The trouble with science from COVID-19 head butting the reality of Americans' public schools pre- COVID-19

Dear Dr. Sterling, Here's the problem with #3.:
[3. Safe opening requires that "all recommended mitigation measures in schools must continue: requiring universal face mask use, increasing physical distance ... increasing room air ventilation, and expanding screening testing to rapidly identify and isolate asymptomatic infected individuals."]

No one really knows how much it will cost nor how long it will take to completely re-design individual school buildings and campuses to accommodate COVID-19 protocols, especially mitigation strategies.
Currently within old and barely maintained and new modern schools are class sizes of 25 to 40 students in rooms consistently smaller than required to maintaining any distance more than 1 foot between each student.

LAUSD, in other news, has spent 92 million dollars and counting to feed families daily since March 2020. So 130 billion may not get us to a start before the 2022- 2023 academic year. I believe a rushed and underfunded federal mandate would be unacceptable risk at best and deadly on a massive scale at worst.

Furthermore, since I last attended public schools from 1966 to 1977, public schools rely heavily on fund raisers. 57% of LAUSD parents were unemployed at lockdown and many will not have those jobs to return to once schools reopen. Any meaningful funding must finally fully fund new COVID-19 protocols and secure supply chains. My last LAUSD school chronically experienced shortages of paper towels, toilet paper, hand soap, and hand sanitizer.

I have saved the best for last. Some portion of Americans have done better in virtual classrooms than they have ever done in brick-and-mortar classrooms. It would be cruel and unusual punishment to force them to fail again by shoving them back into " traditions" that were failing them pre- COVID-19.
OTHER students, because of chronic behaviors harmful to themselves and or others, will need to remain in virtual instructional settings. Conventional behavior intervention models would be hard- pressed to re- enlist the thousands? tens of thousands? MILLIONS? of barely above or at minimum wage staff without health insurance and often like me who began working such jobs full time while living in their vehicles.

Please do not misunderstand my speaking up and speaking out. I miss my former students, their families and my colleagues. But the logistical nightmare of fighting COVID-19 and unprecedented levels of hunger and poverty should under no circumstances be perceived as a massive open on-and-offline multitasking exercise. There has been too much politically initiated chaos and confusion to throw money and resources to school districts with long histories of mismanaging both human and financial resources with expectations of timely command, control, and compliance.

Finally, like many others last spring, I told anyone who chose to listen that once COVID-19 is managed just like the flu, it would be reasonable to advocate a return to Conventional classroom instruction. Nothing our nation has experienced since 3.13.2020 when LAUSD sent faculty and staff into an uncertain future has compelled me to change that opinion.

I close this long reply with more questions all parents wanting to reopen public schools need to have answered to accurately assess potential risks prior to any resumption of instruction at brick-and-mortar sites.

Restaurants, Gyms, Coffee shops = high risk for COVID-19 : An educator makes Connections to Current Hot Topic of Reopening Brick-and-mortar Public Schools
Nature article link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2923-3

A moment of SCIENCE:
From the article:
"We found large variation in predicted reopening risks: on average across metro areas, full-service restaurants, gyms, hotels, cafes, religious organizations and limited-service restaurants produced the largest predicted increases in infections when reopened (Extended Data Fig. 5d). Reopening full-service restaurants was associated with a particularly high risk: in the Chicago metro area, we predicted an additional 595,805 (95% confidence interval, 433,735–685,959) infections by the end of May, more than triple that of the POI category with the next highest risk (Fig. 2d)"

