Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to episode 75 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
Speaker: Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters, three of whom are Gareth Heidt, Emma, and Michael Heidt.
Speaker: Thank you for your ongoing support.
Speaker: You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Speaker: As a note, this podcast contains explicit language.
Speaker: I think the go-to needs to be kids in school, in person, in the classroom, because we know for most kids that's the best environment for them.
Speaker: I understand that, but what if they can't?
Speaker: What if they can't what?
Speaker: What if the school district feels that they can't safely go into the school because there is a flare-up in that district?
Speaker: Remote learning, are you okay with it in that situation?
Speaker: If there's a short-term flare-up for a few days, that's a different situation than planning for an entire school year in anticipation of something that hasn't happened.
Speaker: That was Betsy DeVos, U.S. Secretary of Education, stating that a flare-up of COVID-19 cases has not happened across the country and that schools should seek to entirely reopen.
Speaker: This podcast will be an outline of the immediate danger that reopening schools presents.
Speaker: This is adapted from an article I wrote recently, and it's not going to be a relaxing listen.
Speaker: The fact is, is that there is evidence to support our anxiety in reopening schools that goes beyond the what-ifs.
Speaker: It is a legitimate problem.
Speaker: We'll start with just acknowledging that COVID is a serious issue.
Speaker: Almost all school districts in the United States closed during mid-March.
Speaker: Using March 17th as an example, at that point, there were 6,300 cases total in the United States with 108 deaths.
Speaker: The previous day, there were 4,500 cases and 88 deaths.
Speaker: That's a 40% increase in cases and 22% increase in deaths in one day.
Speaker: On March 17th, we saw a range of closures of schools from Oklahoma to Ohio.
Speaker: As of the date of this recording, July 13th, there have been 3,415,590 cases with 137,797 deaths.
Speaker: To put that into perspective, from when we closed schools until now, there has been a 75,802% increase in cases.
Speaker: In the past day alone, there have been 60,768 cases in the United States.
Speaker: Only two states in the entire country are seeing a decrease in cases, Maine and New Hampshire.
Speaker: And despite this, teachers are being forced back into the workplace.
Speaker: Many families, without access to government support,
Speaker: want schools to reopen as essentially daycare facilities.
Speaker: Many schools, without access to government support, don't have the means to operate virtually.
Speaker: Hypothetically, let's say that we open schools.
Speaker: There's plenty of stories on the future of teaching, their students, and their families.
Speaker: By the time Mungin was hospitalized at Brookdale, she needed a ventilator.
Speaker: Hydroxychloroquine didn't work for her.
Speaker: So Senator Chuck Schumer, a fellow Brooklynite, wrote the Food and Drug Administration to get the teacher accepted for clinical trials.
Speaker: And she was transferred to Mount Sinai March 27th.
Speaker: Up until Wednesday, last Wednesday, she was improving.
Speaker: She had woke up.
Speaker: I was able to FaceTime with her, you know, and she looked well.
Speaker: But once Munjin was transferred to a New Jersey facility already fighting a sepsis infection, things went south.
Speaker: Mia last FaceTimed her sister Sunday afternoon, apologizing for bringing COVID home.
Speaker: I didn't consciously bring it into the house, but it's just something that I was exposed to.
Speaker: And I told her if I could, I would trade places with her.
Speaker: I told her that I loved her and that I needed her to keep fighting.
Speaker: But I know she's tired and her body is warm.
Speaker: At 1225 p.m.
Speaker: Monday, Rana Zoe Munchen, just 30, took her last breath after 37 days in the hospital.
Speaker: Rana Zoe Mungin was actively teaching when she succumbed to COVID-19.
Speaker: Likely due to her being a black woman and the known discrimination that exists, despite showing symptoms and visiting a hospital multiple times, she was denied treatment initially.
Speaker: And to reiterate, Mungin was only 30 years old.
Speaker: Even without the increased influx of people moving about in school, teachers have lost their lives to COVID-19.
Speaker: Here's a very short list.
Speaker: There's Lisa Steelman, a 14-year veteran elementary school teacher.
Speaker: Diagran Nazare, 42, a high school math teacher.
