Band Aids

 Someone asked the question: Are schools contributing to a spike in COVID cases among kids? Which, as a responsible educator and firm believer in science I can only reply, "Well duh."

You see, there's this rock, we'll call it the emotional health of our kids, and there's this hard place we'll call the physical health of our kids. Stuck right in between are all the machinations of various government agencies that insist that we put them in harm's way one way or the other. All of the talk about "learning loss" tends to obscure the way we are treating this most precious commodity like a commodity. 

Obviously, if we want everyone back at work we need kids to head back to their less-than-chosen profession: school. Mom and dad need to be out there, stimulating the economy so that we can afford the lifestyle heretofore known as "normal." Trouble is, things have yet to land anywhere near that expectation. The notion that somehow our seasonal expectations of how things turn, such as fall means kids go back to school, don't fit in very well with the mutating, surging virus that continues to kill us. 

Am I advocating for a return to distance learning? Please, no. I have become immured to the experience of children in the hallways and the playground. Banishing them back to those Zoom cells would be about the cruelest thing I could imagine. Unless I compare it to the thought of losing a single one of them or any of their family members to the plague. Meanwhile, we have a risky situation here. We try and make it less risky by doing what we can to enforce a "mask mandate" inside and out. Fourth graders don't have a lot of concern for a government issued recommendation for safety. So now I have added "pull your mask up" to the litany of phrases I repeat endlessly throughout the day: Please walk in the hall. Hands and feet to yourself.  Use respectful language. Please don't stand in the water fountain. 

That last one doesn't get used as often, but it has been used more than once since this school year began. To me, this points out the struggle we continue to experience. All of those things that we used to have to do to keep one another safe are now a layer deep, just beneath the precautions we take to avoid contracting or passing along a deadly disease. To return to that initial question, I respond with a question of my own: Have you met any fourth graders?