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The CDC Wants You to Homeschool
Over the last few weeks, I’ve heard from a trickle of parents considering homeschooling. Thanks to the CDC, that’s about to become a flood. The individuals responsible for these guidelines have, quite plainly, never encountered a child. They don’t know about how they operate or about what’s in their best interest. These recommendations are shocking and speak for themselves. A few highlights:
Cloth Face Coverings
- Teach and reinforce use of cloth face coverings. Face coverings may be challenging for students (especially younger students) to wear in all-day settings such as school. Face coverings should be worn by staff and students (particularly older students) as feasible, and are most essential in times when physical distancing is difficult. Individuals should be frequently reminded not to touch the face covering and to wash their hands frequently. Information should be provided to staff, students, and students’ families on proper use, removal, and washing of cloth face coverings.
- Note: Cloth face coverings should not be placed on:
- Children younger than 2 years old
- Anyone who has trouble breathing or is unconscious
- Anyone who is incapacitated or otherwise unable to remove the cloth face covering without assistance
- Note: Cloth face coverings should not be placed on:
Children over the age of two years old have to wear cloth face coverings? And the only way to get around it is if you’re unable to breathe or unconscious? All-day long, children are expected from the age of two to have something over their mouth and nose?
- Broadcast regular announcements on reducing the spread of COVID-19 on PA systems.
Feels a bit like an Aldus Huxley novel; not sure if it’s more 1984 or Brave New World. But wait, there’s more!
- Modified Layouts
- Space seating/desks at least 6 feet apart when feasible.
- Turn desks to face in the same direction (rather than facing each other), or have students sit on only one side of tables, spaced apart.
- Create distance between children on school buses (g., seat children one child per row, skip rows) when possible.
- Physical Barriers and Guides
- Install physical barriers, such as sneeze guards and partitions, particularly in areas where it is difficult for individuals to remain at least 6 feet apart (e.g., reception desks).
- Provide physical guides, such as tape on floors or sidewalks and signs on walls, to ensure that staff and children remain at least 6 feet apart in lines and at other times (e.g. guides for creating “one way routes” in hallways).
- Communal Spaces
- Close communal use shared spaces such as dining halls and playgrounds with shared playground equipment if possible; otherwise, stagger use and clean and disinfect between use.
- Add physical barriers, such as plastic flexible screens, between bathroom sinks especially when they cannot be at least 6 feet apart.
- Food Service
- Have children bring their own meals as feasible, or serve individually plated meals in classrooms instead of in a communal dining hall or cafeteria, while ensuring the safety of children with food allergies.
Learning in this kind of environment isn’t only counter-productive to learning itself, but it’s also deeply traumatic. Drilling into kids nothing but fear and isolation will have a lasting impact on the mental health of an entire generation. And for what? The impact of COVID-19 on children is minimal outside of an exceedingly rare complication, that the media seems determined to terrify parents about. Forcing children into schools designed to be more impersonal than prisons is deeply unjust.
These new outlines will push many parents to decide to keep their children home, and rightfully so. Any parent with the ability to keep their children out of these “redesigned” schools will be spending the summer trying to decide if they’re able to.
Published in General
I think administrators will go along, that they may even have been consulted. I want the list of legitimate child psychologists who helped craft the CDC guidelines and I want to see their working papers justifying this madness.
I thought we had enough problems with juvenile mental health already. Expect NAMI to run a new PSA for children like this one for adults:
Is school, like professional sports, being recruited to draft us all into safety theater?
Funniest comment all week. You made me snort grapefruit juice up my nose. It hurts.
Its okay to Fire Fauci.
Just do it.
I heard that even if you incinerate the corpse in a linear particle accelerator, virus particles can mutate and form yet another Star Trek series.
The headache side-effect of masks is real – it has to do with lower blood oxygen levels.
***will inject you now,
Wow. The Bee is really breaking the big stories.
