Open To The Idea Of Opening

 Here's a fun game: Making health and public safety decisions based on their popularity. 

I bring this up because, after more than a year of hybrid/isolation/distance learning, America's teachers unions are calling for all schools to be open this fall. Which is a little like America's elves calling for Christmas to have toys delivered this December. How about football players calling for the use of prolate spheroids? Kind of comes with the territory, right? Not really rocking the boat, exactly. 

It was just a few months ago that teachers unions were not having any of that nonsense. They weren't going to be guinea pigs. They weren't going to have their members showing up on campus to contract a deadly virus just so moms and dads could send their kids back to school and put the wheels of our great democracy back in motion. Not until it was safe. 

So they let us cut in line to get vaccinated. And they shipped us a bunch of hand sanitizer and masks and face shields and Westinghouse air purifiers. At my school, we started letting kids come trickling back a little more than a month ago, and of the one hundred four students whose families asked to have their kids return for in-person instruction, just over sixty of them have appeared. In person. 

Which sort of makes sense, after more than a year of being told that schools were a dangerous place where you could get sick and die, and the alternative was to roll over just after nine in the morning and log onto the online machine provided by the district and get your learning in the safest and perhaps lowest impact way possible. And maybe here is where I should point out that my teachers union made a fuss when they were told they had to do the distance learning portion of their day from the school site. So instead, they got the same deal as the kids: Mornings can be done from the living room, and after lunch those who wanted to participate more fully would all meet back in classrooms filled with all that Personal Protective Equipment. Desks moved and arranged so that there should be touching or sharing of germs. Safe and in person.

So this experiment in the limited return to classrooms turned out to be pretty much a non-starter. And it just so happens that at the moment that the world became a notch easier to move around more safely, government sanctioned restrictions have eased. Profoundly. Voices that had been calling for the end of restrictions are no longer a fringe of red baseball cap wearing furies. Cries for the return to classrooms just the same. This is not a cave to conservatives who had previously made the same assertions. They came by this idea all on their own. Based on science.

We are told. 

And maybe, just maybe, a little bit of politics. Now was that so hard?