Why Schools Can't Reopen This Fall

Schools cannot open or reopen this fall.

Because they never closed in the first place.

Schools, you see, are not brick-and-mortar structures, desks and hallways. They are not cafeterias, musty locker rooms and student art on the walls.

Schools are people.

First and foremost, they are children and young adults bound together in a learning community.

They are professionals who have made careers out of introducing others to a world of ideas and knowledge.

They are support staff who nurture young bodies and minds, physically and emotionally.

And they are the community that surrounds these people — parents, grandparents, neighbors, government officials, clergy and taxpayers.

So when many governors — including Ohio’s Mike DeWine — ordered districts to close last spring in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, they were shuttering buildings, not schools.

Because the business and passion of education continued.

Schools changed because of these orders, to be sure. The student’s desk moved to the kitchen table. The classroom shifted to a computer screen or a thick packet of activities. The cafeteria became a line of cars in a parking lot, picking up bagged lunches for the next day or the weekend, delivered by workers smiling behind their masks.

Some teachers went live on Zoom, delivering content in real time. Others recorded their lectures and posted them on YouTube.

I know teachers who visited students’ homes and presented lessons through screen doors or open windows, who answered emails in the wee hours of the morning as students worked through challenging math problems or complicated reading passages.

I know principals who mailed birthday cards and planted yard signs to honor the Class of 2020. Don’t forget technology resource workers who delivered wifi hotspots and diagnosed troubles with tablets and laptops.

And students responded. They submitted work through Google Classroom or email. They dropped it off to front offices or sent it by snail mail. They scheduled one-on-one conferences through video chats.

They persevered even in the face of incredible odds. Some became the primary breadwinners after their parents were laid off. Others cared for younger siblings. At least one of my students was diagnosed with the virus. Would it be OK, they asked politely, if their work came in a little late for the next couple of weeks?

Was it easy? No.

Was it equitable? Sadly, not always.

Were there trade offs? Of course. Students lost out on sports and other extracurriculars. They missed socialization with friends.

But was it school? Undeniably.

Now the nation’s administrators face tough choices — from the kindergarten to the collegiate level: How to juggle students’ educational, social and emotional needs during a still-dangerous pandemic.

How do kids go back to classrooms safely when they could be asymptomatic carriers, spreading a virus with no vaccine, no proven treatments and a variety of long-term side effects even for its many survivors?

And what effect will that return have on the nation’s healthcare system? Will hospitals be overrun with cases? And what happens when flu season begins in earnest?

I feel for every administrator wrestling with these issues, compounded by contradictory messages at the federal level, financial considerations and pressure from stakeholders across the political spectrum.

Many schools are opting for online-only classes again this fall. Some are advancing a hybrid solution — partially online and partially in-person. Others are going back full-tilt.

All have to remain flexible and be prepared to walk back plans if numbers spike or a governor speaks.

Regardless, none of them are truly reopening schools. Because you can’t restart something that never stopped.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Cleaning up on hygiene

Have you ever read something that you knew you shouldn’t, but you couldn’t help yourself?

When I was 13, it was “The Exorcist.” That novel gave me nightmares for years and made me hate pea soup. It wasn’t much of a loss. If you’re going to associate a food with demonic possession, you don’t want it to be pizza or ice cream.

Last week, the piece I couldn’t avoid was “Your Body Is a Wonderland” in the Aug. 3 and Aug. 10 issue of The New Yorker. In it, Brooke Jarvis reviews two books on skin, a topic that always makes my own thin layer of external tissue crawl with the thought of microscopic critters feasting on me day and night — especially night.

(Although I know it’s been widely debunked, I still can’t shake the fear that we swallow a certain number of spiders in our sleep each year. It’s another, less-publicized reason to wear a mask. If eight-legged freaks are going to lay eggs in my stomach, they’ll have to gain entrance through my ears.)

The books Jarvis reviews are “Clean: The New Science of Skin” by James Hamblin, and “The Remarkable Life of the Skin” by Monty Lyman. Both appear to address the way we have dissed our epidermis over the last few generations and to extol the virtues of a back-to-basics approach.

