Thread by @plainy

Things in schools right now are very, very, bad. Here's a thread of a few things I wish the general public would know:
1. There is no good Covid data. No entity is collecting data on students & staff getting sick in the US, so every article you've read is based on a shaky guess

2. Since there's no central guidance or plan or data gathering for schools, each of the states is doing their own thing. Gathering data, or not. Some record students and staff, some just students.
3. Within many states, each school district is doing it's own thing.

4. There is no common vocabulary for all of these different plans. So, if you read an article saying that there are low or high infection rates for "hybrid" school - that doesn't necessarily mean it's the same system as your kid's school, even if they say "hybrid".

"Hybrid" can mean: at-home and in-person kids taught simultaneously by one teacher, one set of kids being taught in person some days and at home other days. That's just one example of one term.

So, again, any articles you're reading saying schools are safe or unsafe are based on a patchwork of inconsistent data and use words that represent completely different practices in different places.

5. Even within one city or district with one set of guidelines - they are being implemented in different ways. I've heard multiple instances of schools not even notifying kids IN THE SAME CLASS there's a positive student or faculty member, bc they don't sit next to each other

Keep in mind - the longer any group sits together in a closed, unventilated space, the distance away from each other becomes moot. Wouldn't you want to know if your kid was in the same closed room with a positive person for an hour?

Another campus might contact trace and quarantine the whole class.

6.If a city or state has everything open - restaurants, bars, business, AND RAMPANT COMMUNITY SPREAD - kids and staff bring it to school with them. We can wash our hands and wear masks in the classroom, we cannot stop people from having parties on the weekends.

Framing the safety of school workers and students in school buildings as something that's within the power of schools to do is...wild. We only have control inside the walls of our buildings. The relative safety of conditions in schools is up to policy makers.

That's basically it. I could tell you how it's going in my building because I'm physically here and I see/hear/experience things. But, it'd be anecdotal. That's my whole point - the *only* real data we have is anecdotal. All the rest is guesses, fears, and magical thinking.

So.
America doesn't actually want to know how students and staff are doing as the virus spreads like wildfire throughout communities, so America doesn't gather the data to find out, and therefore nobody can say for a certainty what the results are.

(there's an incorrect "it's" floating in this thread, so that is the other thing wrong with education in America)