School re-opening may not go well.

[jomartin281271]

Here's an article from the New York Times documenting what happened when the Israeli government decided to re-open their schools. They thought they had beaten the virus (which this country certainly hasn't) and within days it was spreading again like wildfire. One section of the article is particularly interesting. It reads:

'Public health experts worldwide have coalesced around a set of guidelines for reopening schools.

A major recommendation is to create groups of 10 to 15 students who stay together in classrooms, at recess and lunchtime, with teachers assigned to only one group. Each group has minimal contact with other groups, limiting any spread of infection. And if a case of Covid-19 emerges, one group can be quarantined at home while others can continue at school.

Other key recommendations include staggering schedules or teaching older students online, keeping desks several feet apart, sanitizing classrooms more frequently, providing ventilation and opening windows if possible, and requiring masks for staff and students old enough to wear them properly.'

Our government are going to be cramming the kids into the same old classrooms, students won't be wearing masks, and the older students won't be able to study remotely. And this in a country with one of the highest mortality rates from Covid in the world.

You can read the full article here.

www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/world/middleeast/coronavirus-israel-schools-reopen.html

moretolifethanthis2020

"The whole reaction is ludicras. I am a teacher btw."

You are a teacher?
A teacher who cannot even spell "ludicrous"
The children are better off at home IMHO.

You don't have kids do you Jo.

Well you'll get to see how it works soon. Aberdeen is in a local lockdown and the schools are still going ahead with opening next week. No reduced class sizes, no SD between children, no bubbles as far as I know.

I really, really hope it shows it works. Evidence from Israel would suggest otherwise though.

@jomartin281271cut n paste a speciality of yours

@wagtailred, I have thought about the PTA funding as a way of helping with costs but unfortunately our school PTA (and I would assume others too) have strict limits in the constitutional docs about what money can be spent on. Broadly speaking it must be for ‘extras’ not things that should be funded by the school/LEA, we have got around this in the past but not sure how comfortable I am with fiduciary responsibilities to make that call.

@SophieB100

"I think we'll be closed by October half term"

Yes I think this is the reality. And it's something we all have to plan for.

I work in a school which has said that masks may be worn by staff if wanted. While I worked throughout the last few months with keyworker children, we were in a large well ventilated hall with less than 20 children or outside.
We were one of the few schools who managed to get every pupil back in for at least a few days. We did it by strict bubbles of 15, staggered playtimes, lunches and strict hygeine. I am so glad we got them all back in because it really did provide closure on the school year.
However, when we go back in September we will have 30 in each bubble. Side by side at tables facing the front. Teacher teaching at the front. I worry for my job as a TA due to the no mixing of bubbles and distancing rules. I usually take small groups out to work with, we cannot do that now to keep the bubbles safe in their own room. I fear TAs may be made redundant shortly.
I just do not understand the logic of saying masks will not help contain the spread. We teach children to wear pants and seatbelts and not take them off. Safe mask wearing can be taught.
I do live in a nice area so admit it won't be the same everywhere, but almost all the children I see in our shops are wearing masks. I really do think they should for schools too.
Other countries are insisting on mask wearing as a condition of schools reopening. I don't think we should be different. I do believe thatt he government are saying this for cost reasons not health.
Every school staff memeber that I know is desperate to get back to normal. If wearing masks can help keep our schools open , let's do it.

@Trashtara

Letseatgrandma you'd have to send a kid or have a classroom mobile, work rounds would have to be found. Those are both better and safer work arounds than the current, lets get school in full time and back to normal.

The current plan is likely to have individual schools opening and closing and opening and closing, which is really disruptive to education, and parents.

I completely agree.

But we used every classroom in my school in June-with a teacher and TA in each bubble of half a class. If you took all the TAs out, leaving the teacher alone (unable to leave the class for a toilet break), we couldn’t have had any more children in as there would be nowhere for them to be.

Even if we could find and afford 12 portacabins for the rest of the school, they would be staffed by TAs instead of teachers, which I’m sure people would still be objecting to.

I don’t think schools should be full time and back as normal either. A part time blended model will keep school open, in my opinion.

I would separate the school day into 2 - half the children go in the morning, half in the afternoon. The same teacher stays with the same children all the time, so although the school is open for longer, their day is no longer. Scrap non-essential subjects and sports, concentrating on academic subjects - children can play sport, etc. in the half-day they aren't at school.

This is essentially what they did here in Germany when they re-opened primary schools in May and June. It worked well enough. I think there was one school in my city that had a small outbreak but that was it.

How understanding are employers going to be though laurie when their initial relief at having some of their workforce back and able tow work 'properly' is tempered by constant requests to be off because DC is self isolating, DH is self isolating, a bubble has closed, a school has closed, you need a test, you ahd a negative test but still have symptoms, etc etc etc.

I really don't think people are foreseeing exactly how disruptive this full time return could be to their work patterns and employers will get might pissed off mighty quickly.

I am sure that sort of worry is what lead the parents in Gloucestershire to put their child back in nursery whilst awaiting the outcome of its Covid test.

I guess with more people WFH that won't be such a huge problem as it could be, but Boris Johnson seems keen to put a stop to WFH as well which is utterly utterly short sighted.

So the people going SCHOOLS BACK TO NORMAL KIDS NEED AN EDUCATION

What do you want to happen when schools going back to normal inevitably causes outbreaks as seen in other countries?

SCHOOLS TO STAY OPEN DESPITE KIDS AND TEACHERS TESTING POSITIVE?

SCHOOLS TO STAY OPEN DESPITE NUMEROUS TEACHERS BEING OFF SICK?

SCHOOLS TO STAY OPEN PLEASE VOLUNTEER TO SUPERVISE CLASSES DUE TO TEACHER SHORTAGE?

