One KY district bows to reality. Other plans for in-person school are in deep denial.
On Monday night, Jessamine County Schools Superintendent Matt Moore overruled his school board’s 3-2 decision to send students back to school in person, decreeing instead schools would be online for the first two weeks.
“COVID-19 cases in our community have recently spiked and according to the Jessamine County Health Department, our county’s Case Rate (cases per 100,000 of population per week) has increased 650 percent in the last three weeks,” Moore said.
Apparently, Moore is allowed to do act unilaterally in extraordinary situations. “Beginning in-person instruction during a surge of positive cases in our community is just too great of a risk and one that I’m not willing to take when lives depend on it,” Moore said.
More to the point, he might as well join the crowd now. This is where we’re all headed, especially the large number of Kentucky schools now planning in-person classes.
My friends and family are sick of hearing me parrot Joan Didion, but when it comes to this upcoming school year, we’re all guilty of magical thinking. We’re in denial if we think that COVID-19 won’t pretty quickly derail any plans we have to congregate large groups of young people. It’s sad, it’s depressing, but it’s very, very clear.
From Gwinnett County, Ga., where 260 school employees have already tested positive, to the various positive cases that pop up on Fayette’s athletic fields, COVID-19 is not finished wrecking our lives. Not by a long shot.
And yet, public schools like Jessamine are in the best situation. They can choose to go online without hurting their funding’s bottom line. Not so for private schools and higher education. They are dependent on tuition dollars, lots of them that parents pay expecting an in-person education in return.
Take the University of Kentucky. It’s insane to think that Lexington won’t see a huge spike when 30,000 students return on Aug. 17. As the New York Times notes, UK is depending on its honor system to ensure that students don’t congregate and do wear masks. We’ll see how well that works out. The only thing we can hope for is that Gov. Andy Beshear continues to order bars closed, otherwise we’ll see a distinct COVID-19 cluster right there on South Limestone.
Faculty understand the danger. That’s why so many of them have chosen to teach on line, something that apparently surprised the students: “After selecting classes weeks in advance and sinking money into dorms and apartment leases, many University of Kentucky students learned recently that a large portion of their classes will be taught online,” said this story by Rick Childress.
But UK has few choices unless, as Lexington’s biggest employer, it wants to start laying off employees. Now that about 8 percent of its funding comes from the state, it’s hugely dependent on tuition. Also its private partners in housing and dining would no doubt like to see students in those new living and dining quarters.
But how many positive cases will it take to empty out a dorm or an apartment building full of students? Will students choose to stick around? How long will we keep pretending that it’s possible to have a normal on-campus experience? Just Tuesday, UK sent out a notice that Family Weekend will be postponed until spring 2021. And so it goes, one pin-prick after another.
Mandatory masks might be helping Kentucky’s overall case load right now, but they aren’t enough to withstand thousands of school children or college students all bunched up together. Let’s get real with what’s going on now, and save our delusional hopes for next semester, when maybe, just maybe, there will be a vaccine.
