Trump Is Going To Force Schools To Open

My wife works in a school. Online learning was limited to 3 hours per day, instead of 7. 

Zoom sometimes crashed, sometimes for the entire class, other times some students couldn't log in. 

No social interaction with other children, which creates another set of problems 

Classes were limited to 30 minutes which leaves little time for instruction & questions. 

It was difficult to see who was paying attention & some students didn't show their face. Cheating was rampant. 

Some districts had problems because not all the children were online. 

And then there is the problem that parents can't go to work. 

Who in the world would think Zoom appropriate for schooling kids, especially the younger ones?  Maybe 6th grade, maybe if mom sat there the whole time to keep the kid on track, lots of maybes.   My sympathy to your wife, tom, for doing the impossible.

Tom, those problems seem small in comparison to death or permanent disability. Trump says there will be a vaccine ready by Jan. Give the kids the first semester off and then have the second semester in the summer.

I don't buy the social development argument. Children are spending more time with their families like they did in the good old days.  That isn't a bad thing at all.

Hundreds are shot every week, but the TDS crowd doesn't care, but they get knotted up over a maybe.

While I am a cool parent, children need to socialize with other children.

Many schools particularly in the north don't have ac, which causes another set of health issues.

Mark, you must live in a more upscale area.  Around here a large problem is fatherless children and single mothers, certainly not helped by the pandemic.   Young women proudly refer to "my baby daddy".   Siblings in one household are by different men.  But I digress.

If it wasn't for gun love and the NRA-stooge Republicans, we'd have far less gun deaths. But what the fuck does that have to do with opening schools in the fall?

Our children can survive another half-year of learning at home. I would not be willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of children so that Trump can get his way.

Hey, Stalker, I don't give a fuck what you fucking object to and will say whatever the fuck I want and will continue to utterly refute every stupid fucking thing you say.

And it's "toeing" the line, dimwit.

I live in a rural area that is basically a 50/50 mix of upper-middle-class and the working poor. There are lots of baby daddys around here. Even at 52, I regularly get propositioned by girls in their twenties trying to entice me with sex so they can find someone that will stay with them and be a dad to their kids.  I don't ever take them up on that as most of them are trying to have more babies. Plus, knowing what they want, I am not going to be an A-hole and tell them what they want to hear so I can get in their pants.

Even to a single parent in my area, the $600 a week is more than most of them will make working 40+ hours a week especially considering there is no payroll tax owed on that.  So both they and their kids end up with quality time they wouldn't otherwise have.

Do you really want kids going back to school when several states are reporting full or near full ICUs? It doesn't make any sense at all to me. As I said earlier, a school is a lot like a bar kids don't adhere to social distancing, they frequently touch each other, they won't keep their masks on and will shout spewing droplets everywhere. 

There is also a practical aspect. Since I live in a rural area about 90% of the kids get to school on the school bus packed three per seat and the bus routes are designed to fill the buses to capacity. Is every school district in America suddenly going to triple their bus fleet so they can sit one kid per-seat?

Using my 15-year-old's school as an example, they get 7 minutes between classes to move to different classrooms. Typically, two or three times a day they will switch buildings in those 7-minute transitions.  The halls are 4-5 wide with kids during those 7 minutes.  If you space them out so each kid has 6 feet around them class transitions would take twenty minutes to a half-hour. They run four 30 minute lunch periods at the school. Each table holds four kids. There is no surrounding room to add more tables. As it is now, the kids that are last to get in the lunch line have 10 minutes to shovel their food in their mouths. How do they make that work with social distancing?

Even considering Tom's point, there is going to be 10-20% of the kids that can't go to school because they are COVID-19 vulnerable. All those online lesson plans and lessons will still have to be prepared for those kids and it doesn't take any extra time to show that material to 1000 kids instead of 100. 

Candy, Trump doesn't care about kids--or anyone except himself. He's pushing to reopen schools because he thinks that will help his reelection chances. Period. No other reason. If we reopen schools before we have a vaccine, thousands of kids will die. Not get sick---DIE. Furthermore, they will infect hundreds of thousands of family members, many of whom will also die.

We can catch them up next year. For now, let's keep them safe. We can educate them at home, which won't be as good as a live classroom experience, but it will be adequate for the time being. And we won't have to take them to the hospital---or bury them.

I know that single moms often rely on a school to be a glorified day care center, but it's just too dangerous to do that right now. It's a hard choice, I realize. That's why the CDC guidelines---which Trump has ordered scrapped---recommend phased reopening of schools and major changes in the way things are done.

Sure. There are dozens of practical problems that would have to be addressed in order to make schools even kinda sorta safe. And that would take extra money--above and beyond normal expenses. But the Orange Asshole is threatening to take away schools' funding and force them to reopen anyway. What an utter douchebag!

The most prudent thing would be to continue online distance learning. It would also be the least costly choice. Would the kids receive as good an educational experience as they normally do? No. But I don't advocate killing tens of thousands of kids and their family members, which would happen if schools reopened.

The MAGA morons may wish to sacrifice their kids to their idol, Trumpie-poo, but the kids don't deserve to die.