Coronavirus in Schools: Teachers Fear for Their Lives | Hacker News Reader

Coronavirus in Schools: Teachers Fear for Their Lives

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29 pointslaurex11 comments

Good luck making a group of children all wear a mask all of the time

Can public schools just mandate that kids wear masks, from a legal perspective? On the one hand, kids are much less... annoying about enduring inconveniences; but on the other hand, public schools can't play the private-business card that e.g., stores can. I have no doubt that some American parents with perfectly healthy children will insist that theirs shouldn't have to wear masks, because "oxygen" or whatever, and that really does jeopardize teachers' and other students' lives.

I'm sure they can. There isn't really a private business card that I'm aware of. Even here in Texas the "workaround" was to mandate that businesses require employees and customers wear masks.

Beyond that, I haven't even read a credible analysis that believes mask and social distancing mandates would not be legal. To the contrary, just about everybody I've heard/read from suggests it's settled law that the government can take these measures in the interest of public health during a pandemic.

Really it's just been a bunch of politicizing, hand waving, hollow platitudes, and feigning ignorance of the data and CDC guidelines accompanying a refusal to mandate. I believe the few court cases so far have resulted in the courts upholding mandates right?

There's literally already a supreme court case about the government requiring you to wear masks.

Though "case law" has always been weird to me, because sometimes it just gets reviewed or overturned and now something that was taken as gospel in the judicial system can be 100% turned around, with zero new text in the law books

> Though "case law" has always been weird to me, because sometimes it just gets reviewed or overturned and now something that was taken as gospel in the judicial system can be 100% turned around, with zero new text in the law books

Case law is text in the law books. In the US, it is most of the text in the law books.

It just concerns me how much power a random judge has that their decisions and opinions become law, with other judges very hesitant to challenge it

> It just concerns me how much power a random judge has that their decisions and opinions become law

A “random judge” has virtually no power of that kind; trial court decisions are rarely published and, if published, are still only persuasive rather than binding authority. Appellate court decisions are binding precedent on inferior courts, but appointments to such courts are highly scrutinized for that reason, and the decisions aren't made by a single judge.

Some states have eliminated the religious exemption for the requirement that kids need to be vaccinated to attend school. I imagine that vaccination and mask requirements would be based on a similar legal basis, so "yes".

If a mandate can or can’t be put in place is irrelevant. Remember these are children. When I was in elementary school, it took almost two years for the teachers at my school to get one of the students to stop regularly licking their classmates. In middle school someone in my school got suspended for intentionally, and repeatedly, shitting on the bathroom floors. I’m not even going to get into the antics from high school. I attended well-funded schools with reasonable class sizes. Ask any teacher and they will tell you these kinds of things are not particularly unusual.

Younger kids are inherently messy and chaotic. Older kids live to test the limits and boundaries they are given – I would give it two weeks before the newest "game" going around somehow involves coughing into other people’s faces.

Now, take that, and add in a percentage of parents actively encouraging their kids to disobey any rules about masks or social distancing.

Public schools can enforce dress code. I would imagine that masks fall into that category.

In my country the schools are open without any issues. It is mind-bending that once you're over a certain amount of infected people that it becomes much more dangerous. That is the effect of infections being exponentially.

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