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Comment by babyblueblanket | Hacker News Reader

Are there any teachers who can really talk about solutions to the problems covid presents? Rather seriously, of what I can find anecdotally online (as I know no teachers IRL) that even trying to have in-person classes haven't really helped, because parents pull their kids out of class or a significant chunk misses school due to being out sick/quarantine and now the entire lesson plan is screwed up.

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There's a lot of talk about this in parent's groups on FB. Basically, parents all want their kids in school as daycare. Schools have logistics problems due to students/teachers/support staff/bus drivers/etc. being sick. I think if some parents could enlist the police to drag sick teachers to school, they would do that.

In my area, schools are combining classes across grade levels because teachers are sick but parents are demanding that schools be open. This accomplishes the daycare aspect of school, but to pretend it's about enhancing learning is fanciful.

The parents don't create that pressure though. Americans use school as childcare because we don't have adequate childcare. People don't have leave, paid or otherwise, to take care of their children at home, but they must go to work anyway.

This is a labor issue, not an "individuals are mean" problem.

> Americans use school as childcare because we don't have adequate childcare

This doesn't make any sense. What would it look like to have "adequate childcare" for third graders? You wake up and decide whether your kid was going to school or child care that day?

This one is complicated.

Until relatively recently, married women didn't really work, not at the rate they do now. So, if the child was home, there'd be a parent, typically the mother.

But the public school system isn't all that old either. From about the early 1900s. Before that, there was no compulsory schooling. Kids would be home. Once again, typically with family as life itself was very different. Children living on a farm did not have daily interaction with large groups of children. You'd have your siblings and that's it for the most part.

And none of these changes happened in a vacuum. So the school thing and the work thing and the child care thing, they all happen because of each other and around each other. And now we've put ourselves in a situation where we use school as child care. And we realize that we've painted ourselves in a corner.

Granted, but it’s not a “schools run poorly” issue as it is frequently positioned in the Covid era.

Yeah it is. Schools are run poorly because they fail to acknowledge that they are child care and as such it needs to be consistent and reliable. If school closes for 6 months where is childcare plan b going to come from. How do you replace a skilled teacher that can handle 20-30 kids with one that does 2-3 and not cause huge pain for a family’s finances?

I'm only 40, but for my entire life school systems have been told that their number 1 job is education. Every time they're given performance metrics to hit, they're in regards to education. We as a society are telling our school system that they're an educational institution, not a child care one, and if the school system started to behave like a child care institution, we'd collectively be pissed off at them.

Sorry, but you're dead wrong. It is a larger society problem, not the school system being poorly run. They're being run with the goals that we give them in mind.

The performance metric always includes number of open days. That’s why they add days if you get too many snow days. Those extra days have no impact on education.

The goal is set with the legacy expectation that women will stay home and do childcare but that isn’t a reality for many folks. So schools have an equally important child care role. For many folks the problem of unreliable child care can be worse than no child care. If i knew there wasn’t going to be school for 3 months I can plan for that business can open that provider the service. If schools randomly open and close for 3 months nobody knows what to do and few new business will risk start up costs too fill the gap.

Here's the situation on Day 1 return from vacation in my district:

- ~20% of the teachers at one school out sick

- classrooms being combined due to low staff. Some classrooms combined across grade levels.

- Substitutes in many classrooms. Administration staff being used as substitutes.

This is all before we are passed the median incubation period for New Year's Eve infections, so I would expect staffing levels to continue to deteriorate. (Also keep in mind that some teachers will be out because their children are sick, so kids being infected this week will lead to future staffing pressures.)

In that context, I'm glad you mentioned snow days. Our district is really small; many kids walk to school. However, many teachers & other staff live in other districts and so do not walk to work. When it snows here, the schools generally close on the basis of teachers & staff not being able to make it to school. Parents do not usually throw tantrums on those snow days. This week/month is going to be like snow days in that school staff will not be able to make it to work. Parents are trying to ignore that reality and not being realistic about making alternate plans.

That sounds like a terrible situation. Sorry you have to deal with that. When things are that dire I guess you have to prioritize what’s important. From what you describe they are prioritizing for child care. The older kids probably need more education focus the k-5 kids need the child care. That’s probably administratively hard to pull off though.

To add to our situation, the major hospitals in our metro area area are doing "diversion," which means e.g. there is no room at the trauma center for auto accident victims. "Elective" surgeries like cancer treatments are being deferred.

Nobody expects this wave to continue indefinitely. From what I can see, the peak of the wave may pass in a 1-2 weeks (this is my layperson's understanding). A few years back when storms caused damage to some schools, naturally the kids were out for some time and everybody was fine. But now many parents (pressured by their jobs) are in dire need of childcare, so everything must continue as normal. IMHO better would be for the kids to take at least the week off. It would suck for everybody, but it also seems like the kind of intervention that could save a life or two somewhere in our city.

Schools are child care… but you can’t just remove it and leave folks with nothing. There isn’t enough private capacity if you zero out schools

The person you’re responding to asked only about teachers though.

Teachers and administrators participate in some of those groups. Some people even manage to be teachers and parents simultaneously. School board members sometimes have kids in their districts. The discussions tend to cover a lot of bases.

I'm a parent, not a teacher, but my public school has gone through three phases of the pandemic since my son entered kindergarten:

1. Beginning of last school year: entirely remote. (Except for some children of essential workers; they were in a computer lab-like setting. In many cases they were in their regular school's classrooms, but not the same ones as their teachers, and the other kids in the room would be in different Zoom classes.) This was awful for the standpoint of learning or child care. Adults can barely stand Zoom for that long. I did my best to help my son keep focused, but it didn't work that well, and it came at the expense of my focus on my own work. I have a friend who just pulled her kids from public school for this time and went full-on home-schooling. She said the whole family's mental health and the educational experience greatly improved.

2. End of last school year: most kids in the classroom most days, a few unlucky ones still fully remote due to classroom size limits not actually recommended by the CDC, everyone on Zoom. The classroom is basically a computer lab, but now at least everyone in the room is doing the same thing. Obviously this was better for (most of) the parents, and a little better socially for (most of) the kids, but I think still pretty lousy for learning. The experience wasn't as engaging for the kids as it'd normally be, and the teacher has lost the parents who to varying extents helped keep the kids focused in phase #1.

3. This school year: kids in the classroom, wearing masks, getting weekly pooled COVID tests. If the pool tests positive, everyone gets tested individually and (for 10 days) goes into a "modified quarantine". Under those rules, kids who haven't individually tested positive can be in the classroom with the kids who have already been exposed to the same thing, but no after-school programs or extracurriculars or the like.

I of course hated phase #1 and #2, and I think they far outlasted any reasonable belief they were worthwhile. Phase #3 seems like a more reasonable compromise. I'm sure learning would be better if everything were normal, but this isn't as obviously harmful as phases #1 and #2 were. My son is definitely learning things at school. I don't know how much compared to a normal year. I too would love to hear a frank teacher's perspective on this.

I live in an area where the case rates have been relatively low, which obviously helps. Less disruption due to sickness/quarantine.

I wouldn't mind moving on to phase #4 where school-aged kids must have the COVID vaccine (along with the many other vaccines that are already required) and school goes back to normal. Schools should be fully open before restaurants and bars and the like.

My daughter's pre-K and too young for the vaccine but that's another story.

The solution is to stop testing and quarantining. People don't want to hear it, but that's it. Omicron is a cold. Stop quarantining students and teachers who are around someone who's sick. If you have symptoms stay home, if you don't then go to school. In a few months it'll burn through the population and problem solved.

A lot of the student and teachers being kept home are symptom free.

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