who are in charge of all covid safety decisions in the school(s)
▪️teachers who were told not to do anything to memorialize colleagues who died of covid bc it could upset families
NO ONE is coming to help the staff in these schools, and others like them across the country.@CDCgov recommendations (which don't need to be followed at all anyway) don't mean anything to many politicians and many school districts. There's no one REQUIRING school safety.
But many school staff are in schools NOW, some very unsafely. What can be done to help these school staff, with so little support for making schools safer?

School staff vaccinations might be the best answer.
Not a perfect answer, not without issues, but it would help overlooked teachers already in schools be there more safely, and it could also help educators in schools that haven't reopened yet be in schools more safely too.

And the fact is, we don't have many options.
@bhrenton has a great thread on educator vaccination, below. It mentions a really interesting idea of @JReinerMD that some of the soon-to-be-approved J&J vaccine, that only requires one shot, could be reserved for educators when production shoots up.
https://t.co/99Vlxn8VOK
School staff in the 21 states that aren't prioritizing teacher vax (& staff in priority states having a hard time getting vaccinated soon) could be fully vaccinated by the end of March & safer in even unsafe schools by April. This could help some schools reopen more safely too.
The CDC made sure nothing could stop schools from being open if people want them to be. Safety protocols are optional. Ventilation is ignored. They made sure to say teacher vaccinations aren't a requirement to opening too.

Teachers are regarded so poorly in this country.
With so much stacked against school safety and teachers, it's heartening to see growing interest in school staff vaccinations (@POTUS @DrLeanaWen @ashishkjha @CT_Bergstrom among others).

Now we just need a real plan.

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Chicago Public Schools are supposed to open for some special needs and pre-K students Monday

The Chicago Teachers Union is now threatening to refuse to return to work in person.

https://t.co/MgDgNe6REj


Meanwhile
https://t.co/FIij8J3r7z

Dr. Fauci: "The default position should be to try as best as possible within reason to keep the children in school or to get them back to school [...] if you look at the data the spread among children and from children is not really big at


UNICEF: "Data from 191 countries shows no consistent link between reopening schools and increased rates of coronavirus
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The outrage is not that she fit better. The outrage is that she stated very firmly on national television with no caveat, that there are no conditions not improved by exercise. Many people with viral sequelae have been saying for years that exercise has made them more disabled 1/


And the new draft NICE guidelines for ME/CFS which often has a viral onset specifically say that ME/CFS patients shouldn't do graded exercise. Clare is fully aware of this but still made a sweeping and very firm statement that all conditions are improved by exercise. This 2/

was an active dismissal of the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of patients with viral sequelae. Yes, exercise does help so many conditions. Yes, a very small number of people with an ME/CFS diagnosis are helped by exercise. But the vast majority of people with ME, a 3/

a quintessential post-viral condition, are made worse by exercise. Many have been left wheelchair dependent of bedbound by graded exercise therapy when they could walk before. To dismiss the lived experience of these patients with such a sweeping statement is unethical and 4/

unsafe. Clare has every right to her lived experience. But she can't, and you can't justifiably speak out on favour of listening to lived experience but cherry pick the lived experiences you are going to listen to. Why are the lived experiences of most people with ME dismissed?
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You know what I don’t miss? Parent teacher conferences.

Most of Rocketkid’s teachers were lovely, but we had two that still stick out in my mind as sad/hilarious.

The first one, he was in elementary school. The teacher said it was ‘important’ for us to come in.

1/

So we worried about that for two days until the meeting. What could be wrong? It’s scary for parents to be left hanging like that.

So we meet his teacher, goatee and sunglasses...we live in the boonies and yet there’s something here like he’s trying to be a player.

2/

Not like a lady-player, like he’s got an image of himself in his head. We like teachers, but this guy’s manner is just weirdly kind of pushy a little bit.

Anyway, we sit does in the kid chairs, he’s behind his desk, again, weirdly focused on ‘power,’ somehow.

No idea why,

3/

We ask about our son, he acts as if he forgot that’s why we’re there, says some random stuff, all normal, nothing at all worthy of a conference. I mean, contact and communication is important, but thus just feels off-the cuff entirely.

4/

So then suddenly he gets really intense, but pretends being casual. Like it just occurred to him.

And he says to me, ‘So, I hear you’re a writer.’

What?

I tell him yes, I write comics and some animation and stuff.

He says. ‘I looked you up.’

5/
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Deepti Gurdasani
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We've been falsely told 'schools are safe', 'don't drive community transmission', & teachers don't have a higher risk of infection repeatedly by govt & their advisors- to justify some of the most negligent policies in history. 🧵


data shows *both* primary & secondary school teachers are at double the risk of confirmed infection relative to comparable positivity in the general population. ONS household infection data also clearly show that children are important sources of transmission.

Yet, in the parliamentary select meeting today, witnesses like Jenny Harries repeated the same claims- that have been debunked by the ONS data, and the data released by the @educationgovuk today. How many lives have been lost to these lies? How many more people have long COVID?

has repeatedly pointed out errors & gaps in the ONS reporting of evidence around risk of infection among teachers- and it's taken *months* to get clarity on this. The released data are a result of months of campaigning by her, the @NEU and others.

Rather than being transparent about the risk of transmission in school settings & mitigating this, the govt (& many of its advisors) has engaged in dismissing & denying evidence that's been clear for a while. Evidence from the govt's own surveys. And global evidence.

Why?
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My thoughts about Covid in schools-
Our studies are crap. We haven't put appropriate resources into studying this. Merging "in-person school" v "remote school" across the country makes little sense since there's so much heterogeneity in what "in-person school" looks like. 🧵

A teacher in Louisiana in an area with high rates of covid & in-person school, has a class with just 2 students in it. The entire school has 37 students and 12 staff, in a building that can hold hundreds.
Should this school's data be merged with a school that's fully open?

How would merging such disparate data, and everything in-between impact our understanding of Covid in schools? What about when we compare it to the rates in children who are in virtual school?

Things often not considered that should be... Are kids in pods? Are kids doing virtual school in community centers/ churches/ other group settings? Are youth sports or other extracurricular school activities (music, etc) happening in-person. Heterogeneity exist in this group too.

What's asymptomatic testing of children in the community like? We know that children are under-tested, how can we say something is safe if we are NOT TESTING children at the same rate as the rest of the population. We can't embrace the "don't ask (test) don't tell" apprach here.
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