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Teachers Move the Goal Posts Again: Now *Kids* Must Be Vaccinated
Today while I was explaining to my (thankfully homeschooled) children why schools in our area (and across the country) are still operating on “Zoom” and likely aren’t going back to normal in the fall either, I asked them, “Given the choice, would you rather work or not work?” My seven-year-old daughter replied, “My job would be to teach kids, and I would do it! I would work!” She’s a better woman than the majority of teachers and their representatives in the unions, unfortunately for our nation’s kids.
This is happening across the country as districts try to get kids back in classrooms:
71% of the teachers unions members who voted approved the refusal to return to workhttps://t.co/hSkik9UGjn
— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) January 24, 2021
And they’re already laying the groundwork to take off next year too:
Fairfax teachers union president opposes reopening schools in person full time next fall even if all teachers are vaccinated.
— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) January 25, 2021
Randi Weingarten says we can't be sure of reopening schools in fall because we don't know whether vaccine stops transmissability.https://t.co/UXoAzUFRnu
It doesn't matter whether it stops transmission, if you're vaccinated. What is going on here?
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) January 25, 2021
What’s going on here? Teachers are now pretending to know better than parents what’s best for kids. After abandoning classrooms for almost a full year, they now have the chutzpah to declare themselves the protectors of kids, who likely won’t be able to receive a vaccine for a long while yet, perhaps a year or more down the line. Their solution for what’s best for kids? Keeping them home, isolated, glued to screens for yet another year.
The folks who have spent the last year with kids, their parents, you know, the ones actually charged with ensuring their well-being, full well know they aren’t doing okay. The New York Times published a chilling story over the weekend about how schools in the Las Vegas area have begun reopening after a rash of student suicides.
Over the summer, as President Donald J. Trump was trying to strong-arm schools into reopening, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, then the C.D.C. director, warned that a rise in adolescent suicides would be one of the “substantial public health negative consequences” of school closings. Mental health groups and researchers released reports and resources to help schools, which provide counseling and other intervention services, reach students virtually. Mental health advocacy groups warned that the student demographics at the most risk for mental health declines before the pandemic — such as Black children and L.G.B.T.Q. students — were among those most marginalized by the school closures.
But given the politically charged atmosphere this summer, many of those warnings were dismissed as scare tactics. Parents of students who have taken their lives say connecting suicide to school closings became almost taboo.
A video that Brad Hunstable made in April, two days after he buried his 12-year-old son, Hayden, in their hometown Aledo, Texas, went viral after he proclaimed, “My son died from the coronavirus.” But, he added, “not in the way you think.”
In a recent interview, Mr. Hunstable spoke of the challenges his son faced during the lockdown — he missed friends and football, and had become consumed by the video game Fortnite. He hanged himself four days before his 13th birthday.
Hayden’s story is now the subject of a short documentary, “Almost 13,” Mr. Hunstable’s video has more than 100 million views, and an organization created in his son’s name has drawn attention from parents across the country, clearly striking a chord.
When the numbers of kids and young adults dying by COVID were clear in April, anyone familiar with mental health could deduce the obvious: if the lockdowns and school closures continued, there would be more deaths of despair during COVID than deaths actually attributable to COVID for anyone in that age bracket.
And now, after a year of keeping kids in such a state that they are taking their lives in record numbers, the majority of teachers and their unions in recalcitrant districts across the country are pretending as though they are the guardians of their well-being, and the best thing for them is to keep them locked away in perpetuity, in the same conditions that are leading to them taking their lives. It’s unconscionable, it’s evil, and it’s going to senselessly kill more kids.
Published in General
You cant vaccinate children using this vaccine! It could kill them?! Are these teachers that *CODE OF CONDUCT VIOLATION!*
https://www.cnet.com/health/why-children-cant-get-the-covid-19-vaccine-yet-heres-who-else-may-have-to-wait/
Texas schools are marking their fifth month since reopening last week for the smaller districts, while the larger ones, like Aledo, have been reopened since late September. The schools were ordered reopened by Gov. Abbott, and I believe Gov. DeSantis in Florida did the same thing, even though both states have cities, school boards and teachers there who would have been perfectly fine with following the Randi Weingarten model of continuously shifting the goalposts to keep the schools shut down. So it seems like the problem is the stronger the teachers unions are in an area, and the more power they have via organization and donations to control who gets elected to office, the longer the delays are in getting the schools reopened, even with COVID-19 precautions in effect.
(I know Texas also classifies teachers and other school personnel in the 1b category for vaccinations, which means they’ve been eligible for a couple of weeks now to receive the vaccine, and in a number of cases their 1b status was given preference of the 1b status of people 65 and older. Once the personnel have been inoculated, it’s hard to see where there would be any public support for teachers holding out for children to get the vaccine, especially at the elementary school level where cases of COVID are minimal.)
I think they like being paid for not really working.
Any time you see Randi Weingarten’s name, you can just bet that something bad is about to happen to your child or his/her education.
@jon1979 yes, my kids have been in school in person in Texas since September. They have not been sick, other than one getting a sinus headache in October for a couple days. No COVID. I have concluded that there are weak or non/existent teachers unions here, but I don’t know. It seems very difficult to find out which school districts are actually represented by certain unions. If you know how to determine this information, please share.
I wonder how much of some teacher’s enthusiasm for remote “learning” has to do with their relief at not having to deal with discipline issues.
Well so would I but I would feel guilty about it. Where is the guilt?
Almost all of it I would think.
I have heard that this is a valid point.
This is nothing new.
Teachers have been believing their own press for far too long.