Florida Ruled To Be In Violation Of Science For Not Having More People Die
Regards,
Jim
Everyday I wake up and think, “okay. Today we will start our journey back to sanity.” But then I read something like Bethany’s post and I despair. I’m not sure if Valiuth has any children or not, but his comments about masks indicate he doesn’t and hasn’t actually watched kids with masks. They literally can’t keep their hands off them while wearing them. And what about everything else noted by Bethany and others? Do we really want kids steeped in an environment that screams “danger!” to them all day long? This is insane. All of it. I want off the ride NOW.
As for returning to school, I am lucky that my youngest of five is in a private Catholic school. At this point, I don’t know what measures the school will implement, but if they align with what is listed above or what is followed by public schools, then I will continue homeschooling him until the school environment returns to normal. The only real reason we keep him there is for him to cultivate friendships with other kids who share his faith and have families with whom we share similar values. What is the point if they go to a school and are separated by physical barriers and might not even be able to attend at the same time anyway?
I mean, this is what the French are doing with their children:
And I say, “no thank you!”
***will inject you now,
May I be the first to second the motion.
Regards,
Jim
I did a fair amount of laser surgery before I retired. One lesson we all learned was that treating warts with a laser required safety gear to avoid getting warts in the air way or pharynx. Live virus was not killed by the laser.
Can you imagine a Picard sequel?
Why in the 23rd Century are they able to travel among galaxies but they haven’t been able to cure baldness?
Yes, unfortunately.
What makes you think baldness needs to be cured?
These officials have also never been inside the vast majority of schools. For starters, what school has the physical plant size to allow 6 feet between sinks? Schools will have to lay off teachers to hire all the custodians that will be required to continually disinfect classrooms and common areas and clean up lunch spills in virtually every room. Perhaps all the PE teachers who won’t be able to teach can become custodians? All those teachers can drive the additional buses that will be needed when we have to maintain 6 feet of distance between each child. Is the bus driver going to pull over to the side of the road if a child takes off a mask or moves seats?
For grades 6 and up, how are administrators supposed to arrange this? Kids are segmented by ability and interest. They have to move from class to class. All 10th graders don’t take the same level courses and some bounce between levels. A kid who is advanced in math might not be in english. If they are all sitting in one classroom you are basically having on-site learning be a study hall with a monitor, not a teacher.
This isn’t a plan. It’s almost designed to have parents begging for remote learning.
Or was that the plan all along?
Interesting isn’t it? Its almost as though they’re setting up a false dichotomy: universal vaccination or wildly impossible social engineering.
Tell that to Joe Biden.
Teachers presumably will still be as likely to infect each other as they have always been, so they will have to wear masks, and does the lower transmission rate still hold true of teenagers? I’d be curious to know how many Taiwanees kids wear mask? I bet quite a few do in class. Again I haven’t heard the rational argument for why wearing a mask is such a burden? The more complicates seating arrangement probably won’t work out as planned but for the most part don’t school desks already face in one direct? And eating lunch in smaller groups hardly seems that bad either or being asked to have packed lunches.
We want places to open up and resume more normal activity. Wearing masks, and practicing distancing an hygiene guidelines is the way to help get that going and stay going. So I ask. What is the problem? Other than the fact that Conservative Pundits need to make money by whining about masks.
That they don’t really work? I know the experts now say they work, but last month WHO said masks were unnecessary. A new study shows six feet is unnecessary. Additionally UV from the sun kills COVID in seconds (actually less than a second), so mask wearing outdoors during the day is unnecessary, since the virus will die in the time it takes to travel from one person to another.
Other than that, there is no problem. If you’re good with unnecessary, good for you.
Remember the experts claiming this is absolutely vital are the ones that predicted millions of COVID deaths in the US and the politicians enforcing these requirements are the ones who forced nursing homes to take COVID patients.
@Valiuth, I feel like you used to be a more charitable debater – now so many of your comments assume the worst of the opposite side. Listen, I have five children (my older four went all the way through in public school but we pulled our last a few years ago when the whole Common Core debacle was taking root) and live within sight of my district’s entire campus. You clearly have not observed any classes in primary or intermediate grades recently. Most classes have close to 30 students now – even in affluent areas like my suburb. There is simply NO WAY 30 desks will fit in a standard room with the 6ft distancing recommendation (and no, in younger grades it is de rigueur to have kids sitting in groups facing each other). So now we’re looking at splitting classes up and alternating days of attendance. If parents will still be responsible for the majority of schooling, I have to ask, what is the point?
