- Families are sending their kids to at-capacity schools even as the
Delta variant surges. - Schools that have opened have experienced outbreaks.
- Responses to
school shootings have primed parents to accept unreasonable risks. - Kathi Valeii is a writer living in Southwest Michigan.
- This is an
opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
This month, I will send my vaccinated high schooler to a fully-packed, at-capacity school even though the most contagious COVID variant to date is ripping across the country and landing children in the ICU. Like me, parents across the country are prepared to dutifully march our kids into school buildings because we have no other choice.
This feels awfully familiar. School shooting after school shooting has taught us that we can't count on legislators to protect students. When we hoped for mild forms of gun control, we got thoughts and prayers, and now, as we hope for safe and reasonable measures to protect students from a deadly virus, we get raucous school board meetings where parents scream and cry over their kids' right to have their faces seen.
I'm grateful that my son's school requires masks (for now), but with more than 40 kids per class, there is no way they can be safely distanced. At registration, I got a glimpse of how students will wear masks when school begins: under noses and chins, taken off to talk, or not worn at all. At the last school board meeting, a summer school teacher called in to say that even with a mask requirement, in their experience, compliance was at about 50%.
To top it off, in Michigan, as of mid-August, only 35% of 12 to 15-year-olds and 44% of 16 to 19-year olds had received at least one dose of the
Sure, he's vaccinated, and so are my partner and I. But, my youngest, who is 9, is not eligible to be vaccinated yet. So, every day, whatever exposure my teen has at school will come back into our home. As we've recently learned, vaccines are effect but breakthrough infections can happen.
Back in the spring, as vaccines ramped up and the virus seemed to back off earlier this year, health authorities began talking about a return to normal. Families like mine began to allow ourselves to feel cautiously optimistic. At long last, it seemed, school, friends, and social life were on the horizon.
In May, our district asked families to choose virtual or in-person learning for the upcoming school year. The district told us that we would be locked in; there would be no changing our minds. Based on the information we had at the time, we, along with most families, chose in-person learning.
But, a lot has changed with the virus since then. And yet - even as the virus is the worst it has been since the pandemic began in some places - districts across the country are forging ahead with their plans to cram thousands of students into buildings for seven hours a day, five days a week.
And, predictably, in some places where school has already begun, it's not going well. In Illinois, dozens of students have been infected (including two hospitalized) and hundreds placed in quarantine. In Colorado, hundreds of students and staff have tested positive, and by mid-August, at least four Texas schools had already shut down because of outbreaks.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, hospitalization rates increased five-fold between June 2021 and mid-August 2021 in kids of all ages. The CDC notes that this increase correlates with the widespread circulation of the Delta variant. In light of these findings and with the return of in-person school, the CDC calls prevention measures "critical."
The CDC recommends layered prevention strategies to keep schools safe. These include vaccination, masking, proper ventilation,and physical distancing, among other things. Unfortunately, at capacity, schools are hard-pressed to provide all of these mitigation efforts. And many are being bullied out of even providing the bare minimum, like masks.
A feeling of helplessness
In a prediction model created by North Carolina State University and Georgia Tech, researchers estimate that up to 90% of susceptible students may become infected before the end of the first semester. That's an enormous impact that doesn't even consider how these infections ripple out to the school staff, household members, and community members.
Kids are becoming critically ill with the Delta variant. And some will experience the effects of COVID infection in the long term (referred to hauntingly as "long COVID"). So we can no longer shrug and say COVID doesn't affect kids. It does affect them, and importantly, at-capacity schools that can't abide by all of the CDC's recommended guidelines harm medically vulnerable kids the most.
Some people have said, 'Wait until it affects kids; that's when people will start to care.' And every time I've heard it, I've scoffed. Because for decades, American families have witnessed how people respond to kids dying at school. It's not reassuring, and it's primed us for this exact moment.
Instead of gun control, we got school-contracted police officers, metal detectors, bullet-proof backpacks, and traumatic active shooter drills in response to school shootings. Over decades, families have been conditioned to accept unreasonable things. We've been asked to take risks to our kids' lives at school in stride, to shrug our shoulders, to say, "what can we do?"
Because what can we do when political leaders won't issue mandates or pass legislation to keep kids safe? While politicians work to score goals, using our kids as their soccer ball, parents stand on the sidelines too horrified to even scream.
At the worst point in the pandemic for kids, parents across the country are being told to send their kids to school and let the bodies fall where they may. Nearly every parent is desperate for schools to reopen, but we shouldn't have to take unfathomable risks with our kids' lives and our family's health.
It's too soon for at-capacity classrooms. Districts should have shifted back to hybrid and remote options by now. They should have done it before they opened their doors, before kids began falling into their beds, ill. There is no doubt in my mind that we will look back on the decision to fully reopen schools at capacity in 2021 with horror.