Speaker: Emma Clark, 35, a science teacher.
Speaker: Reyna Chavez, an English teacher.
Speaker: Therese Kerr, a 27-year veteran teacher.
Speaker: I want to call specific attention to Kimberly Bird, a 35-year veteran teacher in Arizona who contracted COVID-19 while teaching virtually at school.
Speaker: Her and two of her co-workers were working in a school office space during the summer.
Speaker: All three of them were diagnosed, and Bird sadly passed away.
Speaker: I think it's further important to note that about half of these teachers are young, and many did not have any pre-existing conditions.
Speaker: This is only a short list found by searching the news.
Speaker: According to the New York City Department of Education, within their schools alone, 28 teachers, two administrators, two guidance counselors, two school aides, two facility staff, one parent coordinator, two food service staff, and a technology specialist have died.
Speaker: Given that the majority of these deaths occurred when teachers were not actively teaching their students, it is highly worrisome what will happen when they are placed in a non-open-air, difficult-to-social-distance location.
Speaker: Some may claim that children cannot spread COVID-19, but the research is still incredibly unclear.
Speaker: Further, children tend to be asymptomatic but can still spread the virus, and their rate of catching COVID-19 increases with age.
Speaker: According to the research, there's mixed results.
Speaker: Overall though, the language is very telling.
Speaker: Research agencies, such as the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention,
Speaker: state that children are not the primary source cases, but children can still spread the virus.
Speaker: To quote Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who's actively looking at conducting his own research, quote, to open schools because of some uninvestigated notion that children aren't really involved in this, that would be a very foolish thing, end quote.
Speaker: Not to mention, many of us teach in buildings or work actively with students older than 10 to 12 years old, which is usually referenced as children in these studies.
Speaker: Therefore, the research involving said children doesn't encompass all students.
Speaker: This doesn't even mention the movement of adults, from teachers to faculty to student family members, who are still actively moving around the building.
Speaker: We can look to other countries to find out how they're containing COVID-19.
Speaker: For many countries, they're just flat out handling containing the virus better than the US on a per capita basis.
Speaker: Let's look at how some other countries are handling the coronavirus outbreak in schools.
Speaker: On May 29th, South Korea ordered the closure of 500 schools after an outbreak of 100 new cases linked to a commercial logistics center.
Speaker: South Korea, which is a country of 52 million people, has had a total of 11,402 cases and 269 deaths since the outbreak began.
Speaker: The majority of their schools continue to be remote or at one-third capacity, and additional precautions are being taken.
Speaker: Or on June 3rd, Israel schools closed after reopening two weeks earlier.
Speaker: 130 cases were reported at a single school, and at least 244 students and teachers tested positive for COVID-19 during that time.
Speaker: Israel has reported 362 deaths total, with 38,670 cases in a country of 8.8 million people.
Speaker: Or on July 10th, Hong Kong reported that they would be closing schools after reopening at the end of May.
Speaker: Hong Kong had believed that they had virtually stopped the spread of the virus, already getting past a first and second wave.
Speaker: There have been no new cases in schools, yet the government ordered the closure due to a fear in rising COVID cases throughout the country.
Speaker: There were 38 new cases reported in Hong Kong on the day of this order.
Speaker: 7.4 million people live in Hong Kong.
Speaker: There have been articles circulating that claim that the United States should look at other countries which have reopened their schools successfully during the pandemic.
Speaker: However, I think we're ignoring the most obvious elephant in the room that we could possibly have, that most other countries have stopped a first wave and taken proactive measures to socially distance, and are seeing a decrease in their number of cases.
Speaker: The U.S. has never solved its initial outbreak, and is now reopening the economy, and with it, planning on reopening schools.
Speaker: In addition, some pundits are citing the American Academy of Pediatrics, who have recommended that schools reopen.
Speaker: That's been walked back.
Speaker: The new statement says that teachers and stakeholders should be at the center of decision-making.
Speaker: There have been some that say that there's a danger in not reopening schools because of the mental health toll it will take on students, which to me is the ultimate concerned role.
Speaker: I mean, that's bullshit.
Speaker: We haven't had mental health counselors or adequate resources for this issue in schools for years.
