Metro schools announce another 48 days of virtual schooling only until they announce another two months of virtual schooling only
People who are bad at math were anxiously awaiting yesterday to hear whether Nashville would resume in-person classes while the daily new infection rate hovers at roughly 413% of what it was when schools dismissed early for the year because of the virus.
Spoiler, they didn’t resume in person classes.
This lead to a “it’s not fair” widely shared on Facebook open letter to the director of MNPS, who doesn’t have control whether schools go back in session, that’s the Metro Health Department and Mayor’s health mandates, and to summarize the open letter it’s “medical science doesn’t actually know what this does to the kids long term, or who they might accidentally kill by spreading the disease, but it’s not fair and we should let parents decide to use their kids and anyone they come into contact with as guinea pigs if they want and Metro should handle it.”
Believe it or not, I’m actually more with the put them back in school crowd, however I’m also in the category of people who assumes they have the disease and will take reasonable precautions to not spread it and accidentally kill someone’s grandparents. I’ve met some of the parents at my kid’s school who think drinking bleach will cure anything.
I’m also not an epidemiologist so I’m not going to cherry pick my arguments here. Schools are not going back except for some special needs exemptions than MNPS managed to get. Private schools are of course going back because money, and that’s draining the little diversity of the MNPS school system as the rich who can afford it are sending their kids there. My kid’s school’s net worth of parents probably dropped 50 million last week that I know of, and removed the economic diversity pretty quick.
K-2 are expected to go back to in-person sometime after October 12. We’ll hear about that before fall break evidently. My guess is they’ll put the little ones in as they’re the lowest infection vector and see how things go for a couple of weeks and then move on.
Spoiler however, the current decreasing infection rate barring something really jarring happening traced out 48 days is… checks math… 47 infections… we shut down in the 30s. Now, things have changed, and the magic number is somewhere in the 70’s (the newly added cases per 100K residents,) so we’ll see.
I would not get my hopes up until we see some of these surrounding schools a month in and what they’ve faced. Remember, the reason they said initially that Covid-19 didn’t spread in schools nearly as much as expected was because schools were closed due to Covid-19. Israel’s school experiment failed hard. Other school openings have learned however.
