Read on Twitter
1/ A few garbled thoughts about the mess around reopening schools.
First, the obvious. There have been no winners. The last few weeks have shown the worst examples of leadership from people who are supposed to look out for school staff, the pupils and their families. #edchatie
First, the obvious. There have been no winners. The last few weeks have shown the worst examples of leadership from people who are supposed to look out for school staff, the pupils and their families. #edchatie
2/ The government's only plan for schools to reopen safely has been
. There has never been a plan for partial reopening of any kind. Making an announcement with no provisions and only 3 days notice is not a plan.
. There has never been a plan for partial reopening of any kind. Making an announcement with no provisions and only 3 days notice is not a plan.
3/ From early on, it was clear HSE figures on school transmissions were conservative compared to those collated by other groups, including @MartinaBroe1's. Trust in figures deteriorated over time when schools had multiple cases & they were recorded as community transmissions.
4/ The attempt to spin doctor that schools were safer than communities never made any sense because schools themselves contain the same members of these communities.
5/ This seemed to lead to the now Comical Ali mantra from @NormaFoleyTD1 that "schools, by their nature, are safe." Even when cases rose to the highest levels, the mantra could have stopped but they left it too late and there's no way they could admit it was no longer the case.
6/ When it became clear that schools were indeed not safe to open, instead of pausing even for a week or two, the DES picked the 2 most emotive groups to politicise: Leaving Cert students and children with additional needs.
7/ In my opinion, this was a deliberate attempt to weaponise vulnerable people against schools, against unions and against each other. What has happened since the announcement to partially reopen schools has been shameful.
8/ It is important to note at this point that @Education_Ire have provided no further protections for any staff or pupils as outlined by this excellent chart from @DrMaireadDB https://twitter.com/DrMaireadDB/status/1351555347278950400
9/ People wonder why teachers and SNAs simply won't go into schools given that supermarket workers are going into work and doctors/nurses are going to work, etc. I can only offer the following analogy for supermarket workers:
10/ Imagine if the supermarket you worked in removed all the perspex screens, didn't limit the numbers coming into the store, no customers wore masks, there was no ventilation except for a small window open and you never were more than 1m from people. That's classrooms.
11/ Having said all this, there are many teachers and SNAs, even with these very poor levels of protection, were willing to work directly with children. Even now, despite the numbers, many are willing even if they know it isn't safe.
12/ Going back to some villains because while @NormaFoleyTD1 and @josephamadigan have moved from gaslighting to chastising the people they are supposed to be in partnership with, there have been others who have behaved poorly.
13/ I don't like to single out @AdamPHarris but he has behaved extremely poorly. His condemnation of teachers has been misdirected, as I'm sure he well knows. Rather than improve anything, he has created divisions within the ASD community and his reputation is surely damaged.
14/ The leadership of the INTO, as we now know, had to have an emergency intervention from its own CEC members. We know that the CEC had to fight for 2 days with the leadership to put a stop to the madness and even now that continues.
15/ The leadership of the INTO is now severely weakened. Their own members have woken and they have seen themselves the power that social media can do. In less than 24 hours, 3,500 members gathered virtually to tell their leadership "enough is enough"
16/ Today, in less than 50 minutes, over 1,000 teachers signed a petition to ask the leadership to represent their views. Will this give the grassroot members of the INTO new tools to take over the theocracy? That remains to be seen.
17/ And all of this could have been avoided. We could have had a situation where partial reopening could have happened. All it would have needed was proper planning and adequate time for that planning to happen. https://twitter.com/hynesalan/status/1347289658934386689
18/ We need an independent metric of how safe schools are depending on a number of variables, sort of like what can open depending on the levels. Other jurisdictions have done this. I run through many of these variables here: https://link.chtbl.com/j-Vu9CJU
19/ If we partially reopen schools, we need to ensure that no children are left behind. The rushed letter sent out on Friday left huge gaps where many children would receive no support from SET teachers.
20/ Any partial reopening means that we move into a world of blended learning. In other words, who comes to school and who gets remote learning? There are a number of competing variables for this.
21/ Some of these are straightforward like children in special classes, special schools, children who are on School Support Plus programmes, kids in Junior Infants, children with SNA access, etc. because either you fall into this category or you don't
22/ However, as you widen out the variables, it becomes extremely complicated to decide who comes to school and who doesn't. Therefore, good guidelines need to be produced to ensure the right decisions are made. Nothing like this has even started to be produced.
23/ The time to start this was August. But because that's not possible, the time to start it is now. Otherwise, we will continue with this mess until cases are down to some arbitrary number and everyone has fallen out with each other.
24/ We need an independent definition of "safe" and levels of it and we need well thought-out guidelines about the impact of these. We then need time for them to be implemented. We have wasted almost 2 weeks already to-ing and fro-ing and no one is back in the school building.
25/ Ultimately, everyone has lost, especially the children, and if we are putting any blame on anyone, it shouldn't be too hard to know where I stand. So much damage has been done and they need to listen to the people who have the answers.
26/ From the beginning, the people who have been christened the partners, have failed to talk to their members. Many of them have set up grassroot groups, lobby groups and so on. Engagement is easy, quick and could be done in days. It's time to wipe the slate and start again.