Hamblin’s book sounds especially odd. He is a medical doctor who no longer showers, although he “occasionally rinses.”

I went through a phase like this in grade school. I would retreat to the bathroom, fill the tub with water, and then sit beside it, splashing with my hand every once and a while to satisfy my parents, who were listening outside the locked door because apparently there was nothing good on TV.

Instead of bathing, I would read books and comics I had smuggled into the bathroom. My vocabulary was increasing at about the same rate as my B.O.

This went on for a while. I don’t recall a come-to-Jesus moment when my friends confronted me because I was stinking up the classroom — it was the ’70s, and nobody smelled too good — or any teacher phoning home to inquire ever so carefully about why I looked greasier than usual.

One day, I just started to groove on bathing again.

Dr. Hamblin hasn’t outgrown his inner second-grader. He argues we are better off not stripping away the body’s natural biosphere with abrasive soaps and chemicals, only to add them back with commercial moisturizers.

Jarvis makes a point to say that Hamblin still endorses handwashing, however, so coronavirus conspiracy lovers need not apply his rhapsody on the unwashed body to any spurious arguments about herd immunity or letting viruses ooze all around us unchecked.

Fair enough.

The takeaway is that Americans have been sold a bill of goods about cleanliness, to the tune of about “a hundred billion dollars” in 2019. What most Americans today take as a given — wash the body with soap, the hair with shampoo — is not natural, but rather the consequence of generations of marketing decisions to make us feel perpetually dirty.

If I can get serious here for just a moment (it may surprise some of you to realize I was trying to be funny before), this cleanliness manipulation is a reminder that many of the assumptions undergirding our lives —about gender, race, beauty, education, transportation, faith and civic duty, to name only a few — are not some profound expression of natural law or eternal truth, but the result of coordinated campaigns that benefitted somebody, somewhere.

Follow the money, goes one old saying. “Nothing happens until somebody sells something,” goes another.

All of which isn’t to say that I’ll be swearing off either soap or showering anytime soon. Nor do I plan to read Hamblin’s or Lyman’s books.

A few pages of skin creepiness is more than enough for me. If I want to be scared this summer, I can always reread “The Exorcist.” Or just watch the evening news.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Wing, wing, who’s there?

Given that much of the world is on fire, literally and figuratively, I hope you didn’t miss National Chicken Wing Day on July 29.

Yeah, every food, article of clothing and hobby has its own day. I used to scoff at such foolishness, but since this damn pandemic bound me up tighter than a block of cheese, I celebrate every single one that is of interest to me, no matter how inconsequential. It’s the little things, ya know?

So, National Chicken Wing Day. If you’re late to the party, it’s fine. The wings will taste just as good, unless you order them from [name of area business redacted. Imagine it’s one you really, really like so that you are suitably outraged].

According to information found in a random tweet, which is at least as trustworthy as Dr. Demon Seed in the Breitbart live stream that has everybody all riled up, Americans prefer flats to drums by a ratio of three to one.

If you’re like me, you’re saying to yourself, “Flats? Drums? What the h-e-double-hockey-sticks is the difference?” (Having already sworn earlier in the column, I cannot curse again without receiving an R rating, which would cause my audience to plummet from 15.07 to 3.07 readers, the .07 being my mom, who gamely tries each week but then quits when I’m not funny.)

I had to look up “flats” and “drums” as they relate to wings. As I suspected, drums are the really good ones and flats are the ones I leave for somebody else, popularity be ... darned.

I’m not well-versed in chicken, so I don’t know which part of the poultry tree growers use to harvest each type or how long wings take to ripen. Maybe the drums stay on the tree longer, since they’re bigger?

Just kidding. Everybody knows chicken wings grow in the ground, like potatoes, and the really hot ones come from closer to the equator, while the mild ones are native to the northeast.

Another distressing factoid is that the average American eats 90 wings each year. If a standard wing weighs about 3.5 ounces, then the average American eats ... a lot of wings.