Note to LAUSD/UTLA/ PARENT-CONSUMERS ( my most recent experience and praxis cohort) and all other global and local education stakeholders ( the rest of all y'all):
Let's start a conversation about the behaviors that put people at higher risk of COVID-19, starting with students keeping masks on and all staff and students maintaining personal and hand hygiene in the course of a school day. There must be a conversation about a population that appropriately would not have been singled-out but now must be intensively supported in order to be included in classrooms in a active, ongoing pandemic. Does your District actively collaborate with local health departments AND CDC, NIH, NIMH since March 2020? What are the chronic behaviors and activities that prohibit some students from returning to campuses without significant one-on-one support or mandated asynchronous remote learning with supervised and structured physical education? Which students have had better outcomes in the virtual classrooms? How exactly do we fully incorporate parents as part of the instructional team, especially if/ when we return to brick-and-mortar classrooms? What are the short-and-long term teacher burnout risks in 1.) teaching on a hybrid model, 2.) teaching in a virtual model, 3.) teaching exclusively in a model that best supports each learner? How will you eliminate COVID-19 risk for Behavior Interventionists, and all classroom and therapeutic support staff? How to you secure your local PPE supply chain response to restock on a continuous basis so no school runs out of hand soap, hand moisturizer, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, tissue paper, gloves, face masks, etc.? Once you reopen schools, running out of these items in a post health crisis environment is no longer permissible.

How do you support socioemotional needs of staff who relied on human contact to manage their classrooms but now must teach in the virtual classroom? Are there any activities that everyone must do at the exact same time? Haven't some students always had better education outcomes with individualized instruction plans? Don't we have sufficient research and outcomes to optimize instruction for different aspects of the curriculum that have never worked in one-size-fits-all instructional techniques? Which subjects always require group instruction? How do you provide physical education during extreme weather events?
BONUS QUESTIONS: Why hasn't ZOOM been mandated by Federal government (?) to allow teachers to disable students from muting themselves and or not having cameras on during class meetings? How rapidly can school districts de-politicize their mission to educate critical- thinking independent lifelong learner-citizens to participate in our Democratic Republic? How do we make the transition from a " benevolent dictatorship model to a Democratic Republic model so that we are promoting skills and giving opportunities necessary for civil discourse and civically engaged lifelong learning at every age and stage?

The soapbox minute: Clearly what public school systems of education have become has failed too many generations of students. All of the well financed, well armed, and coached-by-well-trained military and law enforcement personnel who assaulted a 228 year old US Capitol Building and terrorized its occupants cannot be exemplars of the best or even the average of the best we can produce from public or private systems of education in America. Sadly, they demonstrate at the highest levels of human cognitive and physical abilities how profoundly politicized, balkanized, and socioeconomically-still- unequal-and-racially segregated education systems have failed for generations.
(C) VernonNickersonSchoolcoach 2021

#AskSterlingMD #KnowledgeIsHealth #SaveAmerica

No one really knows how much it will cost nor how long it will take to completely re-design individual school buildings and campuses to accommodate COVID-19 protocols, especially mitigation strategies.
Currently within old and barely maintained and new modern schools are class sizes of 25 to 40 students in rooms consistently smaller than required to maintaining any distance more than 1 foot between each student.

LAUSD, in other news, has spent 92 million dollars and counting to feed families daily since March 2020. So 130 billion may not get us to a start before the 2022- 2023 academic year. I believe a rushed and underfunded federal mandate would be unacceptable risk at best and deadly on a massive scale at worst.

Furthermore, since I last attended public schools from 1966 to 1977, public schools rely heavily on fund raisers. 57% of LAUSD parents were unemployed at lockdown and many will not have those jobs to return to once schools reopen. Any meaningful funding must finally fully fund new COVID-19 protocols and secure supply chains. My last LAUSD school chronically experienced shortages of paper towels, toilet paper, hand soap, and hand sanitizer.

I have saved the best for last. Some portion of Americans have done better in virtual classrooms than they have ever done in brick-and-mortar classrooms. It would be cruel and unusual punishment to force them to fail again by shoving them back into " traditions" that were failing them pre- COVID-19.
OTHER students, because of chronic behaviors harmful to themselves and or others, will need to remain in virtual instructional settings. Conventional behavior intervention models would be hard- pressed to re- enlist the thousands? tens of thousands? MILLIONS? of barely above or at minimum wage staff without health insurance and often like me who began working such jobs full time while living in their vehicles.

Please do not misunderstand my speaking up and speaking out. I miss my former students, their families and my colleagues. But the logistical nightmare of fighting COVID-19 and unprecedented levels of hunger and poverty should under no circumstances be perceived as a massive open on-and-offline multitasking exercise. There has been too much politically initiated chaos and confusion to throw money and resources to school districts with long histories of mismanaging both human and financial resources with expectations of timely command, control, and compliance.

