It's been awhile since I've updated here, here's where things are at:
As in most of the rest of the country, case numbers are rising here in my part of the state of Washington. The governor recently relaxed the standards for schools to reopen, but in announcing the priorities for vaccines, older teachers (over 50) are scheduled for February, but younger teachers (under 50) aren't scheduled until April, and we're behind the posted schedule. Our district has announced plans to welcome K-2 learners in the next couple weeks for half-days. We already have select special education, students who don't speak English fluently, and some select students who struggled in the spring in buildings.
I'm a high school teacher with a full year virtual assignment (working with virtual students only) in a relatively affluent district. Some kids are thriving, some are making it through, and some are absolutely struggling right now. Truth be told, I'm also really struggling right now to keep up with the workload, and I've decided next semester that I have to work-to-contract, which will cut my hours by about 20 per week. I don't like it, but I've already (not by design) lost about 15 pounds this semester, and my doctor is concerned but can't find any other root cause besides stress, despite a battery of tests being performed, which seems to raise my stress levels and around we go.
One interesting thing that we discovered recently was that students would be allowed to switch from "scheduled remote" to "scheduled hybrid" (room permitting) or "scheduled hybrid" to "scheduled remote" at semester. More families are opting to switch to the remote, which I have to admit I did not see coming.
There's a number of elements that would really be concerning me about going back into my classroom right now (were I to have an assignment that would require it before the fall):
(1) As others have said recently in this thread, a vaccine would greatly reduce the anxiety of a number of educators.
(2) We have a large antimasking group within our community. With the vaccines reportedly only 95% effective, masks are still really an essential part of our fight to protect everybody (especially students, who
won't be vaccinated at this point
). My building has usually done an extremely poor job of enforcing "habit" based regulations (students frequently roam the halls until well after the bell, because tardy policies are not enforced), and there's already been anecdotal evidence that students currently in the building are defiantly refusing to wear masks and still being permitted to stay in our limited reopening. This shouldn't be happening now, and this can't happen within a broader reopening.
(3) The schedule of half-days (really about 2.5 - 3 hours, to provide time for cleaning) doesn't work for any parent who has to work. This means that there's going to be a lot more carpooling and child care in play than usual, which again increases community spread.
(4) Cases are currently growing in my area, with an estimated
r of 1.2. We shouldn't be reopening while r > 1.0.
(5) Parents in our community have already decided that they
will not have their children tested. I... I just don't know what to say about that one, but the only way we will know about a COVID case for many of our students is if they end up hospitalized.
The only other comment that I wanted to add here is that I feel a lot of the "spread in schools" data is pretty misleading. The only way our district is recognizing a case as "spread in schools" is if Student A gets it, Student B shares a space with Student A, Student B goes absolutely nowhere except for school and home (including a trip to the doctor's office!), and then Student B also gets it. Our district (and I don't think we're alone in this) is arguing, then, that since no students have met the practically impossible-to-prove standard that
no spread is occurring in schools, because they don't have any cases where
spread definitively did occur there. The logical fallacies in this argument...