Speaker: And now we're worried that if we don't open schools, we're going to harm students' mental health.
Speaker: And that's not even bringing to light the fact that the school is the reason why many of these students face mental health crises to begin with.
Speaker: The opening of schools isn't the root cause of that issue.
Speaker: It's our inadequate systems to deal with mental health in the first place.
Speaker: I want to revisit the fact that
Speaker: that the U.S., in the last day as of recording, has had fucking 60,768 cases in one day.
Speaker: And Hong Kong is shutting down their schools when they had 38 cases in one day.
Speaker: Israel had 1,528 cases on the day that it shuttered its schools after 244 students in that time period, 244 students and teachers in that time period, reported testing positive.
Speaker: Even in a best-case scenario, could you imagine how horrific that bodes for the United States?
Speaker: In the majority of states, we're seeing thousands of new cases per week.
Speaker: And let's not forget that internal CDC documents warn that the full reopening of schools is at the highest level of risk for coronavirus spread.
Speaker: Now let's move into the proposed solutions by districts and policymakers.
Speaker: Most school responses have consisted of the quote-unquote hybrid model, a system where the number of students are limited at school and the rest follow along online.
Speaker: This means that classrooms, on average, will house about 10 to 15 students at half capacity, which is the most common plan that assumes that the average classroom size is 20 to 30.
Speaker: But that's still a lot of people in one spot.
Speaker: In Texas, child care facilities recommended face coverings, required temperature checks of staff and children, and mandated a staff-to-child ratio of 1 to 10.
Speaker: This was back in May.
Speaker: As of July 8th, there were 1,695 cases of COVID-19 attributed to Texas child care facilities at 1,078 different locations.
Speaker: 1,140 were staff members, 555 were children.
Speaker: That is a 707% increase since last month.
Speaker: Simply stated, there's absolutely no way that schools are adequately prepared, resourced, staffed, and maintained to avoid that exact same scenario.
Speaker: except far worse, as the number of schools greatly outweighs the number of child care facilities.
Speaker: Even in a perfect scenario, where all staff members are protected by PPE, how will they even enforce that students do the same?
Speaker: Children are unpredictable, and although I love being a teacher, I know that students often see themselves as invincible, and it's incredibly difficult to monitor that number of students with this much regulation.
Speaker: Between conversing and bathroom breaks, hallway monitoring, late arriving students, students leaving early, just the regular sicknesses that happen, and all the other types of movements that occur, it's nauseating to even think about how rapidly COVID-19 will spread in the hallways.
Speaker: That's not to mention our small classrooms, lack of vents in AC, handing out lunch,
Speaker: and a culture that's been established where 25% of Americans don't even believe that the masks are needed.
Speaker: Could you imagine policing students to keep their masks on?
Speaker: What if a student wears a mask improperly?
Speaker: Hell, I was at the doctor's office the other day, and some of the nurses didn't even cover their nose with their mask.
Speaker: What if a student doesn't believe in mask wearing?
Speaker: At what point are teachers going to have to become even more of a police force than they already are?
Speaker: I know that I would certainly feel a ton of pressure and stress to maintain safety in the classrooms,
Speaker: And I see that argument causing so many problems in classrooms everywhere.
Speaker: But even then, the CDC only recommends face covering for students.
Speaker: So basically, we're screwed because we know that masks limit the spread of COVID-19.
Speaker: And if one isn't wearing a mask, then they're going to spread to other people.
Speaker: The mask really doesn't protect the user that much.
Speaker: Well, I teach in a fairly conservative area, as I'm sure many of you do.
Speaker: Sadly, our country's administration has made mask wearing into a political issue, and I know for a fact that there are going to be a sizable number of students who choose not to wear a mask purely due to the president's actions.
Speaker: This is further complicated by many schools not having well-ventilated areas.
Speaker: I've never, ever been in a school building
Speaker: that doesn't at least have a few rooms without windows, and many rooms that don't have windows that open.
Speaker: Most schools have serious HVAC problems, and many rooms or buildings don't have AC.
Speaker: Plus, we know that COVID has a higher chance of spreading via restrooms, and most schools don't have that many restrooms.
