I don’t know why but both the Federal and the NSW Governments are adamant that children should be returning to school as soon as possible. Reading today I saw the following quote:
Ms Berejiklian said health advice continues to be that schools remain open, and parents, teachers and students can be confident that school is a safe place.
Education NSW website
What piques my curiosity is what are the schools doing in regards to hygiene and infectious disease control that can’t be done at other locations like cafes, pubs, and clubs?
A brief survey of the teachers I know reveals that there don’t appear to be any additional steps being taken to prevent the spread of the coronavirus through the schools.
I’ve posted about it before where either we all isolate or we don’t meaning that if we have a large population of people all gathering together to swap germs, it doesn’t matter how isolated the parents are by staying home from work, if any parent has corona then all of them will get it.
NSW Education currently has a plan to slowly get students back to school, each child will be allocated a day to attend onsite and for the rest of the week they will continue to do their schooling online from home. The sheer stupidity of this plan is unfathomable. Just think about the workload being put on the teachers.
Whilst handling a classroom full of students the teacher will also have to manage classes online, no longer will the teachers just be “child-minding” but they will be managing education on two fronts whilst also worrying about the health and safety of their students, themselves, and their own families.
Repeatedly we hear from the experts, young people are getting covid-19 and they are getting terribly sick from it but it appears that the government is basing their “keep the schools open, they are safe” message on the case numbers showing that children aren’t getting that many cases.
On April 14, based solely on the data from New York City, 3 people aged 0-17 years old died of a total of 6838. A mere 0.04%. A low percentage yes but New York City is in total lockdown, a quick look at the news and you can see street after street completely bare. Streets that normally have thousands of people on them. Just imagine what the numbers would be if all those kids were mingling around in schools.
When you first send your kids to daycare you very quickly lose track of the number of runny noses and bouts of hand, foot, and mouth disease that you get hit with, and don’t even start on gastro.
Why the hell does the government now think it is perfectly fine to send all those same children back to school to mingle, to swap germs, to act as if they are in some sort of bubble? You might as well open the pubs and cafes and give them the same protective measures that are being given to the schools… fucking nothing extra is being done beyond extra cleaners at the end of the day.
I miss sending my kids to daycare, or school as we call it, but I know how filthy children are and I can not be certain that other children’s parents are social distancing well enough to not get infected then pass it to their kid, who passes it to my kid, who passes it to me.
Move schooling online, leave a couple of teachers onsite for the few kids that belong to essential workers that NEED to be out working and get everyone else to stay the fuck home. And yes parents, that means you’ll have to put up with your little darlings 24/7 but it will definitely give you a greater appreciation of those might super heroes that spend 8 hours a day with those little turds every day, 5 days a week, and still somehow manage to resist the urge to set fire to the school.