Thursday felt like a day where echoes of the days before COVID tried to settle themselves into the present day. For one thing, I had my first in-person presentation for work since before the world shut down. I’ve done a zillion of these on Zoom in the months since, but this particular architecture firm preferred an in person visit.
It was a small group…only six…and they all sat at one end of a long room while I stood at the other. I also masked up, which marks the first time I’ve ever spoken extemporaneously for an hour while wearing a face covering. I will say, it is not always as easy as one might think. There were times I had to breathe in pretty deeply and I felt vaguely out of breath at times, but I did get used to it as I went along and everything went fine.
But it also certainly made me realize just how much breath I am projecting out in the world when I talk without a face covering. So whether you have a big, loud voice like me or are sotto voce, wear those masks, dammit!
On the other side of things, we also got notification in the morning that Amelia’s school district had come up with a proposal for learning for the rest of the year. For those who aren’t regular readers of this blog, we started the year completely virtual, with the idea that an assessment would be made this week about how to proceed going forward.
Like many parents out there, we were hoping for a proposal that would allow our daughter to return to in person learning, but to do so with an abundance of safety. I know this is an issue that pulls in a lot of different directions, but I was probably leaning toward a hybrid model, which gets kids in the classroom, but in smaller numbers that allow greater distancing and minimizing potential exposure to the virus.
Well, the proposal did include a hybrid model, but for older grades only. Grades K-5 would be full time, five days a week, in person. There are mask requirements, cleaning protocols, an increase in outdoor air exchanges and things like that, but I admit I was still a little unsure of the proposal. They held a virtual board of education meeting that evening that would go over the proposal, so I tuned in, frankly hoping to be reassured.
I wish I could say that I was. I was not. To clarify, I do think the district is doing a lot things right with their approach to safety. But I was struck by two things. First, I expected that the public health data they were basing this decision on would be a lot more cheery than it was. Basically, the argument to move forward hinged on COVID transmission levels in our county being slightly less awful than they were in July. The rates are still bad, still in the red, and our county is considerably worse than neighboring counties, including Denver.
I was shocked, both in the context of what we were talking about and just in general, how the numbers don’t look awesome. Trending down, yes, but still not good. It’s like being in a hurricane and being told that it’s been downgraded from Category 5 to Category 2, so by all means, it’s a great idea to go out and have a picnic.
And second, it pretty quickly became apparent to me that as a person coming into this meeting hoping to be convinced of the safety of in-person school, I was not the target audience. From the tone of a lot of the presentation, I think the superintendent was speaking a lot more toward the parents who were upset we had even started the year virtual, and was trying to justify that decision to them. I don’t doubt that he got a lot of heat about that back in July (and by the way, our area had its worst spike in cases ever between July and September), and clearly that was a big rudder in this entire conversation.
That brought it into pretty sharp relief for me. According to polling they did of parents in the district, basically 40 or so percent wanted full time in person, about 31 percent wanted all virtual, and 29 percent wanted hybrid. So while 60 percent of parents are hesitating about full-on in person school, I get the sense that other 40 percent has been pretty vocal and clearly drove the decision.
Look, I get that too. I know everyone’s situation is different and we are extremely fortunate to be able to work from home and even have the option for Amelia to do remote learning. I understand other parents coming at this from a very different point of view and completely respect that opinion.
My primary frustration is that we are in this situation in the first place. We do have the option of letting our kids stay virtual. And now Erin and I have to make that unholy choice. We don’t feel overly comfortable about sending her full time back to school in this environment, but we also don’t want her to miss out and have to suffer because of that decision. But this is the reality of living in a country where asking people to make small sacrifices to mitigate this threat simply couldn’t happen.
Truth be told, we are leaning heavily toward keeping her virtual. She enjoys the format and is doing well with it. But doing that will probably mean she’ll end up with an entirely different teacher and class. That’s where we are. She will adapt, she will handle it. She is tough as nails. Way tougher than me. But I freaking hate making her have to prove that time, and time, and time again.
I am angry. I won’t lie. I’m angry that this is where we are. I was angry seeing those numbers of my own county having transmission numbers in the red because not enough people are taking this seriously.
I’ve said it before in this blog, I’m angry that we haven’t had leadership to keep the rate of transmission down. And yes, I avoid getting political in this blog, but I will say that finding out that the federal government knew about the nature and danger of this pandemic in February and did a big fat nothing to prepare us or minimize spread makes me extremely angry. Had we been told in late February that this was a serious threat and wearing masks and distancing could really slow it down dramatically, we would be in a very different place today.
Most models say we would have something like 80 percent fewer cases. You know, like most other countries. Germany is getting back to school pretty successfully. We could have done that too with just the slightest amount of leadership from the top. But no, like everything else in this country, we have to spend months arguing about whether it’s even a problem, so here we are.
I should have seen that coming. I’ve been frustrated by the climate change argument for a long time, and now the sky is orange and the West coast looks like it is on Jupiter, but we are still arguing about whether climate change is real or not. I might be used to it, but it doesn’t make me any less disgusted by the state of things.
No, I don’t think even the most adept leadership could have made this go away entirely. Pandemics are a force of nature. This was a challenge we were going to face, regardless. Nature likes to show us she is in charge. That’s not the point. We were going to have to live with this no matter what, but I sure we wish we all could have worked together to live with a lot less of it than we are now.
The optimistic part of me wants to hope that someday we’ll learn the lessons from this hellish year, and maybe we will. Maybe our best days are ahead of us. I have to hope so. I have two kids depending on a better future, and it’s up to all of us to make that happen. We gotta’ do better. In the meantime, we’ll weigh the data and make an unholy choice. That’s just what parents have to do right now. It is what it is.
