I am kept up at night worrying about my 15 yo returning to highschool. We live on Long Island and cases in my town are in the hundreds, and neighboring towns likewise. Started a thread if anyone wants to comment there about high school http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/2186498-ideas-of-how-will-high-schools-can-reopen-in-hot-spots.html#latest
I don’t think anyone has posted this yet - saw it on twitter. U of South Carolina update on their fall plan includes no fall break and in-person instruction for fall ending at Thanksgiving. https://sc.edu/safety/coronavirus/index.php#Messages
So it appears our local HS is having an in person graduation in a few weeks (class is usually about 180 students). They are inviting the graduate and up to 6 guests to sign up for a 3 minute time slot–the event is scheduled to take 9 hours in total–to enter the auditorium with masks and after a temperature check (no one with fever over 100 can enter).
The graduate may remove mask when crossing stage in cap and gown to get diploma and appropriately socially distanced family may at that time take photos. Then everyone is ushered out a different doorway and the next family enters.
If any graduate can’t make it or feels it is not safe the diploma will be mailed to them.
I’m sorry but I’m not buying this argument that we have to open up the college campus and potentially risk thousands of people’s lives because some undergrad students are a little uncomfortable living with their parents and temporarily taking some online courses. I know tons of college students home from college right now because of this pandemic and not one of them is having serious mental health issues. It’s just not a thing. Are they feeling sorry for themselves, yes.
And if they were, there is likely some underlying mental health issues that should be addressed, regardless of any discomfort from not being back on campus with their friends.
In addition, let’s please stop saying people are in “isolation” like they are in a solitary confinement in a prison. These safe at home orders are not real isolation by any means. A little uncomfortable yes; causing serious mental illness, hardly.
With that said, I hope college administrators figure out a way to get students and faculty back on campus in the fall, safely.
Same goes for K-12. I’m confident school districts will take the necessary precautions to bring these kids back to campus. Too many kids have parents that need to work full time to provide for their family and schools provide over 20 million free school lunches to these kids every single day. Whether we like it or not, other then an education K-12 schools provide necessary day care, shelter and meals for all kids so that the parents can earn a living. They will be open, come hell or high water…
@socaldad2002 You may not know anyone personally who has admitted to having their mental health issues exacerbated, but I assure you I know many. Also, they probably wouldn’t tell you about it because many only tell their friends, and would not want them to tell parents and other people, because there is a great deal of stigma these days.
And yes, it is social “isolation” when you are hundreds of miles from all of your friends.
Also, “potentially risk thousands of people’s lives” is a major stretch. This isn’t the flu, but it also isn’t the bubonic plague. The death rate for our age group is like 0.05%, and those who are not in our age group but work for the college can be protected. In addition, all those who feel uncomfortable or unsafe returning can opt to continue remote learning or take time off, while social distancing measures and mask-wearing would minimize transmission to the greatest extent possible on-campus.
What are all these mentally ill people going to do when they have to leave their friends permanently, at graduation?
You can’t just blame the issue on not having their friends around all the time. They all have computers and phones to stay in communication. They can find ways to deal with their depression other than returning to school where they will be required to stay separate from all these friends - little time together, eating meals, hanging out in each other’s rooms. Now that classes have ended, they should be getting out, taking walks, talking to their friends.
Everyone’s life is different and each person must find a way to deal with it.
@twoinanddone It’s not that simple. When you graduate, you join a job or go to grad school and make new friends. I don’t think anyone’s making new friends in this pandemic. Sure, technology can help, but it’s not the same. Also, they may have to socially distance to an extent and wear masks, but they would still be with friends upon returning to campus. Even if from a small distance.
Also, the mantra of college is “work hard, play hard”. When you have all that work and have no one to fall back on or see, it’s rough.
Well, I’m pretty good at being poor. Yes, I still have a paycheck now. The same was not true in '08, when, after a few years of near-poverty existence, I was suddenly unemployed and responsible for supporting and raising a small child. We got through. But the first job I got after six months of being unemployed (no unemployment insurance for 1099 workers, and no social benefits as I had assets saved for kid’s college and my retirement) was with a for-profit college, and after two days, I saw what a horrific scam it was, preying on the desperate and uneducated, and not only reamed out the guy who hired me and quit, but contacted and testified to a Senate subcommittee.
I did that because even when unemployed and in quite difficult circumstances, on the verge of losing my home and being unaware of providing my kid with a stable existence again for years. I’m aware that I’m not the only person here. I’m also a citizen, and that comes with responsibilities.
We managed. Some time later the for-profits lost a round. There was pasta then, too; it just wasn’t nearly as nice.
I will repeat: there is no other side of the equation with a pathogen. You may want there to be one, and you may want it very badly. This is what you get if you insist:
[oops, cc doesn’t like my twitter link. Look up (at) junesims63 and you’ll see the result of trying to work things out with a highly contagious and dangerous pathogen.]
