Massachusetts’ education department is reportedly issuing guidance on the amount of remote learning schools should use based on the coronavirus risk level in their communities.
As school districts scramble to submit reopening plans to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education by Friday, superintendents received a memo from Commissioner Jeffrey Riley Tuesday night that would limit the use of online learning, according to The Boston Globe.
Here’s the map….
From a linked page:
Chelsea, Everett, Lynn and Revere are included in the high risk category, meaning they have over eight cases per 100,000 residents. Twenty-nine other communities, including Auburn, Belchertown, Boston, Brockton, Charlton, Chicopee, Fall River, Framingham, Georgetown, Granby, Holyoke, Hull, Lawrence, Longmeadow, Malden, Marlborough, Maynard, Middleton, Northampton, Peabody, Salem, Saugus, Springfield, Quincy, Randolph, Taunton, Winthrop Worcester, Wrentham, are in the moderate risk category, meaning they have between four and eight cases per 100,000.
In other words, if your town is packed with welfare-dependent People of Color and migrants… no school (“remote learning” in your crowded public housing apartment). The rich white kids in Wellesley and Dover can go back to school, though!
When not filled with arguments about how to pay for the most expensive (per student) school ever to be constructed in the United States, our righteous suburb (rich in BLM and Rainbow flags, if not in people who identify as persons of color or members of the LGBTQIA+ community) is filled with arguments about the best approach to coronapanic. The latest furor concerns the lethal Covid-19-spreading properties of Canis familiaris. Touched someone else’s dog? Dig yourself a grave. A proposed solution is that our town will one day see reason and pass a leash law to reduce the chance of human-canine encounters.
Thus, it was with some trepidation that I took Mindy the Crippler for her first post-plague visit to the grooming salon. If our neighbors are right, the groomers should all be dead. Folks in the salon apparently did not get the memo regarding the hazards of touching dogs and, remarkably, have failed to die on schedule. While Mindy was having her spa treatment, I met a couple of friends for a rare indoor dining experience at a Panera-style restaurant (order at counter; food delivered to table). They have failed to adapt to coronaplague by augmenting the handful of outdoor tables and it was super hot outside so we ate indoors.
We’re in Month 5 of shutdown here and Month 3 of the universal mask law. Everyone seemed to be attempting to wear masks, but, just as the Swedish MD/PhDs predicted, once they were masked they made little attempt to keep a 6′ social distance. There were a fair number of masks-under-noses as well. We’re spending $trillions on things like $600/week handouts to people who became unemployed after the License Raj made it illegal to operate restaurants. But there doesn’t seem to be any money for adaptions that would contribute to long-run plague reduction (like my pet idea for schools). For example, cruise ships usually have handwashing sinks near the entrance to restaurants. Not this restaurant. If we believe the W.H.O. guidance on mask usage (early June 2020 edition of “science”!), the restaurant should have had a sink outside near the outdoor tables and an indoor sink that didn’t require going into a restroom. After all, masks are effective only when combined with handwashing, so we were told by W.H.O. But, in fact, there were no sinks for customers other than ones in the restrooms.
I took Senior Management’s car for a state inspection on the way back to the groomer. None of the guys at the gas station were wearing masks when working in the bay or outdoors, but put them on (without washing hands!) when going inside the shop to run credit cards with customers.
Mindy wasn’t quite ready, so it was necessary to kill time at Dunkin’ Donuts. The women behind the counter were both wearing masks… underneath their noses. Then the hardware store to buy three bottles of drain cleaner to address a slow kitchen sink. “Why do you need three bottles?” asked the partially masked woman in the store? “One thing I have learned from our government is that when something doesn’t work, keep repeating it over and over.” (The grease clog and a small leak in the elbow were eventually solved by a plumber for $370, further evidence that owning property in the U.S. is stupid, except for the exceptionally capable who can do everything themselves.)
Note the mask directives for boarding the ferry to Chappaquiddick. Perhaps if Ted Kennedy had worn a mask, American politics would have gone in a different direction! (my Cape Cod photos include historical photos of the inn where Teddy K stayed and the motel room where Mary Jo Kopechne stayed).
Two miles away…
I still wonder if having customers inside retail stores makes sense in a country where the only goal is avoiding COVID-19. As noted in “Train Americans to use masks the way that surgeons do or restructure the physical environment?”, why can’t stores go back to their 18th century roots: Customer enters spacious front part of shop and asks for item. Shopkeeper goes into jammed back part shelves to retrieve requested item. (tweak so that customer never goes into the store itself, but stays outside and transacts business over a counter)
We’re afraid of getting Covid-19 from surfaces, right? (hence the constant sanitizing) We’re also afraid of getting Covid-19 from sharing air. How can it make sense to put the entire country at risk by continuing to operate retail stores as they were configured in the pre-Covid-19 age?
