Schools from September

[DinosaurDiana]

I was working in a school yesterday and the lady helping me said that all staff are in next Monday Tuesday to put the school back to normal.
All stickers are being removed, all classrooms and rooms put back to the way they were pre Covid.
So are all schools going back to normal ?

That's one city in the USA. It's not a federal programme.
Anywhere else?
HEPA Air purifiers are not a type of ventilation, btw.

The Head is being pretty stupid if that's true.
You can easily ignore one-way stickers, kids still get educated with the desks arranged differently and a bottle of hand sanitiser in every classroom doesn't affect anyone. It seems very premature to be removing all trace of Covid restrictions when we have no idea what the next six weeks will hold or where we (or restrictions) will be in September.

Another example
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54599593

Again, partly confusing ventilation with anti-microbial air treatment.

Anyway, "mobile ventilators, which filter out tiny particles and cost from €2,000 each" which the article goes on to say is unproven tech and can even make air quality worse

Call that £1800 each classroom,
8.9 mln pupils attending schools in England
26 pupils avg/class
8.9 mln/26 pupils = 343,000 class rooms
343,000 * £1800 = £616 million.

I wonder what the maintenance costs are & what budget they come out of. £30 million/yr?

Opening windows may not be cheaper given heating costs.
Climate change harms be damned too.

So far Germany is only country example, and the article is about aspirations not what they actually have done.

A more recent example

www.deutschland.de/en/news/german-federal-government-informs-about-the-corona-crisis

So what do you suggest for classrooms with no opening windows @lljkk?

Our local secondary is keeping all Covid measures in September. I'm glad.

I think we have to live with some germs & risk in our lives, holiday.
The air treatment systems are too expensive & not cost-effective.

That last link (July 2021) is still about plans not money already spent and causing benefits. Does that mean Germany hasn't spent any money on air treatment systems in schools?

I now understand that when people say "ventilation" they don't mean ventilation; they mean air treatment.

Airplanes have excellent air treatment and ventilation. Off top of my head, jumbo planes in flight replace 1/3 of the internal air every hour with external air. Their HEPA filters filter through 99.x% of all air circulating every 6 minutes.

My guess is that it would cost £1-£2 bln to achieve similar (to jumbo plane) HEPA air filtering in English schools (alone) over next 10 yrs. That could be paid for with £200-£300 extra on each household's annual council tax.

Kids spend ~33% of their waking hours (annually) indoors in school. ~50% of their awake time in private spaces, < 1hour/day outdoors. Is £1 bln a good way to spend the money?

Imagine that, To roll out the systems quickly, we hand each school immediately £2k/classroom. The prices for equipment & engineers (better systems) would skyrocket for months; there aren't enough engineers to do fancy systems in near future. The budget wouldn't stretch. if the money was given to all HTs tomorrow, My guess is we'd reach June 2022 before most schools in England had an air treatment system in operation, and that would mostly just be little portable units sucking electricity all day.

Would £1bln be a good use of the money over this period?
Do we no longer care about climate change?

Schools around here are keeping most of the restrictions, come September. The feeling is we'll behaving another lockdown soon enough.

@lljkk ventilation can mean ventilation. Some classrooms have no form of ventilation at all, or windows that open with a very small gap. Pre-COVID that wasn’t great. The Government tell schools that the mitigation they need to have in place in September is ventilation, and that is very important. But they are doing nothing to help schools that can’t provide adequate ventilation.

To answer the OPs question, regardless of what and when the government do anything, I don't think so.

I really hope so. Kids and and young adults have really been like sacrificial lambs in all of this. They all need normality again.

This! The poor kids have been treated abominably and the sooner schools can operate as normal, the better. An end to 'bubbles bursting' and pointless isolations for children can't come soon enough.
They've had 2 academic years of disruption. Enough now.

Our summer term was largely normal. We had all the events, visitors, clubs, trips etc. The only things we kept were the bubbles, sanitizing and staggered lunches. I think the plan is be totally normal for Sept. But not confirmed.