The role of the economists and psychologists is not to try to negotiate openings that the pathogen will simply take advantage of. Their role is to help people acclimate to a new and difficult life that will go on till we can contain and treat the diseases caused by this virus, or whatever it turns into.
[edited to remove twitter link]
Hello! I’m a parent, and my kid’s a highschooler who’s registered for a university course in the fall. There’ll be a remote option for all university courses, even those held f2f. Kid will be taking the course online.
Senior year will be tricky. We have pretty sensible district leadership, but not sensible state leadership, and the district may be forced to open. If that’s how it goes, and there is no remote option available, kid will likely go live with her dad. If that’s not an option, we’ll have to arrange some sort of homeschooling thing. Much as I want the kid to have a great senior year, wanting her to go on having a mom tops the list.
Well now it is summer and all those students would be home anyway. Some may have had jobs cancelled, but many people, not just college students, have to deal with a job loss for this summer. People have to move on and not sit around being depressed all summer. Get a job, get a hobby, make friends (or go back to high school friends).
I get it. People want things to be as they were but they aren’t going to be. Everyone has it hard. There are people dying without any friends or family allowed to be with them. Courts are closed and people cannot get emergency orders or a jury trial or hearings for visitation with their children. Some families have no food.
I hope schools will open and have classes on campus because it is the best for the business model of the college and because people want to go to college. I don’t think schools should reopen because a lot of mentally needed students are depressed and NEED the school to open so that they can socialize with their friends.
I want things to reopen, but I don’t think colleges will go back to normal and the socialization you are talking about will not be returning to campus unless all the students are willing to risk it.
I would like to remind you all that having people who have lost their jobs lose health insurance at best and go hungry at worst is a political choice, not an inevitability, and the US is fairly unique among first world countries in that.
It’s not a choice Sweden’s workers have to make.
You know, when people say this, I want to take them on hospital tours so they understand what they’re saying.
A lot of my friends at this point are scientists and journalists, and they’re all pretty clear on the danger and absence of leeway here. This thread is enlightening, though. I get the impression that people think this is a sort of “adversity” that can be overcome by courage, pluck, resolve, etc. so that we can go back next month to the Olive Garden, summer parties, and a mask-free existence.
I took a bus to a war zone when I was 16 just to see what was up. Lived in rough neighborhoods. Been attacked physically. Been disabled with an autoimmune disease. Been poor. Had to fight to protect a kid. Supported a kid freelance, with no family local, for years. Changed careers like people change underwear. Flew airplanes, did aerobatics. (Okay, my instructor did the aerobatics. Still fun.) Climbed a mountain in a (small) hurricane. Lived through a suicide. Spoke truth to power. Spun glamor out of nothing. Still here, older, making ravioli, grading papers. Courage, fortitude, resourcefulness, etc. not lacking. However, I know a non-negotiable situation when I see one. This is one, because things like courage and resolve aren’t really salient when you’re talking about an invisibly small cell-death machine. It just does the thing it does. All you can do is try to stay out of its way. You don’t “learn to live with it” the way you do with, say, a disability. You learn to live with it by learning to live out of the virus’s way. For real, according to dismayingly inconvenient science and medicine.
The difficult thing is that science is slow. The Salk vaccine story is a great story, but from a distance you don’t live through the years of dead and crippled children that it took to get to a vaccine. You just get the happy ending. People under 50 or so, and those older folks who had no connection to gay communities, don’t know the shock of seeing young people disappear, one after the next: dead, dead, dead, no end in sight, year after year, and out gay men regarded with fear and hatred. People learning to fear sex, fear touch, after having learned to identify their true selves with sex and touch. For years, because both science and government are slow, because they have to be. Fauci was as deliberate then as he is now. It saved the day back then; not sure it will now, but hope it can. Of course, back then he only had to fend off senators who needed to make a show of hating “the gays”, not senators wanting to trash slow, deliberate medical science so they can sell a quack cure.
The other difficult thing is that it’s some decades since this country regarded itself as a country, and people regarded themselves as bearing any responsibility for strangers who share their society. So you get people wanting to say, everyone decide for themselves. Every town decide for itself. Because that’s how they like to operate. But the virus doesn’t care how they like to operate. It will just take every opportunity it is given to spread. If you create reservoirs for it – a lax county here, an unregulated meatpacking plant there – it will go reproduce there. And mutate, making it harder to fight. I think a lot of people’s minds are just hanging at that juncture, beach ball spinning. “But it’s my right to decide for myself.” Well, normally, yes.
