I don’t think too many people are arguing that kids shouldn’t be going back to school at all. But there is a lot of concern among parents and teachers that the current plan lacks any meaningful measures to protect against the spread of covid other than hoping your “learning group” doesn’t lose the covid lottery.

Things like masks, social distancing, and not gathering large groups in confined spaces are for some reason not a concern in schools and yet still important everywhere else. It’s back to nearly business as usual plus extra hand-washing... why is this considered safe only in schools?

The claims that there is a lack of evidence for child-based covid spread is not very comforting when you consider that during the past several months of social distancing and school closures around the world there haven’t been many opportunities to gather evidence either way. A lack of evidence with so little to draw from at this point simply means they DON’T KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN. It also ignores the fact that half of the students in question are older than the young ages often referenced when discussing child-based transmission. These are the same older students that are in the larger learning groups of 120.

The “learning groups” concept sounds fine in theory as a measure for limiting the scope of an outbreak to 60-120 people (assuming that it is strictly adhered to), but there are a lot of holes in this idea when you consider siblings in different classes, siblings in different schools, teachers who work with the entire school population, teachers who travel between different schools, substitute teachers who will need to visit a variety of schools in rooms where the regular teacher’s absence is most likely due to illness, and the fact that kids will still hang out with their friends outside of class time regardless of how many different groups they’re supposed to be separated into.

It feels like it has been deemed too expensive to have schools follow the normal recommended health measures, and so they have been given their own special set of lax guidelines and told “good luck with the experiment, hope you’re not in one of the unlucky groups if it all goes to shit!”