I'm no more worried about them going to school than I was pre-COVID and no more worried about COVID exposure than I am from living with two adults who work full-time outside of the home with members of the public who do things like licking and pissing on surfaces when they don't get their way. Between cleaning that up, people in their faces, and more, my older children aren't who I'm going to look to if we get ill. The school staff who deal with all that and more are more my concern with this whole situation, but none are my DC so I guess they don't fall into this question.
Having needed urgent medical appointments in the last month, and used taxis to get to them, and with the follow-up appointments in January, I think I might be a bigger potential threat to the rest of my household than my 16-year-old in his class of 8 students.
Not sure why, but the phrase "it’s time to keep our kids home safe" made me shudder. Maybe it's being a survivor of child abuse, maybe it's from having grown up in an American evangelical community where that means something very different, maybe it's having seen some of the worst in the home education community here and in the US over the years, maybe it's ignoring the adults in school, maybe it's a combination of other things, but it just feels off.
Until spring of last year, my children were all home educated. While I'm not looking forward to live online lessons with multiple children and I worry about how BTECs will be handled if it's required, I've no issue with having my children at home if that is decided to be for the best overall. I don't automatically think they - or their peers - are safer at home though.
All options have benefits and risks to weigh up. I wish more would be done to make schools better - years of budget cuts and deteoriating buildings are making this harder on staff getting too few protections - but that was a concern of mine before COVID - it's just one of many things school staff are pushed to deal with by magically pulling resources with no cost out of thin air. I'm not sure shifting everything to online learning long term is the best solutions for a lot of schools that would still be expected to handle vulnerable & keyworkers children (those that get places), plus "hopefully" exam year ones. It's seems like it could be more of a mess depending on how it's handled.
And why aren't more of you concerned about getting long Covid?
I already have conditions connected with post-viral reaction and medically traumatic events. Another is possible - in fact there are some theories that the impact of one throws off our systems in a way that makes us more vulnerable to more as it's not that unusual to have more than one - but I no more worry about that now than I did before COVID. What would being concerned about it get me that general care for the health of my household and others doesn't?
And, as comes up in many threads already, many vulnerable children did not get places last time and many of us whose children could technically be classified that way aren't. My children are young carers, our council has recognized them as such, though cuts means their father and I will pretty much have to be bedbound and needing them to administer medication before they'd get any real support. For my older children, the schools are now providing that as part of pastoral care which I'm glad for my kids and annoyed that it's another thing put on schools shoulders. I mean, yeah, it's unlikely children will get mental health support if their parents get Long COVID - children aren't get support for disabled and chronically ill parents before this, nothing in that is going to change unless people push for it. Keeping children home isn't going to change that.