Read on Twitter
I am deeply concerned about all of the faculty + students in schools that have been fully remote since August and are in the process of solidifying their reopening plans. I’ll explain
Back in August, lots of cities + towns decided to stay remote. Whether it was lack of funding, positivity rates, whatever. I live in RI. Our rates were LOW in comparison to other states in the summer.
Dr. Fauci met with our Governor live & said individual districts should make decisions based on their #’s. Ours were low! We were in the green.
Don’t get me wrong. I trust Dr Fauci. I respect him. There was also a lot we didn’t know about asymptomatic transmission back then.
My district worked nonstop all summer. They hired the extra custodial staff. Hired more TA’s. Made class sizes smaller. PPE in every classroom. Bought outdoor tents for eating. We have an outdoor classroom. Ventilation was checked & fixed where necessary.
We have thermal forehead scanners at every entrance of the school. They’re so futuristic. It’s like an iPad. Every kid got scanned every single morning. We changed transportation protocol so buses were at half capacity. We were ready for any scenario.
We have daily symptom screenings that every guardian and staff member has to complete. We have beautiful new air purifiers in every room. N95’s for specialists who see students from all classes. We stay in our “stable pods” all day every day.
My district applied for grants to purchase more tents for outdoor eating, outdoor heaters for the tents, and grants to make our wifi work outdoors.
We live in a state with strict mask mandates. You wear your mask anywhere in public. Nobody is walking around target without their mask on. They’d be kicked out.
Success would have been ours. It should have been, if transmission worked the way we thought it did. We have the most supportive admin. Anything we needed to be safe, we got.
But, the stable pods are only so stable because they’re only stable within the school itself. All of our small circles eventually lead to Kevin Bacon. The weather changes quickly in RI. One week we’re baking outside reading 6-10 ft apart in fresh air.
The next week, we’re freezing trying to keep windows open & air circulating. People stopped gathering outdoors in their small circles on weekends. We all moved indoors. The problem with young children being asymptomatic is that the virus can run through them and we’d never know
I can say that from experience because if I weren’t paranoid, I would’ve chalked my daughters few hours of symptoms up to allergies & not gotten her tested. Again, supportive admin got me a sub immediately + told me family first.
I never in a million years expected to find out 24 hours later that my 7 year old, who was already feeling normal again, was positive. This unfortunately meant we had exposed my grama (her before school morning care).
This was in the first week of November. We have no clue where my daughter may have gotten it from. We are careful. We stay home. They hate me for it. Regardless, then I caught it. (My tests never came back positive but I had every symptom + still can’t taste or smell)
So, again. It’s Rhode Island. It’s cold now. Rather than hanging outside by a fire pit, people are hanging in their small circles indoors. Cases rise. Cases spike. We became the hot spot of the WORLD. The WORLD. Geography lesson: smallest state in the US.
I would never blame the schools. We followed every rule. We followed the guidance of Dr. Fauci. We did everything we could. This virus is rampant & asymptomatic transmission, no doubt, caused our state to go from 1.2% on our first day of school to 33.2% as of last week.
I say all of this to beg districts planning to reopen to reconsider. Wait until the vaccine is available. A teacher I love dearly at my daughter’s school lost her mom 2 weeks ago. You can spend all the money & take every precaution. The virus will still find its way to you.