Calm down, logisticians. That equals almost 20 pounds of wings a year, which is a figure math-aletes can calculate in their heads, but which took me several long, laborious steps on the computer, followed by a short break of three hours to relax on the couch with a cold compress on my forehead.

Numbers, numbers, will no one rid me of these meddlesome numbers?

Regardless, America consumes more chicken wings than it has unused doses of hydroxychloroquine stored in the bunker beneath the White House that the president regularly inspects. A goodly number of these are consumed on Super Bowl Sunday (the wings, not the chloroquine), which is kinda sorta the unofficial National Chicken Wing Day.

I’m not the biggest fan of chicken wings, truth be told, because I hate any food that’s too messy to eat without a bib. Chicken wings fall into this category, especially when coupled with pizza. Together, they create a perfect storm of greasy sauce and poultry residue on your fingers — and when a cat saunters across your lap while you’re eating them, a purrfect storm — just as your spouse asks you to pretty please turn up the volume on the TV to cover the disgusting sounds you make while chewing.

So while I’ve never walked away from a platter of chicken wings, I’ve never sprinted toward one, either.

Which begs the question, when is National Moist Towelette Day?

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Coming to the aid of lemonade stands

Country Time rolled out its “Littlest Bailout” plan earlier this summer.

Recognizing the COVID pandemic has wreaked havoc with lemonade stands across the nation, the company is offering budding entrepreneurs (re: kids 14 and younger) a chance to recoup their losses.

In exchange for a 250-word essay submitted on the company’s website and a photo of each entrant’s lemonade stand, Country Time will send 1,000 baby businessmen prepaid gift cards valued at $100 each.

In the essay, writers must explain how they will use the cards to “juice” — see what Country Time did there? — the economy.

By the time you’re reading this, my guess is that Country Time will already be inundated with entries. It’s a cute idea, right?

My rudimentary math skills indicate that $100 for 250 words works out to 40 cents a word, which is — ahem! — more than some people are paid for their writing.

If there’s a sticking point in the deal, it will be the photo. Even before the pandemic squeezed the life out of lemonade stands — see what I did there? — the practice was one that, in Shakespeare’s words, was more honored in the breach than the observance.

In other words, many adults like to say we gained business experience by running lemonade stands, but how many of us actually did?

I didn’t. During my formative years, I lived on streets where lemonade stands would either be decimated by wind from speeding trucks or where cars were so rare that they were akin to UFOs.

Foot traffic? Fuhgeddaboudit!

I have, however, had the experience of being a customer at a few lemonade stands. But given the suburban neighborhoods where I’ve lived as an adult, not as many as one might expect.

Most of these exchanges involve jogging or running — or crawling and crying, depending on the heat and my exhaustion level — past some enterprising kids, making the mistake of looking into their weepy eyes, and then promising to come back when I have money.

I generally do — come back, that is. I never run with money, unless you count Apple Pay on my phone as money, which you could, but what self-respecting lemonade stand accepts Apple Pay?

Come to think of it, what business anywhere accept Apple Pay? Whenever I ask, I’m met with a sad shaking of the head. Nope, sorry, not here, the cashiers say with a frown. These days, I have to assume they’re frowning beneath their COVID-repelling masks – the same coverings that their noses hang out of and that are worn to protect only their chins, apparently.

But I digress.

On those occasions when I return to a lemonade stand with change (back when change was plentiful and its scarcity was not a sign of the impending New World Order, according to all those conspiracy theorists holding court in their parents’ basements), I’m often not served lemonade, but Kool-Aid, and usually whatever unpopular flavors have been clogging Mom and Dad’s cupboard for the past three years.

Sometimes, the pitcher contains sugar. Most times, it doesn’t. If ice was ever part of the mix, it has long since melted, further watering down the strawberry-kiwi-raspberry concoction.

Nobody wants to be that guy, the one who complains about quality at a lemonade stand. So I drink what I’m given, try not to think about the last time the little barista washed her hands, and then go on my way.

