‘It’s getting ugly.’ So Fayette school officials need to tell us more about reopening.
Look, we’re all frustrated. We’re tired of the pandemic, the rates that keep rising, masks and social distances, as we stare into the barrel of a long, dark winter where the small consolations of porches and picnics will be denied.
Nowhere is that frustration more apparent than with schools. People want their kids to go back. Which I get. I want my kids back in school, too, yesterday, even. Although NTI is working 100 percent better than it did in the spring, and my 12-, 15- and 17-year-old are getting a full range of coursework from their very dedicated teachers in one middle and two high schools, there’s no doubt they would do better in person.
In Fayette County, at least, the vitriol has run high on social media. We have two choices, depending on how we’re feeling that particular day. For the bad days, when the Internet goes down and tempers rise, there’s Let Them Learn in Fayette County, and on the good days, when you can’t believe the teachers put together even a semi-coherent lesson plan on Zoom, there’s “We Support Fayette County Schools.” (Sometimes I think the world is divided between people who think teachers are lazy union leeches and those who take a more charitable view of their hard work, but that’s another column.)
However we feel, we just can’t take out all our frustrations on our school officials, who are apparently wrestling with slightly more uncertainty than the mom who said that COVID-19 was just the same as the flu. I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes for anything. They are damned any direction they go.
But I do agree that we should be getting a lot more communication from Supt. Manny Caulk, even if it’s repetitive. What are we doing? Are we waiting for Gov. Beshear to tell us if we can go to some kind of hybrid model on Sept. 28? Is that still what we’re working toward? What are the metrics we’re looking at to determine if we need to wait another six weeks? Are we looking at other plans? Are we being creative? Are we putting as much work into planning for school as we are for planning our football games?
To that end, for example, I talked to a parent from Let Them Learn. Todd Burus has a fourth grader and a kindergarten student, and he’s one of numerous parents who say that NTI is just not really working for our youngest students. He’s a math professor and has worked in epidemiology, studying the COVID-19 numbers statewide and in Kentucky.
“I feel like the decisions aren’t being made in an empirical fashion,” he said. “It’s a very finger in the wind type of approach rather than using data in an informative way.”
He thinks based on the numbers and our desire for equity in the district, school officials should be looking at letting all elementary-age children go back to school to start. They appear to have the least risk for transmission and the least success with on-line learning, and it’s the most important time for making gains in school. If it was just elementary, you could have fewer kids on more buses as well.
“Those children need more childcare and they are having the hardest time with NTI,” Burus said. “At the middle and high school level, there is more transmission risk, and they can handle the online learning better.”
It’s just one idea, but it seems like one we could explore for the good of our kids. But have Fayette County officials even talked about such a thing?
“There’s this kind of mixed message going out that’s polluting the waters,” Burus said. “We’re becoming so divided, it’s getting ugly. I don’t want to contribute to nastiness but I think we can’t throw up our hands — we have to keep pushing to make the best decisions out of whatever problem we’re in currently.”
It’s fair to say all our ideas are evolving. Health officials now think that college students should stay in college, even if they have to quarantine, because it’s more dangerous to send infected students back into other communities. Private schools, so far, we think, are making their instruction work without huge outbreaks.
Kathleen Winter, an epidemiologist in the UK College of Public Health, is also the mother of a new kindergarten student. She, too, thinks parents need more data-based discussion of where we’re headed with the public schools.
”I would like to know what is being considered and how we know when it’s safe to reopen and when we would need to close again,” she said. “We should have some clear criteria, multiple different metrics, so that we understand what’s going on.”
Again, I’m not blaming Fayette County school officials who are trying to work through an impossible situation. Let’s remember they’ve already lived through a COVID-19 outbreak among bus drivers, that killed an employee. They’re scared to take risks with students or employees. But I would encourage them to talk to us more, not less, about the issues they’re grappling with so that we can understand our frustration is shared.