Speaker: Usually you're seeing hundreds of students share one, which tends to be a fairly gross place to begin with, even on normal days.
Speaker: And yet, it gets even worse.
Speaker: What we're really overlooking with the COVID-19 pandemic is the irreparable damage.
Speaker: We tend to only look at deaths.
Speaker: To quote an article from the New York Times, quote, It's not just, oh, I had a terrible time in the hospital, but thank goodness I'm home and everything's back to normal, said Dr. David Petrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City.
Speaker: It's,
Speaker: I just had a terrible time in the hospital, and guess what?
Speaker: The world is still burning.
Speaker: I need to address that while still trying to sort of catch up to what my old life used to be.
Speaker: Here is a short list of complications that can last months, years, or potentially the rest of one's life after surviving COVID-19.
Speaker: An increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and lung disease.
Speaker: Permanent memory defects.
Speaker: Confusion to the point of not being able to work.
Speaker: extreme mental health issues of anxiety and depression, as well as post-intensive care syndrome, lung and or heart impairments, the potential need for lung and heart transplants, lung scarring, stroke, blood clotting problems, extreme damage to the vocal cords to the point of not being able to speak, a high chance of never being able to recover completely physically, prolonged muscle weakness, and male infertility.
Speaker: It is estimated that
Speaker: that 45% of COVID patients will require ongoing care.
Speaker: And we don't know the long-term effects.
Speaker: Oh, and of course, how can we forget that the United States also has a completely unsustainable medical insurance system?
Speaker: Some patients are receiving $80,000 bills for medical care, with insurance not even covering half of it.
Speaker: As a result, they're refusing follow-up care, and there's still no in-depth plan for covering COVID-19 treatment outside of some areas still offering free testing.
Speaker: That doesn't even begin to implicate how some of the spread of COVID-19 will impact students and their families, their extended families, and their communities.
Speaker: So let's look at a few hypothetical scenarios.
Speaker: If a teacher gets sick, do they quarantine for weeks?
Speaker: If so, who will replace them?
Speaker: There's barely any subs to begin with.
Speaker: The sub shortage was a serious reported upon problem in 2019.
Speaker: There is absolutely no way that you're going to see people signing up to work in schools if they weren't even doing it before.
Speaker: Also, I'm sure every single teacher has been in a scenario where they cover for another teacher.
Speaker: I've had many times where I've watched students in another room or combined students into a gym or common area.
Speaker: This happens once, twice, three times a month because we can't get enough subs.
Speaker: We can't do that with social distancing, so what do we do?
Speaker: Do we just leave students in a room by themselves?
Speaker: Or if a teacher gets sick, do their students quarantine for weeks?
Speaker: Will they still be attending school?
Speaker: What does the workload then look like for teachers expected to teach both in person and virtually?
Speaker: We can pretend that teachers can stream their lessons to students at home, but we know, because this isn't something new back in March, that the workload of teaching online is a full-time job by itself.
Speaker: There's a lot of new challenges when it comes to teaching online.
Speaker: It isn't just an add-on.
Speaker: What if a faculty member gets sick?
Speaker: Who quarantines?
Speaker: Does everyone quarantine?
Speaker: What if a food service worker or janitorial staff member becomes sick?
Speaker: Further, think about this.
Speaker: Many food service companies make the majority of their income off of a la carte items, not the lunches themselves.
Speaker: So if students can't enter the cafeteria, because just imagine how long lunches would take with social distancing and all these different measures, how are students going to get their food?
Speaker: If they're eating in classrooms, will students be able to select their food?
Speaker: As of right now, it's being advised in multiple districts that food service employees can't put their food out for students to just grab.
Speaker: So will food service providers even be able to stay in business?
Speaker: If not, who will provide food to free or reduced lunch students?
Speaker: If a family member or a student gets sick, what about the other students in the class?
Speaker: Are they going to have counseling if someone were to become extremely sick or even die?
Speaker: How will we provide that?
Speaker: Guidance counselors are already grossly understaffed at most schools.
Speaker: The average student-to-guidance counselor ratio in the United States is 1 to 482.