Related:
“Masks are pointless, says Sweden’s maverick chief medic” (Financial Review): “Because from a medical perspective there is no proven effectiveness of masks, the cabinet has decided that there will be no national obligation for wearing non-medical masks,” said Medical Care Minister Tamara van Ark. (Where is the respect for #Science?)
Reusable bags have been cleared to return to checkout lines in Massachusetts, with a previous ban now removed in the latest round of Baker administration guidance affecting grocery stores.
“This is a home run — good for the environment, for public health, for reducing waste, and for protecting both workers and shoppers,” MASSPIRG executive director Janet Domenitz said in a statement.
“Reinstating bags bans, effective immediately, doesn’t give business owners a chance to use up their stock of existing plastic bags or a chance to stock back up on paper bags if they need them. Even 30-60 days advance notice would have been a help,” Reibman wrote. “?It’s bad enough that store workers have to enforce mask wearing. Requiring cashiers to be the ones who inform customers this week that they have to pay for bags again, is just cruel.”
We’ve seen how powerful a virus can be, generating enough fear to paralyze a society of 330 million, for example, despite killing only about as many people as will be replaced in a few months of immigration (see “More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year.”). We watch as $billions continue to be spent on obsessive sanitizing of every surface that is reachable with a Lyson wipe. Does it actually make sense to encourage people to bring their filthy bags into stores again? (for a canvas bag to do less harm to the environment than a series of disposable plastic ones, the canvas bag must be re-used literally hundreds of times (Oregon Public Broadcasting))
After all of this effort to turn our grocery stores into Japanese- or Swiss-style models of cleanliness, we’re going back to bags that have been soaked in germs for years?
Bonus… the Big Save market in Hawaii, 1990. Rollei 6×6 SLR and… film!
The latest from our governor: a $500/day fine for anyone returning or traveling to Maskachusetts who does not either (a) quarantine for 14 days, or (b) produce a negative Covid-19 test result from within the preceding 72 hours. (But it is now taking a week or more to get a test done in most parts of the U.S.? So prong (b) has no practical effect?)
The new restrictions are effective on August 1.
From our airport management: “Please find below and attached new directives from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Please post these new directives within your leased area and to ensure visibility and cooperation.”
Do you send out one email every Monday morning and then host a couple of group video chats later in the week? You’re a hero!
Educators will continue their heroic efforts from this spring and will work hard to make our schools ready for our students this fall. Educators, through their unions and in collaboration with students and families, must play a central decision-making role in the return-to-school plan, district by district. Ultimately, we will decide if these directives have been met by the state and the districts.
Everywhere that the schools previously had a rainbow there will now be a double rainbow:
We cannot go back to the status quo, which was actively harming many of our youth, families, and educators of color, as well as people from other marginalized groups, including our LGBTQ+ students. We must instead be bold and create free and equitable schools where education liberates and empowers our youth so a brighter future is possible for all of us.
[among the “Key Directives”] Curriculum must reflect and affirm our LGBTQ+ students.
This is a bit odd when you think about it. LGBTQIA+ students weren’t being reflected and affirmed previously. I am sure that we will all agree that this was a terrible situation. But who created that situation if not the very unionized teachers who now say that the situation must end? What was stopping them from reflecting and affirming LGBTQIA+ students six hours per day every day?
There is one Key Directive that is worth putting in bold:
Eliminate MCAS and reevaluate the ways our public schools are assessed.
In other words, the only objective test of student learning has to be tossed out. (Admittedly, the raw MCAS does not measure school performance that well since the children of well-educated parents tend to score highly even if their teachers don’t teach anything.)
Teachers should be hired and promoted based on skin color:
We must prioritize hiring, retaining and promoting educators of color.
But will the older white teachers resign or subject themselves to firing in the event of poor performance in order to make room for educators of color?
Here’s a principle that I can support wholeheartedly:
Every student — and every educator — deserves access to the basic tools of a modern society: a computer and reliable internet access.
Would someone please tell this to Comcast?
As soon as the first person anywhere in the state gets a fever in November and a positive coronavirus test, the teachers will go back home to their pets and gardens:
Educators must be supported with … effective practices for crisis learning remotely.
Districts must provide support … if we are again forced to return to crisis learning remotely.
One fact that I learned about a private school was that they have already wired up every classroom with video cameras so that students who need to stay home for any reason can participate remotely and see what is going on in the physical class.
