Education and the pandemic, how our leaders, the people not in the classroom are failing and risking lives
Everyone's starting point, whether you are the President of the United States, the superintendent of the district, a teacher in a classroom, or a cafeteria worker, is we want to be back in school and that in school learning is by far the best method of educating children. That being said, it's only the teacher and the cafeteria worker who will be risking their lives.
District after the district is coming up with a plan after plan to return to school just as the nation is inarguably in much worse shape than when the country shut down. If you live in any other region besides the North East, you have seen an uptick in cases and deaths.
Let's take Florida for example, the state closed the schools when there were less than a thousand cases. Governor DeSantis, in a rambling interview, said children were fine with returning, while not mentioning teachers once. He did this while Florida was averaging over ten thousand cases a day, including a record-shattering 15,300 in one day.
To give you some scale, it took Florida 111 days to reach 100 thousand cases of the disease, and just 13 days to reach 200 thousand, we will be at 300 thousand in less ten days after that. At the height of the pandemic in New York, they had a little over 11,000 cases, and all of South Korea, a country with 59 million densely packed together citizens, haven't had 15 thousand cases total.
Given these facts, how does rushing to open our schools make sense? The answer is it doesn't, but that doesn't stop our leaders from making plans to open schools, and the main reason they give is distance learning just did not work for some, and you know what? I agree.
I think we have to admit that distance learning did not work for many of our easily distracted, English as a CONTINUE READING: Mr. G for District 3: Chris Guerrieri's Education Matters: Education and the pandemic, how our leaders, the people not in the classroom are failing and risking lives