Colleges have to coexist with the communities in which they operate. If they start spreading a deadly disease to the locals and their small children and putting a strain on the state’s medical resources the local and state governments aren’t going to shrug and say, “that’s life.” Governor’s can declare a state of emergency and shut colleges down. The colleges know that and are making plans to limit their negative impact on surrounding communities.
Colleges don’t consider their students privileged elite who deserve to be served. They’re customers whose overall number matters, but individually they can be replaced. And it’s not a given that they’ll be on campus this fall just because that’s what students want. Colleges won’t be permitted to reopen unless they have a comprehensive plan in place for dealing with the virus, and that includes a containment plan that prevents the spread to the off campus community.
@twoinanddone That’s just not how depression works. It’s not just “sit[ting] around and being depressed all summer”. Telling somebody with depression they just need to “do something” isn’t helpful. Honestly, it is statements like that which contribute to the nationwide stigma about mental health that exacerbates mental health problems. If a soldier has PTSD, you don’t tell them to just “get over” fireworks on the Fourth of July. Depression is a serious clinical condition, much like PTSD. While I understand that these mental health issues need to be treated, it is hard for many to reach out for treatment due to the national stigma. I have read some articles and many psychologists/psychiatrists/counselors are very concerned about the effects of quarantine and social isolation on mental health. People need to be educated about mental health issues, because they are not something that people can just “get over”. It’s a lot more complicated than that.
@austinmshauri The state can force them to temporarily stop offering in-person classes and stop normal programming, but they can’t force them to not let students move in/kick them out or not let them resume essential operations; up through the end of the semester, when classes were still in-session, there will roughly 200 students living across three dorms at Amherst. They had to convert our dining hall to a to-go model (which will likely continue in the fall assuming reopening), but they were still able to let all students come to pick-up food, and even though there were no events of any kind, students were still allowed to frolic across campus and in the town.
So they can prevent classes and events from continuing as usual, but they can’t stop them from reopening the dorms and dining halls. As a matter of fact, Liberty University allowed all students to move back in after spring break, and in Virginia, which has some of the nation’s harshest coronavirus restrictions.
I think these are really useful perspectives.
One thing that I’ve found discouraging in the response to Covid-19 is that some people don’t seem to care. This is a public health emergency. Wearing a mask, washing your hands, washing surfaces and keeping social distance are things that keep both you and others safe.
Some may view these as an infringement on their rights. But you could say the same about speed limits on the highway. Or you could say this about drunk driving laws. These are limitations on our behavior that benefit public health.
I don’t know how colleges will respond in the fall, but I bet that most will do so in a way that attempts to keep students, staff and communities safe. This will vary, of course, depending on local circumstances and institution size.
We really need to see what this virus does over the summer. I think everyone needs to take a deep breath. I read that SARS burned out in 6 months. Yes, I realize that is wishful thinking but that could happen just as a return could happen. Nobody knows. Right now I am encouraged that Georgia and Florida opened up rather quickly and so far, nothing seems to have happened. We should know in another ten days for sure.
College students will not socially distance. That is hilarious. Yes, parents like me will send their kids back to college although I will not be going to restaurants etc. My college student isn’t in a risk group. My age alone puts me in one.
The K-12 issue is a much bigger one. Elementary children will not socially distance and if you give them a mask they will touch it all day long. Cleaning buses alone would be a major issue. K-12 schools are petri dishes that share their germs all around a community. College students tend to keep their germs on their campus. Of course they go to stores etc. but I think they will mask and distance when they go to those places if required. Their germs tend to be contained on their campus.
I imagine the K-12 issue will be regional as may be the same with colleges. If there is no K-12 for childcare parents are going to have to make choices regarding work. Childcare has remained open for hard hit states such as mine and I know parents with school aged kids who are paying for care while they work at home. The time may come when people realize our schools are not daycares.
Are you guys kidding me? If K-12 in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island can’t open in the Fall, it will be political suicide for NESCAC and the Ivy League to attempt to do so.
And, yeah, “that’s just part of life.”
Thank you, but I am well aware what this virus does, I live in the most affected area in the country and have lost people I know and know many who were sick. But we most likely won’t have a vaccine for more than 12-18 months (that would be a world’s record) so yes - People will need to learn to live with the virus. You can sit in your home for the next 2 years, only leaving to get groceries - but most will not, they need to have a life in 2020, 2021 and 2022. So we will need to live with the virus.
The governors in the states where I live and work have a very systematic approach to opening up…whether residents agree or not (I am supportive of the way things are being handled).
Once schools open up…if a student or teacher tests positive…the entire disruption will begin all over again.
We were told on March 12th that we should go home on Friday the 13th with materials to last for 2 weeks. We know how that went.
Yes …many parents need childcare and depend on the schools, but once/if the virus enters the school system these parents will have to come up with an alternate plan. One of the problems is that not everybody can afford to.