The MTA is a union of 116,000 educators … We are entering a dangerous and unknown peak period of this pandemic. … We present these demands of local and state officials …
Keep schools closed statewide for as long as necessary to ensure the health of students, faculty, and staff. No educator should be required to come to work when schools are closed for students. Any vulnerable staff should be able to stay home with no loss of pay or benefits.
All educators – full-time, part-time, hourly and per-diem workers, including teachers, secretaries, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and substitute teachers – must be fully paid during this time,
Guarantee that pay and pensions are not affected by the pandemic.
Declare a moratorium on all educator evaluations
Based on the above, I don’t think my friend is going to get that property tax refund he had been expecting based on the fact that his middle schoolers did not receive any education after mid March.
[Our own town of Lincoln, Massachusetts will presumably be one of the last to reopen its schools due to the fact that the square footage is going to be dramatically reduced via a $110 million construction project that moves children into cramped trailers with minimal windows and doors from 2020 through 2023:
They couldn’t find a place to build a new building on the 70-acre campus (above) while continuing to use the old building.]
State reopening guidance (June 25): “Schools do not appear to have played a major role in COVID-19 transmission. … Students in grade 2 and above are required to wear a mask/face covering that covers their nose and mouth. Students in kindergarten and grade 1 should be encouraged to wear a mask/face covering. … Mask breaks should occur throughout the day. Breaks should occur when students can be six feet apart and ideally outside or at least with the windows open. … aim for desks to be spaced six feet apart (but no fewer than three feet apart)” (in other words, elementary school children do not spread coronaplague, but let’s make them wear masks anyway)
“Research Shows Students Falling Months Behind During Virus Disruptions” (nytimes, June 5): The average student could begin the next school year having lost as much as a third of the expected progress from the previous year in reading and half of the expected progress in math… A separate analysis of 800,000 students from researchers at Brown and Harvard looked at how Zearn, an online math program, was used both before and after schools closed in March. It found that through late April, student progress in math decreased by about half in classrooms located in low-income ZIP codes, by a third in classrooms in middle-income ZIP codes and not at all in classrooms in high-income ZIP codes. When all of the impacts are taken into account, the average student could fall seven months behind academically, while black and Hispanic students could experience even greater learning losses, equivalent to 10 months for black children and nine months for Latinos, according to an analysis from McKinsey & Company, the consulting group. … The disparities in educational progress do not appear to be caused by any lack of effort on the part of families. The poorest parents spent about the same amount of time during school closures assisting their children with learning — 13 hours per week — as those making over $200,000 per year, according to a May Census Bureau survey of households with children.
The school in our town shut down on the afternoon of March 12. Initially, the school decided that teachers wouldn’t be tasked with any online teaching. This was consistent with my theory that #1 priority for a public school is welfare enterprise for employees and that #2 priority was teaching.
This theory turned out to be wrong. Our email inboxes were flooded with content regarding the school’s heroic efforts to continue providing meals to students entitled to welfare. Could the school add $300/month to the mom’s EBT card and task her with microwaving whatever was purchased from a supermarket? Apparently that would be too challenging, so the school decided that they would have people come in to cook every day (spreading coronavirus to each other?) and then hire drivers in school buses to deliver the food to students, most of whom were located a 30-minute drive away in Boston (part of the METCO program that brings exotic skin colors to the suburbs while relieving wealthy Boston skyscraper owners from paying property tax).
How about the teachers? They email students with some assignments on Monday morning. These review material previously taught. They host a couple of Google Classroom hangout sessions each week, in which the students chat amongst themselves.
Facebook post from the father of an 8th-grade student here in our town (soon to be home to the most expensive school, per student, ever constructed in the United States):
Quarantine Day 30+ in a district with some of the highest teacher salaries in Massachusetts and a future $100m middle school building:
How was your video lesson with your teachers today? Have you guys started learning something new?
Papa, seriously, today we talked about our teachers’ dogs, dogs other teachers would love to get, and some other unrelated nonsense. For 45 minutes.
A follow-up:
“Papa, our teachers finally stopped pretending. This week’s science homework is ‘reflect on last week’s homework'”
The 8th grader spends roughly five hours per week on schoolwork, including the video chat. There are no grades.
Maybe things are better in Brookline, a top school district within Massachusetts? “The teachers are useless,” said a friend. “The kids are getting nothing.” His perspective was confirmed by another friend in that town: “Very close to giving up on Brookline schools, which have devolved into about one half hour of Zoom per day. It’s teacher’s union saying ‘you can’t make us teach’ and weak administration and School Committee — and somehow parents just aren’t organized enough even here…” (ordinarily she is a huge believer in the power of bigger government to fix any problem, and a loyal Clinton/Warren-style supporter of unionized labor)
How about high school? I ran into a 10th/11th grade English teacher walking his dog in the during what used to be the school day. He described his current work schedule as “intense.” What hours was he actually online with the students? “12-2 every day.”
