Jul. 21st, 2020

walkitout: (Default)
Our district is still pursuing the hybrid and remote options and had presentations about them this evening. I watched the elementary one but was unable to get into the secondary one and never could make the youtube live thing work. *shrug* Tomorrow is the special ed one; I am not sure I will bother, but maybe.

Meanwhile, Fairfax, which was going to go down the same path, has abruptly switched to the California option. I was surprised! They were running almost exactly 50/50 parents wanting hybrid vs remote only. The staff was running more like 40/60 and that was after a lot of detailed leveraging being applied by administration to staff. This happened more or less hours — less than a full day — after the largest union in Florida filed a lawsuit to stop the fall school reopening.

I had not paid a ton of attention to the vote in LA by the teachers union in Los Angeles Unified School District a week or so ago, but I went back and took another look at that timeline. I had also been seeing headlines go by in Education Week speculating about whether there would be teacher strikes. Those are rare, so I tend to not believe they will happen until they actually do. I may or may not link fu this post later, but the short form for now is that schools are not going to be reopening anywhere in the fall. They may spend a bunch of money redoing their HVAC and buying hand sanitizer, but it ain’t happening. The staff will ensure that — and a big push to reopen may give us the First Ever National Teachers Strike.

I was trying to piece together why I did not pay more attention to that union vote in LA. I think fundamentally, it was my skepticism about teachers striking. They really only do that when parents will back them up, and parents have not shown readiness to do so. We are in very new territory here.

Back when Trump and DeVos were running out the length of rope allotted to them, I was sitting there in disbelief thinking wow, am I gonna have to confront a truancy officer? Is my country really so batshit that they will open the schools? Are we going to do a full Sweden, and deploy truancy measures to make kids attend in person? Really?

Turns out no. Thank goodness for teachers. The youngest do not have jobs or seniority or kids. The middle aged have jobs and kids but no seniority. And the ones whose kids are out and grown are in the high risk group. None of them have, at the same time, the power and the desire to reopen schools. They are our Last Best Hope against diving off that cliff into everyone needing an ICU bed at the same time.

ETA: Also had great phone convos with J. and with K. The sitter took T. to swim lessons and then over to her place to swim in the aboveground pool, then dinner and ice cream. Good times.

I took A. out for a walk when it cooled down a litle.

I walked with M.

ETAYA: I had a pleasant conversation with a real estate agent.

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