Regardless of my execrable experiences, I hope this year’s crop of junior business people gets a share of those $100 windfalls and that they don’t all get gobbled up by giant corporations and the infamous lemonade lobby. Which is probably really a thing, right?

Good for Country Time for having some fun in a summer that isn’t exactly overflowing with it. Still, the company missed a golden opportunity to call this promotion Lemon Aid. A savvy copywriter could have fun with a tagline offering kids $100 in their pocket for not making lemonade in their pants.

Goes good with fudge, I hear.

See what I did there?

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Mr. President, What a Big Mask You Have!

President Trump was photographed wearing a mask last Saturday, and the internet went wild.

He was visiting Walter Reed National Military Medical Center when the media captured the history-making moment. It didn’t take long for the derision to kick in.

Some online wags were pleased the mask shielded the public from the president’s weirdly-shaped mouth. Others cheered because they said he looked defeated and deflated.

I don’t know about that. In a rare move for me, I’m going to applaud the president for having the courage — just this once — to lead positively by example.

Of course, we can’t discount the possibility that his decision was politically motivated. Trump’s calculus about such matters is as shrewd as it is often accurate: Like a wounded animal with its paw caught in a trap, he knows when it serves him to act in a certain way, whether to endear himself to his base, to own the libs, or both.

So the mask may be an act of political expediency. Or not. It doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that, by wearing it, he paves the way for the typical Trump supporter to do the same, to reverse course and put on a mask even after long, drawn-out Facebook rants about how our rights are being compromised by a piece of cloth over our mouths and noses.

Who knows how many lives Trump will save and how much illness he will prevent by the simple choice to wear that mask, even if only for a few minutes, even if in his secret heart of hearts, he still believes a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine and bleach works better.

Less publicized but just as significant, Trump told CBS News a few days after the hospital visit that Americans should listen to the CDC. “If it’s necessary, I would urge them to wear a mask and I would say follow the guidelines,” he told reporter Catherine Herridge.

While this is hardly a ringing endorsement for the efficacy of masks, it’s another step in the right direction. How exhausting it must be for Trump’s handlers to nurture anything like empathy in the man. Almost as exhausting as it is for the public to watch him slowly evolve into somebody with an iota of compassion — a case of one step forward, two dozen steps back.

Let’s face it, Trump needs some wins where the coronavirus is concerned. His administration’s handling of the pandemic has been horribly uneven, which is a euphemistic way of saying it has been a near-total disaster leading to more illness, fatalities and economic disruptions than necessary.

The national shutdown last spring, intended to give the country time to ramp up COVID testing and contact tracing, was instead so squandered that some experts now speculate a second shuttering of non-essential businesses and activities may be needed. By advocating for the nation to reopen too quickly, in defiance of his own administration’s plan to wait until 14 days of declining numbers, Trump presided over a Titanic-level catastrophe and spawned a Frankenstein-monster patchwork of state and local regulations festooned with red tape and contradictions. Meanwhile, President Nero waded into the culture wars, crowed about his ratings and pouted over his rally attendance.

His most definitive COVID action, announcing travel restrictions to and from China at the end of January (they went into effect on Feb. 2), could be seen as merely an extension of his usual America-first nationalism. In other words, he used COVID as a cover story.

Another bold action with a similar not-so-hidden agenda was a recent attempt to ship foreign college students back to their countries of origin if their courses were entirely online in the fall. His administration walked that back recently after threats of litigation and, one assumes, realization that these students subsidize many American students’ bills.

But timeout. I came to praise Trump, not to bury him, or however that line goes.

So ...

At least he’s wearing a mask and advising others to do the same. That’s a start. And while it would undoubtedly have been better had this realization hit him two months earlier, his detractors — if they truly desire best-case outcomes where the virus and the country are concerned — should encourage the better angels of Trump’s nature to unfurl their wings a little more often.

If that means admiring the emperor’s new mask, so be it.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Let's move cautiously on school reopening

Accepting the idea of schools reopening normally in the fall requires a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance.