Speaker: I hate to bring this up, but I'm sure many of us have had situations where a student has committed suicide or died in a car accident or succumbed to another form of sickness.
Speaker: Imagine if a teacher or student dies at our school due to COVID-19.
Speaker: Imagine if more than one does.
Speaker: The mental health toll of this is absolutely absurd, and we won't have the tools to help students and staff throughout this process.
Speaker: If a school employee is sick, will their health insurance cover their absence?
Speaker: How will their employment be affected?
Speaker: Can schools afford to keep teachers on payroll if they're also paying for more subs if they can find them?
Speaker: Where are we going to find long-term subs and pay them accordingly that can handle this environment?
Speaker: Plus, there are so many questions circulating that are part of this quote-unquote experiment.
Speaker: I hate that people are using the word experiment.
Speaker: I'm really not someone's lab experiment, and I'm sure many of you, including myself, live in households or are yourselves high risk.
Speaker: There is a high probability that if I got sick, I would literally kill someone.
Speaker: Regardless of these serious ramifications, everyone feels like their hands are tied.
Speaker: Teachers must go to school, or they feel, or they likely be, fired.
Speaker: Administrators have to enforce the policies given to them by the district, and districts feel held back by parent demand and lack of resources to sustain virtual classrooms.
Speaker: Ultimately, the federal government is responsible as their financial resources would allow schools to easily transition to virtual.
Speaker: However,
Speaker: Does that mean that we'll just then lockstep to our potential doom come fall?
Speaker: Because I don't see a situation where the federal government, who has barely assisted regular people in this pandemic, will all of a sudden change course on schools, especially when the president is threatening to cut funding to schools who don't reopen.
Speaker: Is our society so misplaced that we will readily accept dying because no one knows what to do?
Speaker: The plan should be,
Speaker: to just simply go online and find ways to mitigate in any way possible the inequity of access that will result because of that.
Speaker: At Sarah J. Teacher on Twitter shared her school's reopening plan, which seems to be better than most.
Speaker: Start with 90% of students not in the building, except for students with disabilities or homeless and foster youth.
Speaker: It isn't included in the graphic, but I would hopefully assume that the majority of staff wouldn't be on campus either.
Speaker: I think really any other measure would be an extremist position.
Speaker: So what now?
Speaker: I would implore districts to take the perceived-as-radical action of going completely virtual, or close to it.
Speaker: Nothing is going to change between now and fall.
Speaker: If anything, it will get worse.
Speaker: I don't understand the notion that we're going to have magically different numbers in August.
Speaker: It's July, and cases are way up.
Speaker: The government is not taking any proactive actions.
Speaker: Why would numbers go down?
Speaker: If anything, they're going to go way up, especially when we reopen schools.
Speaker: There's been a call for schools to delay past Labor Day.
Speaker: But unless we're talking about preparing for virtual learning past Labor Day, that idea is really laughable.
Speaker: The case would be higher past Labor Day.
Speaker: Again, we're not doing anything different.
Speaker: This is mind-boggling.
Speaker: If cases are surging and we're opening more things, there isn't going to be a miraculous disappearance of the virus, as the president has infamously said.
Speaker: There is a literal article on USA Today called, quote, With teachers throughout the country talking about returning to work just because they have to, knowing that they might be dead or irreparably harmed.
Speaker: Therefore, this leads to a major point through all of this.
Speaker: Given what I've just spoke about and cited, teachers should organize and refuse to work at school, both union and non-union.
Speaker: There is absolutely no way that teachers will get what they desire without using their leverage to stop the opening of buildings.
Speaker: There's a lot of power here.
Speaker: Schools can literally not replace teachers with long-term subs right now, and they can't maintain the student-to-staff ratio if teachers leave.
Speaker: I know that's a really scary proposition to seek out fellow staff members and organize and make demands, but at the same exact time, I don't consider that any scarier than killing someone as a result of the actions that I do not take.
Speaker: If one of my students died because I just went along with the status quo, I don't know how I would face myself.
Speaker: If I killed someone in my household because I left it up to district policy, I don't think I could just blame someone else.
Speaker: The fact is, it's a life or death situation.