What’s the point of having a vaccine if you can’t get back to a normal life after receiving it?
So why aren’t parents and private schools creating alternatives in states where the crazies don’t govern, or even where they do. If they just sit there and complain then the radicals have already won. Look at what poor Indians did because public schools were so dysfunctional. Our parents could do the same. Parents only have to be willing to let their kids join others in homes or public places. If we’re all so terrified it’s over.
I guess the Wake County, NC officials got the same memo. One good thing I can say is this seems to have awakened the parents that mindlessly sent their kids off to indoctrination centers everyday without the first idea of what they were “learning”. Many have started to home school. Others have become more involved with the school board (much to the current leadership’s dismay) to also include running for office.
Are teachers saying they don’t believe the vaccine works?
Teacher’s Unions should be regarded as public enemy number 1. I hope the public catches on eventually.
If only there was a children’s union that could lobby congress as effectively as the Teacher’s Unions.
Teachers’ unions as organizations (separate from individual teachers) rarely if ever have the best interests of the students (children) as a key objective. Union mission statements and legislative and policy goals are all about the teachers – making their jobs easier, more lucrative financially, and more secure. Sometimes they can claim that a policy designed to make teachers’ jobs easier / more lucrative / more secure has an incidental benefit for students, but the actual interests of the students are not at the forefront of the goals of teachers’ unions.
Have you read the demands from the Los Angeles Teachers Union? Apparently California is a racist hellhole and it’s the fault of billionaires not paying enough taxes. Before they are willing to go back to school they demand a higher income tax for high earners, a wealth tax, defunding the police, more paid sick time (not just for teachers, but for everyone), a moratorium of opening new charter schools, and more welfare for illegal aliens. Somehow they forgot to throw in demands to end global warming and abolish the Second Amendment.
This is not just a K-12 issue. College students are stuck in dorm rooms or near-campus apartments doing Zoom classes. Ignoring the outrageous tuition for sub-par online learning, these students are isolated in their rooms, away from other peers and professors they should be developing relationships with at this time. Another Texas A&M student committed suicide yesterday. The isolation is hard! Even classes that are listed in the schedule as face-to-face are often only taught online, as profs and TAs discourage students from actually coming to class after the first meeting. Many parents have been raising cane about it, but many others, very vocal, are worried about F2F classes without online options because of their fear of Covid for their 19 yo student.
I believe Scott Adams said this very thing earlier this year in a podcast covering challenges to the black community and what BLM should focus on.
Demands like that come from the clout the teachers feel they have with the California elected state officials because of the union’s size and financial clout within the state. It’s the belief they can’t just force higher salaries, wages and benefits on the pols, they can also order them to change social policy on things not related to schools, and a large part of that goes all the way back to 2005, when California voters rejected Arnold’s school reform efforts. He was cowed at doing anything for the rest of his time as governor, and no state pols have been willing to challenge the teachers unions in any meaningful way since then.
BLM only cares about black criminals killed by police officers. Black-Americans who are victims of crime and useless schools don’t count.
I don’t even have kids and this makes me mad.
I’d love to ask one of these union teachers/union officials this simple question: “How do you do it? How do you look a grocery worker in the face, when they keep you fed and you skip ahead of them to get vaccinated?”
I sincerely would love to hear their answer.
I don’t disagree at all with your comment about teachers’ unions.
That said, my comment was directed to teachers specifically as thinking they know what’s better for our kids (to be honest, I’ve never gotten that impression from unions, though my experience is limited). I feel as though they have always been obviously fighting for teachers and indifferent towards students.
In my 20 + years of experience with K-12 teachers, from 1992 to 2013 I found myself in quite a few conversations with teachers where my reply was : That is literally not your job.
My mic drop moment was with son #3’s eighth grade teacher where I said: Unless you’re going to leave a key under the mat so he can move into your garage when he’s 25 and a loser, butt out. If I remember the context, he had pushed back when she told the class about the movie Jesus Camp and used it as proof that Christianity was dangerous (this was at a Catholic school). Her worry was that he would grow up to be “intolerant”.
I want more details about the context.
This is non-COVID related, but there was an editorial in the local newspaper entitled: “Common curriculum would boost national unity”.
You don’t have to have much of an imagination to see where this would end up. Spearheaded by the teacher’s unions, all American History would begin (and probably end) with a long drawn out reading of the 1619 Project.
Going from there, would be mandatory courses on the dangers of Transphobia, Homophobia and just about every other phobia that you can think of.
Math and Science? Forget about them; they’re nothing more than white constructs that were designed to keep non-whites on the fringes of society.
I’m sure that the author of this editorial was serious about “national unity”; it’s just that the “unity” will come about on Leftist terms.
Wouldn’t be better off being ruled by the Chinese at that moment? I mean they are evil racists but at least they have the fire in the heart to conquer someone.
There is nothing worse than the push for a “National Curriculum.” Schools are community focused, and should be community focused. First, you can barely get the teachers in one district to agree on what should be taught–what are the priorities and what should be emphasized in the schools. To create a nation wide curriculum would be a nightmare, and that is exactly why Common Core is horrible and stupid. I taught school for 24 years in three different (very, very, very) different parts of the country.
The only thing we need National Unity on is that America is a great country, and we need waaaaay less government than we have right now!
Leftists will stop at nothing to accrue government power to make the world more leftist. They will have taken over the curriculum while conservatives are debating whether to have kids read Locke or Montesquieu in their AP class.
There is work for plaintiffs lawyers getting together parents for a massive class-action lawsuit against the biggest teachers unions, for ruining the lives of children all over the country.
Why has this never happened?