Thread by @TracyNovick

@DanaGoldstein Dana, here's what my district in Worcester, Massachusetts needs to get all students back into classrooms:

Somewhere between twice as much and three times as much space as we have now, given how crowded our spaces are. We have nearly fifty schools, so plan accordingly.

@DanaGoldstein We then will need staffing for those spaces. Now, we're already an underresourced district: by the state's own measures, we are already short about 700 teachers.
To that add probably at least another 2000 teachers to have actual staff in those additional classroom spaces.

@DanaGoldstein Now, that's assuming that the $15M that our city is putting into our HVAC systems for ionization equipment is sufficient to let us use all the spaces we have.

@DanaGoldstein If you wanted to have all of our schools have full air exchange, we'd need substantial changes in HVAC systems in all but about 13 of our buildings.
I don't even know how much that would be.

@DanaGoldstein It's Massachusetts, so I'm not going to go with open windows being an answer for most of the year; even it were, please see the underresourced district, which means that in some buildings, we have HVAC systems that struggle to keep our buildings properly heated during usual times

@DanaGoldstein I'm also not going to cost out heated tents, as we have neither the space nor the money (which runs into thousands of dollars PER TENT) for those.

However, all of the forgoing are what our better resourced neighbors are doing.

@DanaGoldstein We are in a district where many of our 13,000 bused students don't have family cars. We aren't going to crowd our students onto buses in an unsafe fashion, so we need about another 200 buses to run three or four tiers a day.

Plus that many bus drivers.

@DanaGoldstein All of the above space also either needs furniture (we zeroed out our furniture budget when the state budget didn't come through with all of our funding), or we'd need substantial funding to move furniture from current classrooms.

@DanaGoldstein However, much of that furniture is still going to need replacement, as we can't have as many students sitting at tables and other common seating spaces.
That is millions--and I am not exaggerating--more.

@DanaGoldstein Because I have seen some of the experts cited make cute quips about how kids can just "put on a sweater" for cold bus rides--yes, we'll need the windows open for those--our student body is nearly 80% low income. Many are recent immigrants. We give out 100's of coats each year.

@DanaGoldstein Note that we still haven't gotten to actually dealing with an actively raging pandemic that's killing hundreds of people a day here.
My district is majority students of color. We are a city full of essential workers.
Our students' families are those hardest hit by the pandemic.

@DanaGoldstein Our state this weekend conceded that they did not know, through our contract tracing system, where 50% of the cases in Massachusetts are coming from.

@DanaGoldstein Worcester does currently have free testing available--much of our state does not--however, it is in a few locations (see above lack of cars) and it is during the day (see essential workers). Turnaround time varies widely.

@DanaGoldstein Access to testing thus remains difficult for many of our families.
Regardless, the protocol is to quarantine.
See, though, the above essential workers.

@DanaGoldstein I could go on, as I am sure there is more.

I have great respect for the work you do at the Times.

You, however, are way off base on this.

@DanaGoldstein Congress has not passed an aid package, as I know you are well aware.
Massachusetts has funded state aid at a 2% increase over last year, which doesn't even meet costs.
In August, Worcester cut $15.5M out of our school budget, and we'll need to cut close to $1M more so far.

@DanaGoldstein These are not excuses.
These are the lived reality of those of us making decisions at the district level for the students that those pushing the return to school so hard profess to be concerned about.

@DanaGoldstein If indeed that is the concern, then let's turn our collective attention to some SOLUTIONS to the issues, rather than continue to snipe--because that is what this is--at those who are doing the hard work on the district level.

@DanaGoldstein Again, I have great respect for the work you do at the times.

There is real good that you could be doing with that platform for the districts that most need it.
This sort of tweeting isn't it.

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