To think this class should be closed?

[Jenster03]

I'm a part time primary teacher and in the space of two weeks, 14 children have tested positive out of 30 in my class.
We've had 2 or 3 return in that time, but more and more are testing positive. Now my teaching assistant has it.
AIBU to think we should be sending the class home and remote learning? How would you feel if you were a parent of a child in my class?
Oh, and I'm pretty anxious about my level of exposure too!

Anyway going to leave you to it. IME you can't really discuss things with people who just want life to be totally normal for their families and don't care about the impact that has on other people including losing earnings, not being able to visit and help elderly families, and some dying.

@ImUninsultable

Schools are not the only places with close mixing or high case numbers.

Doesnt change anything. Covid is not going away. This is now life. Nothing anyone can do.

Who said they are?

Do you work in a school?

My business shut down because of lock down. I lost earnings for a year and a half. I didnt qualify for any if the supprort grants, like thousands of others. But I guess that doesnt matter to all the hysterics who want to keep everything closed and sit in their houses just wishing the virus will go away.

It wont. This is life. We take sensible precautions. We get vaccinated. We get boosters. We take LF tests twice a week. We wash our hands regularly. We stop touching our faces all the time. We maintain social distancing and masks.

But we dont start closing things up again because it changes nothing. We end up right back here again, over and over. This is life now. Get used to it.

@ImUninsultable

My business shut down because of lock down. I lost earnings for a year and a half. I didnt qualify for any if the supprort grants, like thousands of others. But I guess that doesnt matter to all the hysterics who want to keep everything closed and sit in their houses just wishing the virus will go away.

It wont. This is life. We take sensible precautions. We get vaccinated. We get boosters. We take LF tests twice a week. We wash our hands regularly. We stop touching our faces all the time. We maintain social distancing and masks.

But we dont start closing things up again because it changes nothing. We end up right back here again, over and over. This is life now. Get used to it.

I'm not being hysterical. Have some empathy for others like you're expecting in return.

@ImUninsultable you are accusing things that no one is saying. Yes if a classroom has so many pupils ill it is riddled with covid, it should temporarily close. That is all the OP is saying.
You are being a bit hysterical.

@ImUninsultable

My business shut down because of lock down. I lost earnings for a year and a half. I didnt qualify for any if the supprort grants, like thousands of others. But I guess that doesnt matter to all the hysterics who want to keep everything closed and sit in their houses just wishing the virus will go away.

It wont. This is life. We take sensible precautions. We get vaccinated. We get boosters. We take LF tests twice a week. We wash our hands regularly. We stop touching our faces all the time. We maintain social distancing and masks.

But we dont start closing things up again because it changes nothing. We end up right back here again, over and over. This is life now. Get used to it.

School staff can't take sensible precautions or social distance.

@Sherrystrull

So what's your solution? When you close schools again, you need to bring back furlough payments and self employed grants and incentivise employers to keep their employees jobs open. So, more tax increases. You also send thousands like me back to no income.

We cant close schools. It isnt an option.

All the precautions are on option. And they should be used in school. All the parent shouting about their kids being forced to wear masks or have the window open or wash their hands just need to be told to shut up. Schools should be allowed to use all precautions anyone else is allowed to use.

But closing schools? Going back to remote learning?

The financial impact, the mental health impact. It is untenable. Because THIS ISNT GOING AWAY. This is now just a permanent part of life and we have to get used to living with it.

It doesnt matter how much you dont like it. It isnt changing. There is no magic wand, no government in the world can keep it away. This is life now.

I'm not suggesting schools close. It isn't a solution. I deal with the horrific impact on young children every day. I'm just saying have some empathy for school staff.

Well thanks to school we have covid and all 3 of us are ill and put higher risk family members who could die if they catch it at risk but yeah let's keep spreading it then let kids stay home a few weeks to reduce the cases

YABU because if you were "anxious" about getting covid, you shouldn't have accepted a job where you were 100% guaranteed to be exposed to it. Literally any other possible job would have been better for you.

The parents' feelings are irrelevant, because there's nothing stopping those who are worried about it from keeping their children home. If they're continuing to send their children to school, you should assume they'd rather chance a covid exposure than have their children at home all day. If I were a parent who depended on the school for child care, I'd be pretty annoyed at a teacher depriving me of that (while still drawing a full wage) because she belatedly decided she was no longer ok with an obvious risk of the job.

