I would like my kids to be back in person for the fall semester.  They really miss it.  However, they will be fine if they have to do on-line learning, and private day cares have largely remained open for preschoolers and pre-K.  It is very pricey, of-course, but kids of that age need socialization badly to develop.  Hopefully the family income will remain and I will be able to give that to him. 

I am sure that whatever decision is made will be difficult, and I hope community leaders make the right call. 

As someone who works in schools, I just don’t see how we return with in person schooling for more than a month. That’s as long as I can see a massive outbreak throughout a district being delayed. 

But it’s not as if none of the kids will have it when school starts. A few will, unknowingly. Then they give it to their teacher, who then spreads it to the rest of the class, where they spread it to their siblings and parents etc etc. 

Just seems inevitable that we will not have significant in person schooling until a vaccine. 

Interesting, based on the evidence the AAP put out guidance supporting in-person school, and the recent study coming from Germany seems to imply indicates the opposite conclusion from this info from Israel. Not sure what to think. 

It will be really interesting to see what happens.  I've heard some people claim that little kids aren't believed to be able to transmit the virus to adults, but that could be wrong, and high school kids are basically adults.

If schools are closed it will hurt the economy as more people have to stay home.  If you open and it gets out of control that will hurt the economy as well.  So you might as well make a mistake on the side of caution if we aren't fully sure what is the best response.

Teachers with little kids like myself will need some flexibility in how we teach online, because we will have to get our own kids working on their school too.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently walked back their initial stance in support of schools fully reopening, changing it to 'follow science, not politics.' It was the original stance that the CDC and others often referred to in support of reopening schools. 

https://services.aap.org/en/news-room/news-releases/aap/2020/pediatrici…

You will see a lot of school districts trying to start with a hybrid, split schedule plan to get kids in school teaching 2 days a week and to keep students with additional needs in school as much as possible each week (looks like 3 days a week).  With some content coming via online learning, the fall back to all online should the virus break out will be an easier transition.  Our school district has higher than average class sizes, so there's just no way to meet the social distancing rules in the classrooms.  If the standard was reduced to 3 feet, then they could cram everybody in the classroom, but they'd still need multiple runs to get through bus routes increasing time and expense.  I'm not sure parents would be happy with a new 3 foot rule, either.  I'm wondering if Redfield/CDC will be pushed to announce a 3 foot rule.  Keeping in mind that states and municipalities still haven't received enough federal funding to make up for sales tax, income tax, and other local tax shortfalls, there's just not enough financial support to allow for additional expenses.

Schools are going to cause outbreaks though the article doesn't go into much detail (unless I missed it) about how the schools are handling COVID-19.  So that information would be interesting to know as reference.  Other countries have had better success re-opening schools.

We could have spent the summer strictly following guidelines, wearing mask, avoiding large groups but then we could not go to the fucking sandbar party, have a couple hundred people over for our 4th of July party, protest in huge groups in the street and so on.  So, we won’t have school and fuck up the education of a generation of American kids, screw the economy and kill thousands of people.  Good job America!

This whole thing is fucking ridiculous.  Also fuck the various asshole sheriffs who won’t enforce anything.  Take this dude in Van Buren County who says,  “We will dedicate our services to investigating crimes against persons and property and we will not pull valuable resources away from that to investigate complaints against the governor’s executive orders,”.  I guarantee you if you go into the courthouse in that county there will be an endless line of people who got picked up for not paying speeding tickets or some other minor offense that the Sheriff’s department has spent a shit ton of resources to deal with.

This whole thing is turning into one of the greatest failures in American history.  In a just world the leaders who have failed so badly would be held to account.  Unfortunately, the world is not just.

I’m pretty amazed that as many politically charged threads make it onto the boards these days as there are. 

Do Brian and Co. just not care anymore? Or is it because there’s literally nothing else to talk about?

Did anyone else actually read this article? (plus, see below for a much more balanced one) I don't know what haveeru.com.mv is but this is the worst written article I've ever (attempted to) read.  It's worse than my 4-year-old's chicken scratch.

Even if it's a poorly translated article, the composition makes absolutely no sense.  This is the context in which that quote comes in:

"Soon after 18 months of political limbo, he’d been in a position to cobble with each other a group-of-rivals coalition with former opponent Benny Gantz, a centrist retired military chief of employees.

“Schools—not restaurants or gyms—turned out to be the country’s worst mega-infectors.”

That govt, Netanyahu promised, would focus only on the “corona emergency” for its 1st 6 months."

Smack dab in the middle of explaining Netanyahu's coalition govt, it throws a random, unexplained, unattributed quote.

I tried to find some context since this is in direct opposition to every other country and all the other research out there (Hong Kong just shut a down their schools again because of another "wave" but said they hadn't documented a single case of spread within their schools).

For one, Isreal's "wave" is, like almost everywhere else, nothing compared to waves in the US.  So a few hundred cases constitute a wave.  And second, even if schools are isreals "worst" place of infections, that doesn't mean it's bad at schools, per se.  It might just mean there isn't spread happening elsewhere (like gyms and restaurants that might be closed).  If schools are the only things open, and I would argue it's more important for schools to be open than anything else, of course that will be the place where spread is relatively common.

A much better, more comprehensive article that talks about how low transmission is across the world in schools.  It does talk about an outbreak in a school in Isreal but 1) it was high school aged kids and 2) it wasn't even conclusive that they became infected at school.

"Israeli health authorities said they were unsure how many of those cases were the result of the virus being passed around within school buildings."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/schools-reopening-coronavirus/2020/07/10/865fb3e6-c122-11ea-8908-68a2b9eae9e0_story.html

Shocking the right doesn’t have public interest in their agenda...queue the greedy corporate lackeys 

That was a horrible article. Poorly written and provided no evidence for their claims. In other words, typical journalism today.

On a related note.  We made the decision to homeschool today.