DD finished school.

I know sixth forms are different but it is interesting hers which she starting in Sept. are operating with what they call 'blended learning'.

Four days out of five in college. Each student issued with IPAD.

If you ask me they are doing this in case the worst case scenario means they have to provide online learning in the case of a lockdown.

I've heard parts of the NHS are preparing for similar thing.

Personally I'd reather operate on this basis. If we get something better thats a bonus.

I'm currently preparing for a lockdown this autumn/winter.

Not being a misery guts, just that last time I was caught on the hop and in shock when the schools closed and i had to home school for ten months. It was awful.

If covid is "ripping through schools" now then to be honest that tells me the current restrictions have had zero impact anyway so is removing what little barriers they have no going to make a massive difference, I doubt it.

The "measures" in place now are about as useful as putting a plaster over a gun shot wound.

@ineedaholidaynow

But there will be a higher risk *@TheDailyCarbunkle*. If they are saying they are looking at over 100k new cases a day, there is a much higher risk that your child will catch COVID than if there are 5k cases a day. Schools are the one place come September that will have the most unvaccinated people in them ie the children. The CEV guidance says you should try and avoid unvaccinated people, can someone tell me how a CEV child does that?

The risk is just concentrated into a shorter timeframe, that's all. If we suppress to 5k per day, it will just ensure Covid lingers longer

Well, my son’s school was not supposed to break up for another week but they’ve just closed two whole year groups down early due to rampant cases, so I’m not convinced we’ll be back in September at all.

@Wellbythebloodyhell

If covid is "ripping through schools" now then to be honest that tells me the current restrictions have had zero impact anyway so is removing what little barriers they have no going to make a massive difference, I doubt it. The "measures" in place now are about as useful as putting a plaster over a gun shot wound.

Indeed. Why all the panic then. If its ripping through then everyone will have had it if that's the case.

Why all the panic then. If its ripping through then everyone will have had it if that's the case.

You can get it more than once though.

@Mixmeup

Why all the panic then. If its ripping through then everyone will have had it if that's the case.

You can get it more than once though.

Same as any other virus then

I couldn't believe last winter when we had no idea what was going on (surging of Kent varient) and schools were required to keep going with Windows open.

Some people actually fought agaisnt this due to the eco side of having heating on and a window open... I couldn't believe it, how rigid and inflexible some peoples thinking can be and that's within the actual establishment sometimes.
For instance the in house heating controllers saying, to keep classrooms warmer shut the windows

Unbelievable.

@Lemonmelonsun

I couldn't believe last winter when we had no idea what was going on (surging of Kent varient) and schools were required to keep going with Windows open.

Some people actually fought agaisnt this due to the eco side of having heating on and a window open... I couldn't believe it, how rigid and inflexible some peoples thinking can be and that's within the actual establishment sometimes.
For instance the in house heating controllers saying, to keep classrooms warmer shut the windows

Unbelievable.

I have seen exactly the same on here today, so it is not an attitude that is lost in the past - a poster saying that they don't really believe in ventilation in schools as part of Covid response, because having open windows is not eco friendly.

No not normal here in Scotland. We ere told restrictions would still apply but we still have a good few weeks before going back.
For others in England, normal until the latest mutation comes along that totally and completely evades the virus and infects children as it does adults.

@Macaroni46

I really hope so. Kids and and young adults have really been like sacrificial lambs in all of this. They all need normality again.

This! The poor kids have been treated abominably and the sooner schools can operate as normal, the better. An end to 'bubbles bursting' and pointless isolations for children can't come soon enough.
They've had 2 academic years of disruption. Enough now.

But what about the adults who work in the schools? We can ‘poor children’ it until the cows come home but if the adults are sick (not dying or in hospitals), education will be disrupted. We need to stop giving reasons why schools can’t be made safer and start sorting it out now or the two years of disruption will be three. On a personal level I’d like my working conditions to be even as safe as the shops and restaurants I’ve visited recently. I’d love to be as safe as people working in offices.