@Dddccc

Sending your children to school comes with that risk. You had to option to withdraw them from school homeschool them.

I send mine to school. I've accepted the risk. I'm scared of it, of course. But it wont go away. It isnt going to change. It's now a risk we live with, like all the other risks we have in life.

Wonderful to know that so many people think that the vulnerable don't matter any more. We just have to live with it now, so fuck them! Never mind teachers with chronic conditions, who might not be able to teach your kids if they catch it despite being vaccinated - never mind the children in your child's class with conditions that mean a respiratory illness could kill them! We'll just live with it :)

@PurpleOkapi

YABU because if you were "anxious" about getting covid, you shouldn't have accepted a job where you were 100% guaranteed to be exposed to it. Literally any other possible job would have been better for you.

The parents' feelings are irrelevant, because there's nothing stopping those who are worried about it from keeping their children home. If they're continuing to send their children to school, you should assume they'd rather chance a covid exposure than have their children at home all day. If I were a parent who depended on the school for child care, I'd be pretty annoyed at a teacher depriving me of that (while still drawing a full wage) because she belatedly decided she was no longer ok with an obvious risk of the job.

We shouldn't have accepted the jobs? We did that years ago. What would you say if we all quit now because the risk is too high? Surely it would be worse if teachers quit in their masses (as you seem to be suggesting) than classes close for two weeks once they are riddled with COVID, as Jenster suggested

@unvillage

Wonderful to know that so many people think that the vulnerable don't matter any more. We just have to live with it now, so fuck them! Never mind teachers with chronic conditions, who might not be able to teach your kids if they catch it despite being vaccinated - never mind the children in your child's class with conditions that mean a respiratory illness could kill them! We'll just live with it :)

No amount of handwringing is going to make covid disappear. Anything other than "find a way to live with it" stopped being one of the choices a long time ago. Not even the tightest restrictions were enough to get to 'covid zero,' so I shudder to think what you have in mind in perpetuity if that's your goal.

Not every health condition is compatible with every job. If you literally cannot do your job without dying from known, common occuaptional hazards that are a negligible risk for those without those conditions, you need to find another line of work. Someone who's severely immunocompromised shouldn't be a primary teacher any more than someone with haemophilia should be a footballer.

I agree that remote options should exist for vulnerable students, or for anyone else who wants that. I'm not sure where OP is, but many do in many places. The children OP is talking about are those whose parents have chosen to send them to school in-person.

Of course you should send the class home. Your instincts are totally right. They all need to self isolate for up to two weeks and do remote learning in that time.

Public Health are absolutely crazy not to advise you to do this. Read about the Irish school that have gone onto remote learning for two weeks, as they also have not had adequate advice.

I’m a medical professional. Vaccinations are a big part of the control of the pandemic, but they won’t work on their own. Children do get ill, do transmit to others (leading to breakthrough serious cases), do get long covid, do sometimes get seriously ill.

It is not a good strategy by any means to just ‘herd immunity’ children in schools. Reducing cases is extremely important still

• by mitigations within school (mostly ventilation, HEPA filters, masks) greatly reduce transmission.
• by sending close contacts of a positive case home (= the whole class) for testing for at least a week.

The best strategy is as soon as a child tests positive, for the whole class to switch to online learning for 5 days, and then daily antigen tests for another week. That is the very least to be done, and is quite an effective way of reducing transmission.

@unvillage

There isn't another option. It isnt going away. This is life now. There just a fact. There are plenty of facts about life which I dont like, wish they were different but... they're not. It's the way it is.

No one, anywhere in the world, is going "yay, this is life now."

The delusion around this is unbelievable. If you're pragmatic about it and simple admit that this is life in covid world, you get people jumping up accusing you of being quite happy, not caring about anyone else, just wanting your kids out of the house, and all the rest of it.

No. It's just that there isnt another option. Covid is here. That's all there is to it.

We cant close classrooms for a couple weeks every time numbers are high because it isnt one classroom, it'll be hundred. So that's furlough, grants, jobs at risk, income cuts etc. All on a rolling schedule because it isnt "just one classroom". It would be constant. Not possible.

