Reopening public schools

By George Spangler

Chatfield, MN

Let me start with my conclusion: With the indoor heating season almost upon us, don’t send our most precious resource, our children, back into a conventional schoolhouse this fall. Don’t allow them to be ushered into the enclosed space of a school bus twice a day. Insist that the public school curriculum should only be offered through a virtual classroom or other “distance learning” environment.

In an Op-Ed in the New York Times on August 7, University of Minnesota Professor Michael Osterholm, internationally acclaimed expert epidemiologist, and Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis declared that, “To save lives, and save the economy, we need another lockdown… if we do this aggressively, the testing and tracing capacity we’ve built will support reopening the economy as other countries have done, allow children to go back to school and citizens to vote in person in November.”

The effectiveness of the lockdown has been demonstrated by multiple European and Asian countries, and its initial attempt here is known to have failed by letting up the lockdown well before the virus was under control. Our most immediate concern has to be how best to protect our population from the ravages of COVID-19 until a safe vaccine can be developed. We know that physical separation is the only proven method for slowing the spread of the virus so we have no alternative but to prevent aggregations of people wherever we can.

So, call up your school board members and ask them if they would be willing to conduct their business under the same physical constraints that they are asking students, teachers, and support staff to endure in order to re-open schools. If their answers do not satisfy you, run, don’t walk, to get your child into homeschooling, or, send him/her off to a relative who lives in a more humane jurisdiction offering schooling in a “distance learning” environment.