On the one hand, we have leaders at various levels, including President Donald Trump, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and their down-ticket ideologues, who argue that education at all levels — from preschools through universities — must resume face-to-face classes in a few weeks.

Their rationales are varied. The one that sounds most plausible — because it appears to put children’s needs first — is the emotional and educational toll the pandemic has taken on students.

To be sure, this is an important consideration. Children and young adults, like all of us, are social beings who thrive on interactions with others. Even self-described introverts have recognized the challenges of being isolated for long periods during this pandemic.

Students also don’t all experience school shutdowns in the same way. Minority students and children living in poverty have had a tougher time. Some students have limited or no access to the Internet, and some have taken on caregiver or even breadwinner responsibilities, making it harder to stay current with their studies.

Buttressing this concern about student welfare (some might even say superseding it), is the argument that schools are necessary to the nation’s economic fabric. Not going back to school, or going back on a staggered schedule, would mean that parents have to make tough decisions about employment and daycare.

These choices would have a dramatic effect on the country’s financial welfare, especially in an election year when votes will be predicated as much on economics as public health.

Recognizing this reality, President Trump has in recent days resorted to public shaming, calling out Harvard for its decision to go mostly online for the fall and threatening to cut funding for schools that don’t reopen. We’ve seen attempts by his administration to force universities’ hands by vowing to send international students back home if they take only online classes, knowing that these students, who are more likely to pay full tuition and therefore subsidize lower rates for American students, are financial linchpins for their schools.

At the primary and secondary level, we’ve seen a curious reduction to the oft-repeated social-distancing rule, from six to three feet, to acknowledge the reality that the former is unfeasible in most schools.

We’ve seen the Ohio High School Athletic Association replace one leader who expressed a more cautious attitude about the resumption of high-school sports with one who is perhaps more willing to get players back on the fields and courts.

And we’ve seen a lot of passing the buck, from the federal to the state to the local level, to make the hard calls about how to enforce recommendations for safety in schools, with little or no money — and sometimes less funding — to implement them. Plausible deniability for those at the top, perhaps.

The cognitive dissonance stems from these actions and decisions about education occurring even as, around the country, officials are stalling and even reversing plans to reopen other institutions because of growing numbers of COVID infections.

As I write these words on July 7, new cases are up 72 percent from 14 days ago, while new deaths are down only 8 percent over that same period. Governor DeWine has mandated public mask-wearing in seven Ohio counties, with more likely to come.

Columbus’s Center of Science and Industry (COSI) has delayed its reopening. The on-again, off-again Canfield Fair is off again. A growing number of GOP senators won’t attend the Republican National Convention next month because of virus concerns, even as the Trump administration has attendees sign waivers saying they won’t sue if they catch COVID at one of his mask-optional campaign rallies.

COVID outbreaks are often traced to situations where people have gathered in large numbers or where they live in close proximity — parties, funerals, nursing homes. These are the same sorts of clusterings that will occur when students return to campuses and classrooms this fall.

Little has been said of students who live with parents who may be at higher risks for complications from the virus, or the 7% of students who live with their grandparents.

Nor has much consideration been given to teachers and other staff, many of whom are in elevated-risk categories based solely on age. For instance, 37% of college faculty are 55 or older (compared with 23% of workers in general). Protecting the adults who interact with students must also be a priority.

As many people who read this column regularly know, I am a full-time high-school teacher and a part-time college instructor. I want nothing more this fall than to look out over multiple classrooms of students, conversing with them and allowing them to interact with each other.

I also recognize that “safety” is never assured. There always will be some degree of risk associated with anything worth doing — from crossing the street to sitting in a lecture hall.

But given all the unknowns with COVID — the concerns over how long it lingers in the air, the radically different ways it affects patients, the surging numbers even in the heat of summer, the lack of a vaccine or even effective treatments — and even acknowledging the emotional and educational needs of students, it would be prudent to take an overly cautious approach to school this fall.

Start slowly. Limit face-to-face interactions to a few times a week with smaller numbers of students, mandatory face coverings for all, frequent cleanings between classes, and an efficient system of shifting between in-person and online environments if or when infections spike.