@SamVimesFavouriteDragon

We shouldn't have accepted the jobs? We did that years ago. What would you say if we all quit now because the risk is too high?
Surely it would be worse if teachers quit in their masses (as you seem to be suggesting) than classes close for two weeks once they are riddled with COVID, as Jenster suggested

Your hire date isn't the issue. You can quit whenever you want, and you've chosen not to, presumably because you want to continue getting paid. You aren't "all" going to quit, because with vaccines being readily available, the risk is negligible to 98% of you. But even if you did ... we're talking about primary students. You accomplish nothing by trying to teach them remotely, so yeah, you might as well all just quit if that's what's going to happen. At least the taxes that are paying for you to not do your job could be repurposed to do something that might be useful and beneficial to the children you're supposed to be teaching.

@PurpleOkapi
Ah I see. 98%
Made up stats
I'll bow out there then, it sounds like you're going to argue no matter what the facts are.

Statistically, teachers are very likely to get COVID, regardless of vaccines - due to viral load, inability to distance etc.
Classes will have to close when this happens.
It would be better to remote teach for two weeks than be off for 6 (how long both teachers I know with COVID have needed thus far)

Can't answer for other teachers I stayed in my job because I like it, and because I'm good at it, and I did a bloody good job during remote learning and heard that from parents daily, so I'm obviously not the kind of teacher you're talking about when you say remote learning is pointless.

I'm sorry that you can't see that two weeks of remote learning is a better option than risking people getting seriously ill - remote learning must have been particularly hard for you. I'm sorry you've found remote learning so difficult, I wish there was another way to keep children and staff safe.

Well France, Spain, Italy, Germany and other European countries @PurpleOkapi and @ImUninsultable are managing not to have high case rates, keep schools open and education continuous because of the lower case rates. They do isolate cases, wear masks, have ventilation. They are doing what’s effective and evidence based.

They are just being more competent, like the OP who is being massively let down by incompetency. And now being given a lot of ignorant rude comments.

I'd like to know what "tightest restrictions" @PurpleOkapi saw, because I certainly haven't seen them in the UK.

Good luck with your kids' schooling when teachers quit or die in droves. My union is reporting terrifying numbers of people wanting to leave teaching directly due to the handling of covid. Hope you're good to homeschool!

@SamVimesFavouriteDragon

Of course teachers will be exposed to covid. That's why I'm mocking the OP for acting surprised at the situation - anyone mentally functional enough to have any business teaching children knew all along that this was inevitable. But what percentage of vaccinated people die from covid? I think I actually overstated it - it's nowhere near 2%.

The small percentage of people who are at high risk despite being vaccinated shouldn't be teaching in person, because they're not medically able to do that job. It's their responsibility to find work that's suitable for their condition, not everyone else's responsibility to rearrange their lives to accommodate their desire to do a job they aren't capable of doing.

@PurpleOkapi I don’t think attacking teachers is helpful.

Schools don’t need to close again like before. But they do need proper mitigations and contact tracing. As I said before, Europe is, right now, managing with very low case numbers. Children mostly wear masks in school (with no problems at all), better ventilation in schools, close contacts are sent home for a short time (which keeps cases lower which keeps classes open). These are effective measures. It’s not the public or teacher’s fault the the public health response is not effective in schools.

"This is covid now, get used to it" = on terms that suit me. Look after my kids and tough if you get covid etc as far as some people seem to be concerned.
Alternatively, getting used to it = managing the situation when infection rates are soaring. Remember the old protect the NHS line? How about remembering that newer and hopefully better vaccines might be in the pipeline? New treatments.
Why do people respond as though the only options are to let corona run completely unchecked or to lock everything down? There's a lot of leeway between those two stances.

@PurpleOkapi

YABU because if you were "anxious" about getting covid, you shouldn't have accepted a job where you were 100% guaranteed to be exposed to it. Literally any other possible job would have been better for you.

The parents' feelings are irrelevant, because there's nothing stopping those who are worried about it from keeping their children home. If they're continuing to send their children to school, you should assume they'd rather chance a covid exposure than have their children at home all day. If I were a parent who depended on the school for child care, I'd be pretty annoyed at a teacher depriving me of that (while still drawing a full wage) because she belatedly decided she was no longer ok with an obvious risk of the job.

School is not childcare. Classrooms are Petri dishes. We seem to have forgotten about viral load.

Teachers