Hey, there! Log in / Register
Baker orders schools shut through end of school year
By adamg on Tue, 04/21/2020 - 12:18pm
Gov. Baker made the announcement at his daily press conference; said there's no way to assure a safe environment for students.
But, he warned students, this doesn't mean an early summer vacation: You're still going to have to do your work remotely.
He acknowledged the sting for high-school seniors: "The end of the year may not end proceed as planned but there will be as there always are, brighter days ahead."
He added that non-emergency childcare centers are now ordered shut through at least June 29.
Baker said that educators wanted to see their kids before the end of the year, but in the end, there just was not enough data to figure out how to do it safely - think of all the kids piling on top of each other on school buses as just one example, he said.
Elementary and Secondary Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley said that planning for re-opening schools in the fall already under way - with such possible steps as temperature checking students, keeping desks 6 feet away, staggering hours, based on evidence from other countries that have re-opened schools.
He added that he expects Massachusetts to come out ahead in this whole experience because "in my opinion, we have the best teachers and principals in the country."
Barbara Murphy responds:
As a BPS educator, I predicted this would be the case, but it sure still stings to hear the official announcement.
Caroline Chrisom adds:
It’s the right move with all that’s going on as a Brookline teacher but still heartbreaking.
Baker said that announcements on how the state can begin to ease restrictions on businesses could come within a few days, but he cautioned that there are still too many unknowns about the "insidious" virus. He said that while the state has seen a drop in new cases in recent days, that's not enough data to prove a trend yet.
"Right now, Massachusetts is still in the surge," he said.
"Doing it wrong could create more hardship in the long run. ... We are all in this together, Massachusetts," and at the end, we will come out stronger than ever, he added.
Baker continued that more than half the available hospital beds in Massachusetts remain open, which means the state can help weather increased Covid-19 hospitalization - and provide care for people who have other health issues who have stopped going to hospitals or even their doctors for care. Baker urged people with non-Covid-19 illnesses or symptoms to contact their doctors - the state has a strong telemedicine system and people should not worry about not getting a hospital bed if they need one.
Baker got personal, in response to a question from a reporter that only people in the State House room where he was speaking could hear: He wants to see his dad, 91, again. Also, his favorite part of the job was meeting with hundreds, thousands of people. "We don't do that anymore. At all! ... We're not going to shake hands anymore, we not going to hug, we're not going to do any of those things."
But Baker said he can't let his personal feelings interfere with the steady work against Covid-19. "We've gotta do this right, and we've gotta respect this virus - big time. ... When we're ready to come back, we'll start to do that. This is like the third or fourht quarter and we are holding our own here. Don't let the virus win the game. Play it all the way to the end."
Free tagging:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
Pass the Vodka
I agree ,but this is nuts.
This Is Ridiculous
Charlie - are you going to come to my house and watch my two year old every day once my wife and I go back to work since you closed daycares for the next 2+ months? We can’t just stay home to watch her because our jobs are “essential” so that we can all continue to eat. You need to come up with a better plan.
Grand
It would be great if Baker and DESE actually, you know, coordinated before making announcements like this. Maybe its better in BPS, but in some districts (like across the river *cough*) we teachers are getting contradictory messaging every couple of days- not great when parents are overwhelmed as is with closures, but teachers are left trying to figure out how the hell we reach kids who were hard to reach as is, never mind engage them. I've got kids who barely can read cvc words left home alone; who's going to log them in for our virtual sessions?
People joke about teachers deserving 'millions of dollars' for what we do on regular basis during this, but at the same time demanding we be responsible for making sure our students are making goals when we're learning along with everyone else is batsh*t. Yeah, wealthy districts can get all their kids on laptops and have virtual classrooms, but for those of us at title-1 schools, we just got laptops to some of our students last week.
Sorry, I'm on a rant; the schools should be closed, and we do need to flatten the curve, but anyone thinking Baker and DESE know what they're doing are nuts.
Wealthy schools...
If it makes you feel any better, and it shouldn't, plenty of wealthy school districts can't distinguish their ass from their elbow right now and are doing a few hours of teleclassroom per week.