It’s not perfect, but it’s not forever. Better this way than roaring full-throttle into the great unknown.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

A quick trip around the world, COVID-style

I’m catching up with old friends this summer.

Their names are Phileas Fogg and Jean Passepartout, protagonists of Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days.” I last sort of read the book in grade school, when I cheated my way through a report with the Classics Illustrated version. But coronavirus lockdown makes strange bedfellows, so now I’m reacquainting myself.

As the name indicates, the novel follows Fogg’s attempt to circumnavigate the globe in an amount of time that would have been fast to readers in the nineteenth century and appears glacial to readers in the twenty-first.

A quick Google search — hey, it’s the Internet, so it can’t be wrong — indicates a similar trip around the Earth in 2020 would take 45.5 hours, plus time to refuel the plane.

Santa, of course, does it all in one night. But I digress.

Fogg, the epitome of stiff-upper-lip British privilege, spends a large part of the voyage, whether by boat, train or elephant, playing whist, a card game I don’t even pretend to understand, and ignoring the cities and countries he visits.

By contrast, his loyal French manservant, Passepartout, is much more enamored by people and cultures along the way, and is hence more relatable. A classic fish out of water, he mistakenly sets foot in a forbidden temple in Bombay and passes out in an opium den in Hong Kong. (I’m not sure this last part was included in the Classics Illustrated version.)

One scene near the end of the novel speaks eloquently to our current pandemic.

Fogg and Passepartout are traveling across the Rockies by rail when the train stops. One of those challenges that happens exclusively in adventure stories is about to occur: The suspension bridge ahead is too rickety to cross.

The only option is to walk 15 miles around the river, estimated to take six hours, and catch a replacement train on the other side of the tracks. Passengers will be delayed, and Fogg and Passepartout will miss their 80-day deadline, but it’s the safest, most prudent course.

Then the engineer, described by Verne as “a true Yankee,” offers an alternative. They can cross the bridge anyway, safety and prudence be damned, trusting in the train’s speed to carry them through.

Passepartout tries to offer a sensible compromise, but nobody wants to hear it. Indeed, before he can explain his idea, he is shouted down, accused of cowardice. The decision to cross quickly is made.

This is as apt a metaphor for today’s coronavirus situation as one could imagine. We Americans are all on a train, chugging toward a rickety old suspension bridge, which represents a patchwork system of local and state reopening plans, an uneven and ineffective federal response, the politicization of masks, the desire to get back to our restaurants, department stores, schools and sports so strong that we ignore science and expert opinion.

Below the bridge, mounting infection rates, prolonged economic distress when businesses must again be shuttered, and more death.

On the other side, “normalcy.” Our orderly, scheduled lives.

Other countries, many of which have weathered the virus and its fallout more readily than we, are demonstrating how a more unified approach is safer and more effective. They’re shaking their heads — and closing their borders. Like Passepartout, they are finding our “proposed experiment a little too American.”

And for a growing number of states, the recovery train is careening off the tracks, either because the locomotive —emphasis on the “loco” — is going too fast, because the plan is too weak to support it, or both.

As for the scene in the novel?

Well, the engineer’s plan works, even though it would make a better metaphor if it didn’t.

The conductor backs up the train for almost a mile and then barrels toward the bridge, hitting it at 100 mph. “The train leaped, so to speak, from one bank to the other, and the engineer could not stop it until it had gone five miles beyond the station,” writes Verne.

But no sooner does the train cross than the bridge collapses.

Passepartout’s plan, by the way, was to have the passengers disembark, cross the bridge on foot, and then send the train across.

It’s the equivalent of a slow, careful reopening of America, based on the best recommendations of epidemiologists and other health officials, not the fantasies of business leaders and campaigning officials.

Yet nobody wants to hear Passepartout’s plan, and few Americans, it seems, want to hear people — “sheeple,” as we are disparagingly called — begging for more caution, more testing and, at the very least, masks in public.

Instead, it’s full steam ahead in the battle with a virus that has also gone around the world in about 80 days.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter