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.

1/9 - “In the second wave we acquired much more evidence that schoolchildren are almost equally, if not more infected by SARS-CoV-2 than others.”

2/9 - “The problem is not that schools are unsafe for children,” Mr. Boris Johnson said last week. “The problem is schools may nonetheless act as vectors for transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.”

3/9 - “An antibody survey conducted by researchers in Geneva in May and December, using thousands of random samples, found that children of age 6 to 18 were getting infected as often as young adults. The study has yet to be peer reviewed.”

4/9 - “One reason for this: The Swiss city’s schools have been open since the summer, while restrictions have been placed on adults, meaning schoolchildren played a bigger role in transmitting the virus during the autumn surge.”

5/9 - “In Austria, a nationwide survey by universities and medical institutes found that children under 10 showed a similar rate of infection to those between 11 and 14, and that the children in general were getting infected as often as teachers.”

SCOOP: San Diego Unified School District tells white teachers they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children and should undergo “antiracist therapy for White educators.”

I've obtained explosive whistleblower documents from the training session. Let's dig in. 🧵

This summer, San Diego Unified hired critical race theorist Bettina Love for a district-wide training on "[challenging] the oppressive practices that live within ... school organizations." The district forbade recordings, but my whistleblower took screenshots and detailed notes.

According to the whistleblower notes, Love began by saying that "racism runs deep" in America and that blacks alone "know who America really is." Love claimed that public schools "don't see [blacks] as human," perpetuate “anti-Blackness,” and "spirit murder babies."

The concept of “spirit murder” is at the heart of Love’s teachings. Love writes that public schools are guilty of “the spirit murdering of Black and Brown children,” defines as “a death that is built on racism and intended to reduce, humiliate, and destroy people of color.”

During the presentation, Love argued that “Whiteness reproduces poverty, failing schools, high unemployment, school closings, and trauma for people of color.” She insisted that “white educators must take responsibility” because they uphold “white supremacy culture.”

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.