Can people like the Globe and
Can people like the Globe and Baker's other supporters please beg him to make masks mandatory, like several other states have? While we are hunkering down and many of us out of work, it makes the most sense to have this time be as beneficial and short as possible. Everyone wearing masks reduces transmission. It makes no sense to just advise it, and have the outcome be, as it is, that many customers in stores aren't wearing them. This puts workers in harms way for vanity and prolongs the high infection period. Why not make this period have the most impact!?
cue the Alice Cooper
School's Out
Yikes.
The daycare oh please the daycare
After this the daycare will realize they can charge whatever they want.
Daycare
They already do charge whatever they want.
Magoo sez
Magoo gets sad thinking about this. But then Magoo considers history. Victims of the Huns; smallpox laden blankets passed out to Native Americans, those destroyed by the Roman Legions; current Syrian civil war and so on and so forth, and Magoo thinks it could certainly be a lot worse. Magoo.
Schools are breweries for respiratory diseases
The people in them are not always symptomatic when shedding viruses, and they are also in close quarters much of the time with dubious hygiene even when there is hot water and soap available.
I could come up with a number of historical examples and studies showing how schools act like landlocked cruise ships when it comes to brewing pandemic illness, but this CDC flu guide gives some lay level detail on the subject.
From what we now know about Virions in hot breath
CDC seems to have a totally anachronistic understanding of how virons hitch a ride on what we are exhaling -- MIT seems to have found the key
As a result -- I think almost everything we have been told about how respiratory virus diseases propagate in public is questionable including the 2m [aka 2 arms length or 6 feet] social distancing
Based on MIT's fluid dynamics and high speed photography -- what we most need to worry about is breathing in the cloud of warm moist exhalations in the still air indoors filled with SARS-COV-2 virons.*1
So what's the solution -- well a bandana or a surgical type cloth mask will trap a lot of the drips and drabs of moisture emitted by people talking and screaming, etc. -- but it will still let pass the warm moist exhalations with their cargo of invisible virons.
To really clear all the virons from the air -- you need filtering not hospital-style but semiconductor fab-grade -- that is not going to happen.
However, we have considerable evidence that Sunlight will disable or "kill" the SARS-COV-2 virons. So we need artificial sunlight and some filtering.
Back some time ago there once was a device called a Puritron which featured some UV lamps and some early-gen HEPA filters -- its target was seasonal allergies -- you can still buy old ones on e-Bay
Today, there's something called the
There are others similar in features and performance
What we need is not more ventilators for ICU's -- but industrial quantities of air cleaning tech designed to filter and disable SARS-COV-2 virus*3 in ambient room air for rooms of all sizes
Then we can get back to school, libraries, and shops, bars, restaurants, factories, and places to get a haircut, etc.
*1
Airborne COVID-19 transmission
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2763852
*2
https://www.amazon.com/Germ-Guardian-Purifier-Allergies-GermGuardian/dp/...
*3
UV-C LEDs and COVID-19
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200414173251.htm
Back when I was a kid...
We would pray for snow days...If we had only known we would prayed for a pandemic!
"doesn't make any sense and I don't think it makes us any safer"
Governor Baker on his ban on public schools
Oops that was Governor Baker on something else
Well the reality is that when you look at the Commonwealth's own data [04/21/20] there is virtually 0 chance of a school age kid getting sick enough to be hospitalized let alone dead from the COVID-19
From several other sources [mentioned in this space by several posters over the past few days] there is a whole lot of "anecdotal information" that many more of a given population have come in enough contact with the SARS-COV-2 virus to show antibodies in the bloodstream than will test positive. So the virus is around and if we are to expose any people to the virus as part of the "Opening-up" it should be young, healthy people -- aka school kids.
Obviously, there needs to be protection in the form of masks for staff when appropriate and possibly thermoscans of everyone entering the school and plexiglass partitions in the cafeteria lines.
Perhaps when the kids visit their grandparents -- they should exercise a certain amount of social distancing. However, even having contact with their parents should make only a minimal difference in overall infections, and hardly amount to anything in the "serious" category.
The decision by the Governor to ignore the "real science" to make some "scientist-guides" happy to be leading the Governor around based on models and jargon is as unscientific as encouraging people to stay home instead of practicing safe low density outdoors activities.
Time for the nanny-state to relax its hold on us -- and let us
as was exhorted by our "fore-leaders" back a couple of centuries ago.
Nowy Liberté!