Speaker: And I completely understand
Speaker: why parents want schools to reopen.
Speaker: I get that schools are facing a ton of pressure to reopen from their communities.
Speaker: It isn't just the government.
Speaker: Families are concerned about their children quote-unquote staying ahead.
Speaker: Families are struggling to raise their children and work, and they rely on schools to operate as daycares.
Speaker: And many families are out of work.
Speaker: I mean, the real unemployment rate is estimated to be about 25% of people.
Speaker: I'm not pretending like keeping children at home is desirable.
Speaker: However, if the choice is between an undesirable time at home with some added stress to families versus staff and students dying, I'm always going to choose the first option.
Speaker: If we act early enough or delay schools opening until we're ready for virtual learning, we can remedy some of the equity issues.
Speaker: As Jennifer Saravallo states, quote, end quote.
Speaker: I can't agree with that sentiment enough.
Speaker: Quite frankly, I'm pissed off at schools who are dedicating just a ton of time to the most obtuse things.
Speaker: 360-degree webcams, putting markers on the ground at school for students to stand, sterilizing lockers in special ways, when we could be using that money to ensure that teachers are prepared to teach online.
Speaker: I know for a fact that I need a lot of help doing that effectively, and ensuring also that families have all the tools necessary to learn from home.
Speaker: I think it's a gigantic disservice to our communities that barely have any schools doing this.
Speaker: So here is my proposal that teachers begin to leverage with their positions.
Speaker: Number one, schools remain remote in almost every area of the country that is seeing any kind of COVID-19 increase or stagnation.
Speaker: Schools in the few areas where this isn't the case could open at a low capacity.
Speaker: But if there's any indication that cases are increasing, any school that was open would immediately close.
Speaker: The only exception could be students with disabilities or unsafe environments.
Speaker: Certain staff members could operate at a very small capacity to ensure these students are cared for.
Speaker: Number two, if a school is not ready to carry out remote instruction, schools could delay to open past Labor Day and push the school year back.
Speaker: 3.
Speaker: If a school will never be ready to open remotely, push the school year back to 2021 and simply go through the summer, or just find a way for students to complete work on their own to make up that semester.
Speaker: 4.
Speaker: Teachers and other faculty members should be included in all reopening talks and procedures, and it should be on the record for policymakers, administration, and teachers, and publicly known.
Speaker: Number five, schools should demand funding from state and or federal sources to adequately equip students, educators, and faculty members for sustained virtual learning.
Speaker: I implore you to reach out to your coworkers and begin that conversation about organizing.
Speaker: Demand change or refuse to go back.
Speaker: That is the teaching as a superpower move.
Speaker: It's not sacrificing your life or your students' lives in the name of a building reopening.
Speaker: It's calling to the fact that people are literally going to die if we go back into the building.
Speaker: I also want to call attention to the work of Allison Collins, Stacey Schubetz, Julie Gee, and Sarah Mullen-Gross, who have provided a template that I'll link in the show notes for communities to write to their school boards to demand safe schools.
Speaker: I can't emphasize enough how important it is that we remain virtual.
Speaker: We could deliver a really amazing virtual curriculum with the necessary training and resources.
Speaker: I want to state that the references I provided in this podcast are just the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker: There are unions gearing up for widespread strikes.
Speaker: There are teachers across various news outlets talking about leaving the profession.
Speaker: There are rapid surges in COVID cases due to child care facilities, and school heads are openly talking about how they don't even know what they're doing.
Speaker: They don't know the next steps.
Speaker: There are an exhausting number of articles related to the questions and dangers of opening school that continue to surface.
Speaker: I understand and recognize that districts must be beholden to their stakeholders as well as to what their budget can afford.
Speaker: Yet again, this is a life or death situation, so I fail to see those actions as responsible.
Speaker: How many teachers will die as a result of a district's inaction?
Speaker: Can a district blame the federal government when one of their teachers, students, or their family members die as a direct result of their experiment with reopening?
Speaker: I'm not making a hypothesis of what will happen.
Speaker: We've already seen what will happen.
Speaker: As Mitchell Robinson best puts it, I'd rather lose a semester than a single student or colleague.