What about private school? Friends have 3rd and 6th graders in a local school for intellectually and financially elite children. The teachers transitioned seamlessly and immediately to Zoom, working from 8 am to 2 or 3 pm daily. There are substantial homework assignments afterwards, especially for the 6th grader. Although the children are Zooming ahead, so to speak, academically, a lot of parental effort is required. There are numerous breaks and small tasks that require the mother and father to step in at various points throughout the school day.
Are you a lower-middle class taxpayer in Iowa or Arkansas? Elizabeth Warren wants you to buy $3 billion in ferry tickets for the nation’s richest people, i.e., folks who can afford summer houses on Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and similar island retreats: “Markey, Warren, Keating Seek Federal Aid for Steamship Authority”:
With the financially strapped Steamship Authority in mind, the Massachusetts Congressional delegation is requesting $3 billion in aid to keep the country’s ferry industry afloat.
In a letter sent to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and senate leaders Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer on May 7, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, and Cong. Bill Keating pleaded for additional dollars for ferries, citing the SSA’s plummet in passenger traffic and the fiscal strains caused by the pandemic.
What else can middle-class taxpayers in the mostly plague-free “flyover” states buy for us?
(How much does $3 billion buy when it is not a U.S. state government spending the money? Indonesia has a Navy with roughly 140 vessels and 55 aircraft to patrol its 3,000 x 1,100 mile territory, which includes 17,504. islands. The total military budget of Indonesia is about $9 billion (Wikipedia), so presumably the Indonesian Navy spends close to $3 billion per year.)
Do you belong to a dark-skinned inner-city victim group? Even if you’re under 20 years old and nobody your age has ever died from Covid-19 in Massachusetts, stay in your public housing 2BR with 4 or 5 additional family members please. Wear a mask if you venture out onto the sidewalk or be fined $300.
“We’re All In This Together” is the banner across the main street of our town. Good reminder as one drives one’s $130,000 Mercedes SUV to the golf course!
Some 250 people who work at Boston Medical Center are protesting a scheduled visit Wednesday by first lady Melania Trump to a hospital program that helps babies who were exposed to drugs in the womb, according to opponents of Trump’s appearance.
A local reporter asked on Facebook for “thoughts” on this visit. Here are some sample responses regarding this high-achieving immigrant woman from the locals who describe themselves as “feminists”:
Could be part of a series on other parasites, bedbugs,vampire bats, ticks
She can stay away! We dont want her hypocritical interest in children here. Please! Is she only going to visit the rooms of white kids? What if there is an immigrant child staying there? Will she kick them out of the hospital? The visit is a joke!
Differences between escort services in New York and Boston.
[One difference is that the escort who gets pregnant in New York harvests a maximum of $100,000/year (tax-free) for 21 years while in Boston the child support profits are potentially unlimited and the payments last for 23 years. See Real World Divorce and “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage”.]
Fake breasts, fake personality, fake husband
My comments might not be suitable for the Globe…they won’t be too kind. Worst FLOTUS of 45 of them…#BeBest Zero sense of irony – married to the world’s biggest cyber bully and she picked that as her cause? While he puts children in cages and separates mothers from their babies? She had a chance to use her global platform to do good. #epicfail
Every single comment is a no to Melania’s visit! I’m so glad that we live in a smart state!
Now they are moving from NYC to FLA, because we haven’t treated him nicely…Trust me as a life long New Yorker who knew all about DJT when he was just another sleazy socialite, we do not want him here! Floridians you have our deepest sympathies, but please keep him…puhlease!
How much do we need to raise to cover her pre-nup? Freedom for us and the civilized world if we ante up and she spills the beans. My checkbook and pen are at the ready.
No win situation. She’s coming to see an amazing program but also one that confirms a narrow view of brown and black people held by the White House. Yet Bmc depends on federal dollars so protesting- which seems obvious when an anti immigrant admin visits a remarkable institution that welcomes all— puts Bmc funding in jeopardy. It’s a perfect set up for a vindictive small-minded president to confirm his preconceptions and cut funds. Another chance for we liberals to play into trumps hand. For an idiot he sure knows how to agitate us and get the result he wants.
[This last one is my favorite, an acknowledgment that “Big Medicine” depends on “Big Government”.]
It occurred to me that the haters are part of a community that produced enough babies addicted to opiates that a special hospital program had to be created. On the other hand, Melania Trump has, to the best of my knowledge, never produced a single opiate-addicted baby.
Also, given that many of the above sentiments are from women, where is the solidarity among the sisterhood?