I mean, what’s your end game? When would you accept schools not being open as normal? Would you ever accept them closing or maybe implementing more effective measures?

@Piggywaspushed

You'd be amazed how many people don't understand what pandemic means. It was the government who added the word global , followed by the media, to alert people to exactly how serious the word is.

However, I am fairly sure 'pandemic' doesn't have to be 'global'.

This is correct. Pandemic is spread over a large area that crosses borders (so for example if something spread through the southern hemisphere but not the northern hemisphere it will still be a pandemic, even though the whole world was not affected.

Those nitpicking are just trying to make themselves out to be more intelligent and humiliate the poster - all that does is make them, the nitpickers, look stupid...

Not necessarily. Also, depends which children

This is from the CDC:

While relatively rare, some children die from flu each year. Since 2004-2005, flu-related deaths in children reported to CDC during regular flu seasons have ranged from 37 to 187 deaths. Even though the reported number of deaths during the 2017-2018 flu season was 187, CDC’s mathematical models that account for the underreporting of flu-related deaths in children estimate the actual number was closer to 600

www.cdc.gov/flu/highrisk/children.htmPop pop

You can compare that to the 20 or so kids under 14 who have died from Covid-19 in the US.

One might well ask why the USA is prepared to allow hundreds of kids to die from the flu year after year, with no one batting an eyelid? We’d never go back to school (and there is a somewhat effective vaccine for it too!)

This is all so ridiculous.

Also, children rely heavily on family members to survive emotionally and physically. Anything which threatens all this is extremely serious for them

Healthy working age adults are also at a low risk.

If your family has a vulnerable working age adult, you should make preparations to educate at home rather than demand everyone else disrupt their child’s education.

What do you want to happen when schools going back to normal inevitably causes outbreaks as seen in other countries?

And yet, plenty of other countries have managed to keep their schools open without a fuss, like Japan, China and South Korea.

around : the other option is to get rid of setting, rather than faffing about with sets or streaming and teach inform groups/ smaller groups.
Still doesn't answer years 10 upwards though.

And who decides what are unnecessary subjects?

People keep saying "We need to find ways to open schools more safely", but none of their suggestions would actually work (for secondary schools, at least). It needs to be recognised that there might not actually be any way to open schools safely full-time, even if you threw money at the problem.

The government was already unable to recruit enough teachers before the pandemic. I can't imagine why anyone would think that ex-teachers who are retired (and therefore more vulnerable to Covid due to age) or who have fled the profession to go to other jobs (or be SAHP) would come rushing back to teach during a pandemic. Reducing classes from 30 to 15 would require almost double the teaching workforce.

Spreading secondary schools around other local sites (church halls etc) would be completely unworkable too. Just one modestly-sized year group of 150 would need a building with rooms to take 10 grouos of 15. Even if you could get more teachers, they'd still have to be moving around from room to room and site to site to teach different subjects to different classes.

And that's without even considering the mixing of the bubbles via siblings in different bubbles, friends seeing each other outside school, school buses (which would also need to deliver kids to umpteen different sites?).

When will people consider schools to be 'safe'? The concept of safety from a virus is bizarre, even if it is a clever campaign.

How understanding are employers going to be though laurie when their initial relief at having some of their workforce back and able tow work 'properly' is tempered by constant requests to be off because DC is self isolating, DH is self isolating, a bubble has closed, a school has closed, you need a test, you ahd a negative test but still have symptoms, etc etc etc.

Of course that will be a challenge. But the reaction to emergency closure is totally different to parents only being available part time for the foreseeable.

If I go in right now to my boss and say I can only do part time hours, that’s my redundancy papers signed, at that moment.

Think of all the companies bringing people back from furlough. Working mothers top of the list if schools are part time.

Working parents would be better off taking their chances.

Covering emergency care if schools are shut is something that people (employers/family support) can rally to, in a way that they’d be unlikely to commit to long term as the ‘new normal’.

keep their schools open without a fuss, like Japan, China and South Korea.

You are comparing apples with a dumpster fire. When you say ‘without a fuss’ have you seen what measures were put in place that will be notable by their absence here?

A better comparison for schools here internationally would be Israel. Go on, tell me how that went.

I can see us being back for most of September (with local outbreaks closing down certain areas) but having to close all schools early for half term due to widespread outbreaks . Then, over half term the government will frantically back pedal and say we are all going back to school on a part time (week A, week B) basis with online learning set for the time they aren’t at school. Masks mandatory unless exempt. That seems to be pretty much what a lot of the schools in the US are doing.

mango how do you know there hasn't been a fuss?

There have certainly been school closures and lockdowns since school returned and a study which came out of South Korea about children's role in the spread.

There are huge cultural differences at play there : one being that parents play an enormous role in educating children and don't devolve that entirely to school, so hoe schooling went more smoothly and with less protest.

Children have returned in parts of those countries with HUGE mitigations in place and STILL schools have been closed back down in whole districts. They do not hesitate to do this..

I would separate the school day into 2 - half the children go in the morning, half in the afternoon. The same teacher stays with the same children all the time.

Sure, that would work in primary but not in secondary - unless you're expecting, say, a history teacher to teach up to GCSE or A Level in physics, maths, English, Spanish etc.

hoe schooling is an entirely different thing

A part time blended model will keep school open, in my opinion

I think many teachers agree. Sadly, it’s not the way it’s gone and all I can say to parents is many of you are going to be bitterly disappointed come the end of September. We are going to be in and out like yo-yos.

And yet, plenty of other countries have managed to keep their schools open without a fuss, like Japan, China and South Korea.

using bubbles, strict social distancing and masks.