Here's a recap of our COVID-19 mitigation efforts for the 2022-23 academic year, in the hopes that it may support school leaders and decision makers who want to keep their students, staff, and local communities safe. I’ve broken this into 10 videos. Abridged text included. For most families with children or adolescents, the greatest risk of bringing a COVID-19 infection into the home does not come from the workplace or recreational activities, it comes from their kids’ school.

"I’ve been scouring the web to see if any school has managed to prevent outbreaks. I found one – Abrome, in Texas. How did it do it? By ignoring politicians and following the science."

independent.ie/opinion/commen… "Acknowledging Covid is airborne, mitigations included daily testing, mandatory FFP2/3 masks indoors and outdoors in close contact during surges, distancing, remote learning when cases were extremely high, outdoor learning options, and Hepa filtration in every classroom."

🧵 A short thread on some examples from the past week of how US schools are "the great equalizer," and why we don't need critical race theory being pushed on kids in "woke" schools.

https://twitter.com/KATUNews/status/1623920950382145536

This is a brief overview of the layers of protection that we are applying at Abrome for the 2022-23 academic year. Abrome has been able to remain COVID free for the past three years of pandemic schooling. The success we have had in protecting each other and local communities from the spread of COVID is something we are very proud of. We were only able to do that thanks to a collective commitment to community care, transparency, and candid and honest communication.

So the fact that we are a very small education community seems to really gall some people, convincing them to shout that our approach to Covid is irrelevant because of our size. Because if we don't have at least 100 enrolled there is nothing to learn from our efforts.

1/12 We are a Self-Directed Education community that rejects the practices and structures of schooling and instead focus on centering community care and honoring the autonomy of young people. We will never become a large school because we are not what most parents want. 👍

2/12

Fred Rogers understood the importance of how young people are treated, and the ways it so often shapes the adults they are to become. When young people receive the message that their worth is tied to the grades they get, how they perform at school exhibitions, sporting competitions, or they awards they garner, they learn that they are not valued for who they are.

Our 2021-22 academic year just ended yesterday.

We just finished our 3rd year without a single case of COVID-19 in the space. That means not a single person was exposed “at school.” Doubly impressive given the transmissibility of the current variants.

How did we do it? First, we prioritized community care over white, upper middle class, reactionary insecurity. We recognized early on that COVID was falling heaviest on BIPOC communities, the immunocompromised, those without access to quality healthcare, etc. All our decisions centered them.