I read this article in the Washington Post recently about the Bethlehem Area School District in Pennsylvania and its attempts to contain COVID19 cases. If you don’t have a subscription or you don’t want to read it all, the basic gist is, “We got this.”
Spoiler Alert: They don’t got this.
I work for the school district next door, the Easton Area School District and one thing that both districts share, besides a border, is complete denial among the administration about how bad things are getting. September went pretty smoothly but in October we started seeing cases in the schools. In November, it took only a week to have as many positive cases as we had in all of October. The truly bad part about these numbers is that children are significantly more likely to be asymptomatic when they have COVID19. As many as 45% of pediatric cases of COVID19 are asymptomatic which means that cases we are seeing are likely only the tip of the iceberg as far as the number of students who are actually getting sick. Even being asymptomatic carries health risks that we don’t yet fully understand.
If you’d like to see the number I’m talking about, feel free their publicly available and updated fairly frequently.
The line from administration is that everything is fine, despite all evidence to the contrary, that there has been no intraschool spread of the Coronavirus. “What evidence?”, I hear you asking at home. Well the first big outbreaks at the high school came from the sports teams.
Now that should be obvious intraschool spread but that’s only if not being mendacious. If you’re part of the school district administration, though, you say, “Well, school sports aren’t really part of school so they don’t count.” If you think that sounds like some Orwellian style doublespeak, then you’d be correct.
Now, since I started working on this piece, they have decided to close the high school out of an abundance of caution but to show how much they really care, take a look at this.
That’s right, it’s not safe enough to go to school but sports will go on because they are more important than the health and well being of the student athletes, coaches, cheerleaders, and band members.
The risks that are being taken with student and staff lives and health is both irresponsible and completely unconscionable, especially now that there is a vaccine on the horizon. Remote learning is certainly not an ideal situation but problems can be fixed, unless you’re dead. You can’t fix dead.