The COVID-19 cases in Archuleta County, and in neighboring La Plata County, remained relatively low from March through the end of June… but the new number of total reported cases in Archuleta County — 50 cases, including those who have recovered, and including 25 confirmed cases among tourists — is now six times the level we saw at the beginning of the summer.
The data available on the San Juan Basin Public Health website does not break out cases by the patients’ ages… so we don’t know if any school-age children have contracted the infection in Archuleta County. I wonder if we can even find out that information?
Earlier this week, in Part Two of this editorial series, we shared a quote from President Trump’s July 19 interview with FOX News commentator Chris Wallace.
“Schools have to open,” the President told Mr. Wallace. “Young people have to go to school. And there’s problems when you don’t go to school, too. And there’s going to be a funding problem, because we’re not going to fund — when they don’t open their schools, we’re not going to fund them. We’re not going to give them money if they’re not going to school. If they don’t open their school.”
Apparently, President Trump isn’t the only national leader threatening to withhold education funding in the midst of the COVID pandemic. According to news reports, a controversial coronavirus stimulus bill being crafted by Senate Republicans would explicitly tie federal education funding to schools’ reopening. It’s unclear how the funding would be structured to prod schools to reopen… or what, exactly, would constitute “reopening”.
Kids physically present in a classroom? Teacher-led online instruction? Homeschooling assistance? All of the above?
People involved with the controversial federal funding bill have cautioned that negotiations are ongoing, and provisions are subject to change.
But public schools have an historical tradition of ‘local control’. That idea — a preference for a locally-determined curriculum, school calendar, salary schedule, and overall school operations — is in fact written into the Colorado Constitution in Article IX, Section 15, which specifically assigns the control of local schools to local boards of education:
The general assembly shall, by law, provide for organization of school districts of convenient size, in each of which shall be established a board of education, to consist of three or more directors to be elected by the qualified electors of the district. Said directors shall have control of instruction in the public schools of their respective districts.
During the last half of the 20th century, we saw education pulled in two opposite directions. In Colorado, for example, recognition of the right of parents to educate their children at home — a right first recognized in 1973, but not legally finalized until 1988 — was part of an underlying dissatisfaction with education trends, among some parents and teachers, that created the charter school movement and other attempts to generate educational options. At the same time, demands from politicians and parents for better ‘accountability’ and more educational equality led to the imposition of state-controlled “standards” and the accompanying standardized testing that, to a large degree, dismantled local control of publicly-funded education in Colorado.
In other words, some groups feel the improvement of educational outcomes depends upon increased local control — by individual families, and by individual schools — while other groups are pushing for centralized, standardized control by state and federal government — or possibly, by teachers unions.
On Monday, July 20, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) released a report that identified an almost half trillion dollar need to safely implement in-person instruction in public schools. A significant portion of that funding – an estimated $262 billion – would be necessary to ensure students can properly social distance. Another $147 billion would be needed for salaries and benefits, for additional instructors.
From that report, which you can download here:
First and foremost, we must do all we can to ensure students, teachers and support staff are safe at school and are not unknowingly transmitting or contracting the virus. This will require a number of steps that anyone who has consumed any news has heard repeatedly: screening and testing, contact tracing, and isolation and quarantine measures, as well as ongoing prevention measures like frequent hand-washing and some degree of physical distancing. There won’t be a one-size-fits-all process, or a hard open where every school in every district immediately turns the lights on; we may be opening and closing for a number of months while we secure these measures and develop ways to keep everyone safe…
…Revisiting the community school model is a way to do all of the above. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, community schools created a community hub where students and families could get access to health services, where marginalized communities received support, and where necessary services were available in one place. This model is needed even more now, given the effects of the pandemic — from the inequalities that have been exacerbated, to the need for care before and after school so that essential workers can continue to work and other parents can return to work.
The comment about “essential workers” might strike some Daily Post readers as somewhat bizarre. Ever since US governors began shutting down state economies — while we waited for public health experts to figure out what, exactly, was happening with the pandemic — certain classes of workers have been classified as “essential” and were expected to continue interacting, face-to-face, with possibly-infected members of the public. Here in Colorado, the “stay at home” orders specifically listed “Critical Businesses” that would be expected to continue serving the public during the first wave of infections — and the employees who would operate those businesses.
Grocery store workers. Bus drivers. Nurses. Drug store clerks. Post office workers. Marijuana vendors. Nursing home caretakers. Child care workers. Employees at food banks and homeless shelters.
Even news reporters, for heaven’s sake.
Many of these “essential workers” are among the lowest paid employees in their communities. As the COVID roller coaster has tossed us around, these “essential” employees have continued to serve Americans in every community.
But it might appear, to some readers of the July 20 report, that the AFT does not consider public school staff to be “essential”? It might seem that the AFT expects someone — not sure whom — to spend half a billion dollars to make working conditions in public schools “safe” for students and staff.
A reasonable expectation?