Finally, like many others last spring, I told anyone who chose to listen that once COVID-19 is managed just like the flu, it would be reasonable to advocate a return to Conventional classroom instruction. Nothing our nation has experienced since 3.13.2020 when LAUSD sent faculty and staff into an uncertain future has compelled me to change that opinion.

I close this long reply with more questions all parents wanting to reopen public schools need to have answered to accurately assess potential risks prior to any resumption of instruction at brick-and-mortar sites.

Restaurants, Gyms, Coffee shops = high risk for COVID-19 : An educator makes Connections to Current Hot Topic of Reopening Brick-and-mortar Public Schools
Nature article link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2923-3

A moment of SCIENCE:
From the article:
"We found large variation in predicted reopening risks: on average across metro areas, full-service restaurants, gyms, hotels, cafes, religious organizations and limited-service restaurants produced the largest predicted increases in infections when reopened (Extended Data Fig. 5d). Reopening full-service restaurants was associated with a particularly high risk: in the Chicago metro area, we predicted an additional 595,805 (95% confidence interval, 433,735–685,959) infections by the end of May, more than triple that of the POI category with the next highest risk (Fig. 2d)"

Note to LAUSD/UTLA/ PARENT-CONSUMERS ( my most recent experience and praxis cohort) and all other global and local education stakeholders ( the rest of all y'all):
Let's start a conversation about the behaviors that put people at higher risk of COVID-19, starting with students keeping masks on and all staff and students maintaining personal and hand hygiene in the course of a school day. There must be a conversation about a population that appropriately would not have been singled-out but now must be intensively supported in order to be included in classrooms in a active, ongoing pandemic. Does your District actively collaborate with local health departments AND CDC, NIH, NIMH since March 2020? What are the chronic behaviors and activities that prohibit some students from returning to campuses without significant one-on-one support or mandated asynchronous remote learning with supervised and structured physical education? Which students have had better outcomes in the virtual classrooms? How exactly do we fully incorporate parents as part of the instructional team, especially if/ when we return to brick-and-mortar classrooms? What are the short-and-long term teacher burnout risks in 1.) teaching on a hybrid model, 2.) teaching in a virtual model, 3.) teaching exclusively in a model that best supports each learner? How will you eliminate COVID-19 risk for Behavior Interventionists, and all classroom and therapeutic support staff? How to you secure your local PPE supply chain response to restock on a continuous basis so no school runs out of hand soap, hand moisturizer, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, tissue paper, gloves, face masks, etc.? Once you reopen schools, running out of these items in a post health crisis environment is no longer permissible.

How do you support socioemotional needs of staff who relied on human contact to manage their classrooms but now must teach in the virtual classroom? Are there any activities that everyone must do at the exact same time? Haven't some students always had better education outcomes with individualized instruction plans? Don't we have sufficient research and outcomes to optimize instruction for different aspects of the curriculum that have never worked in one-size-fits-all instructional techniques? Which subjects always require group instruction? How do you provide physical education during extreme weather events?
BONUS QUESTIONS: Why hasn't ZOOM been mandated by Federal government (?) to allow teachers to disable students from muting themselves and or not having cameras on during class meetings? How rapidly can school districts de-politicize their mission to educate critical- thinking independent lifelong learner-citizens to participate in our Democratic Republic? How do we make the transition from a " benevolent dictatorship model to a Democratic Republic model so that we are promoting skills and giving opportunities necessary for civil discourse and civically engaged lifelong learning at every age and stage?

The soapbox minute: Clearly what public school systems of education have become has failed too many generations of students. All of the well financed, well armed, and coached-by-well-trained military and law enforcement personnel who assaulted a 228 year old US Capitol Building and terrorized its occupants cannot be exemplars of the best or even the average of the best we can produce from public or private systems of education in America. Sadly, they demonstrate at the highest levels of human cognitive and physical abilities how profoundly politicized, balkanized, and socioeconomically-still- unequal-and-racially segregated education systems have failed for generations.
(C) VernonNickersonSchoolcoach 2021

#AskSterlingMD #KnowledgeIsHealth #SaveAmerica