As for asking parents to provide lunch. That’s fine. I don’t have a real problem with that, but remember so many kids now receive meal support from school. Again, even in my relatively affluent district, there is a growing number of low-income families which qualify for reduced or free lunch AND breakfast.
And the mask issue. Look at the picture I posted of the French children at school in the post-Corona environment. I am assuming you don’t have kids (I apologize if I’m wrong) but I can guarantee you would be less flippant in your assertion that this is “no big deal.” I grew up in the 70s/80s when we were routinely told that the Soviet Union was going to deploy nuclear weapons and destroy our country. In school it was common to talk about what we would do if the bomb was on its way (most of us agreed to just go outside and let it kill us because we knew we didn’t want to live in the post-apocalyptic landscape painted by made for TV movies like “Testament.” ) My sister had nightmares for months. I would rather my last child be spared a school day with “regular PA announcements” reminding them that they are one touch away from becoming a carrier of death. If it was JUST a mask we were talking about, I would grin and bear it. But the mask, in addition to everything else, is just too much.
Maybe they will have “Corona Drills” just like when we used to have “Nuclear Fallout Drills” where we would hide under the desk and put our hands over our heads. Anybody old enough to remember that?
I don’t have a problem with guidelines, per se. But I want them to be voluntary, and it would be nice if the more onerous ones were based on some reasonable amount of data. And it would be nice if schools implemented policies that took into account human nature as it exists in small, rambunctious, impressionable packages.
The cost of not having children in school is high. I think there is no defensible justification for not having school open in the fall.
Masks don’t work. Its Kabuki and Virus Theatre: Professor Dolores Cahill, Phd Molecular Biologist comes on at around the 8:00 – 9:00 mark. Of course, perhaps Matthew McConaughey knows better.
Masks: Masks are uncomfortable and difficult to breathe through at times. At least that’s how I find them to be, and I can’t see a child finding them any more comfortable. Sometimes I feel like I – a 52-year-old, reasonably mature woman – can barely make it through the grocery store with one on. It’s all I can do to keep from pulling it off and finishing the errand without one. I can’t imagine immature kids being willing to wear one all day – if they ride the bus, from the moment they leave for school ’til the moment they reach home. Many teachers are going to wind up spending more time enforcing the mask-wearing, space-distancing rules than doing any actual teaching.
Desks: In many classrooms, if there are any, the desks are facing every which way – many pushed together to make “tables”. So no, they’re not all facing in one direction.
Lunch: Two of the issues with lunches are having the space to spread out the groups and the time to work more groups into the lunch schedule. Another one, as Nerina pointed out, is that many receive free lunches from the school. Their families don’t have resources to send lunch with their kids – at least that’s the assumption behind the lunch programs.
Bottome line: The rules Bethany outlined are not workable. They just arem’t.
***will infect you now,
I just loved the Star Wars Resume scrolling. That’s the way a heavy hitters resume (scientists with the real creds, not bureaucrats) should be presented. The point about masks being useless for Corona and being counterproductive (immune system suppressors) is very important information as important as HCQ. That’s two pieces of vital information being obscured by government baloney. That really stinks. That really will get more people sick and dead.
Regards,
Jim
Here’;s the thing – we *want* people, especially low-risk people like children, to get infected, and then recover. That’s how we get to herd immunity and end the pandemic. Otherwise it will just go on for years. All these steps to avoid infection just prolong the time that we’re living in a new great depression.
After a full season and a prequel novel telling the story of the terror attack on Mars and the Romulan refugee crisis they still haven’t explained how the Martian atmosphere could be ignited and continue to burn for over a decade. There are clearly some unexplored safety issues with Federation industrial or terraforming practices, if not both.
Miffed,
100% agree.
Regards,
Jim
The Federation has been taken over by rude xenophobic women, robots have a home world, and the head of Star Fleet Security is a Romulan spy.
I can’t stand Star Wars but even I laughed at the Star Wars Resume scrolling. That was a nice shot at an actor opining about masks.