Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

Slow the Rush Back to School

As I write this, school boards are scrambling to create safety plans to evade COVID-19. Parents have big decisions to make, and kids are itching to get back to school with their friends. A barrage of pediatricians have lined up to reassure us that their own kids will be going back to school, that kids need social activities and time with friends to develop social skills. They reassure us that little kids don’t get COVID-19 in the same way that adults do.

Really? Have we had time to measure the effects after recovery? This disease has been with us for less than a year. We have no idea what the long-term effects on kids will be. We’ve been jerked around by experts with ideas about who gets it, what their symptoms are, how long it takes for recovery, what the lasting effects are.

Each time I see one of these pediatric pundits, I wonder—what school do your kids go to? How do they get there? How do they get home?

POTUS says he’ll withhold federal money if schools don’t re-open. The question is, how much more money will the feds shell out if schools DO re-open. At a minimum, schools will need equipment to make frequent temperature checks. Staffing needs will increase so that someone in the classroom can monitor such things as hand-washing and mask wearing while the teacher is teaching. And if a teacher gets sick or has to self-isolate because a family member is sick? Schools will need at least to double the staff to cover that eventuality. And testing kits? Are there ever enough?

For my family, with kids in three school districts—east coast, west coast and Midwestern—proposals for opening up are unrolling different for each school and each age group. Here in mid-Missouri, where schools closed in mid-March, parents were supposed to let the districts know their plans for this school year by July 15, but that was before the current spike. Now, schools will offer “distance learning,” which allows kids to stay home and interact with their class on zoom. And, they will offer classroom learning. Or, kids might get a combination of the two — one day in the classroom and four at home with Zoom.

Before making decisions, families must look at the safety precautions taken by your school district. Then take a minute to compare them to the cautions taken by Kanakuk Kamps in Missouri’s Ozarks. Full disclosure: My kids went to these camps many moons ago and I know them to be well-run and devoted to the safety of campers. Um, “Kampers.”

Diligence didn’t pay off for the overnight camp, however, in 2020. Despite the requirement that families self-isolate for 14 days before bringing their kids, and that counselors produce a negative test, and that all activities are carried out with social distances maintained and mostly outside, the camp has closed after more than 80 COVID-19 cases were identified. This despite precautions that were extreme. In order to maintain social distancing, the number of kids at meals was divided in half—two seatings for each meal. And field trips were canceled to eliminate contact with the germy outside world. Cleaning crews were ramped up and the majority of activities were moved outside.

This was not the only camp that’s had to close this summer. At least one camp in Colorado, two in Florida and one in Maine closed mid-season or never opened. A Georgia YMCA camp reported numbers eerily like Kanakuk—more than 80 positive cases and a quick closing.

While life in a summer camp, where kids share the air of cabins all night, is way different than life in a school, day camps are more school-like. And those have also had to close when a child or staff reports an illness. One person ill means a closing.

The most dangerous situation is the challenge of getting kids back and forth every day. Rural schools, with families more spread out, have more to think about than urban ones when it comes to transportation. In my rural area, it is common for kids to have an hour-long bus ride to school and another hour returning after. Bus drivers, saints that they are, can’t be distracted from eyes on the road by the job of monitoring kids’ masks.

CDC recommends schools require frequent handwashing, masks on everyone, and that equipment is not shared, meaning that each child will need such things as art supplies, gym supplies, science equipment and, of course, books, paper, pencils and so on. Shared items, like playground equipment, must be sanitized frequently.

One thing we’ve known since the beginning is that the more folks someone’s in contact with, the greater their chance of catching something, and this is true of all communicable diseases. Parents who keep their kids home, as hard as that is, are doing everyone including themselves a favor.

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. She also is a co-founder of CAFOZone.com, a website for people who are affected by concentrated animal feeding operations. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History”. Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2020

Populist.com