Florida orders schools to reopen as COVID-19 cases surge

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/08/flor-j08.html






By David Brown
8 July 2020

On Monday, the Florida Department of Education issued an emergency order requiring school districts to reopen all “brick and mortar schools at least five days per week for all students” in August in order to facilitate “a return to Florida hitting its full economic stride.” The order, which specifically complains that school closures “limit many parents and guardians from returning to work,” is part of the murderous back-to-work campaign that has led to a spike in COVID-19 cases across Florida and dozens of other states.

The number of new cases in Florida has surged from an average of 700 each day at the beginning of June to a seven-day moving average of 8,587 daily cases on July 6. With the number of cases continuing to escalate, it is certain that COVID-19 will be present throughout the school system next month and face-to-face instruction would become a significant vector for further transmission. Teachers, including those nearing retirement or with health vulnerabilities, will almost certainly contract the deadly disease, while countless students will bring it home to their parents and grandparents.
The order immediately sparked outrage and protests from teachers and parents across the state. Teachers in Orange County, which includes Orlando, organized a protest caravan that blocked traffic. On Facebook, an Orange County teacher, Mia, wrote: “We the People…We can’t let the Governor and the head of the DOE make these decisions without the input of the Teachers. We’re the ones risking our lives. We need to make our voices heard and stand together. This is literally life and death.” A parent, Angela, added, “I'm a Mom and at risk due to an autoimmune issue...why for political reasons am I being forced to expose my child, her teachers, our families and communities to a virus that is not under control. Hell No! We won’t go!”

The Florida order comes as part of a nationwide push to end lockdown measures, “reopen” the economy and force workers into unsafe conditions. The same day as the Florida order, Trump tweeted “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” On Tuesday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a call of governors, “Ultimately, it’s not a matter of if schools need to open, it’s a matter of how. School must reopen, they must be fully operational.”

Schools across the country, in many cases under pressure from teachers and parents, shut down in-person instruction in March in order to slow the spread of the pandemic. School districts have struggled to come up with any effective plans to reopen schools under conditions where state and federal governments have rejected efforts to contain the virus and pursued a policy of mass infection. During the nearly four months since Florida schools were closed—when there were only 217 confirmed cases acknowledged in the state—no effective measures were implemented to contain or mitigate the disease, such as contact tracing. Now that there are 1,000 times as many confirmed cases in the state, they are trying to open up schools.

In early May, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis rushed to reopen the economy even as his administration was deliberately undercounting the number of COVID-19 deaths and infections. This included firing a state employee in charge of Florida’s coronavirus database after she refused to manipulate the data to justify the governor’s back-to-work order.

The Trump administration and Governor DeSantis are so adamant about getting children physically into school regardless of health cost or educational value, because they need schools as day care centers in order to push parents back to work. Safer, more effective distance learning would require that families take care of children during the day.

The conditions of schools make it effectively impossible to safely have in-person instruction when there is community transmission. Outside of prisons and meatpacking and other industrial facilities there are few environments that squeeze people into such close contact throughout the day as a school. Underfunded districts cram over 30 students into classrooms, making any pretense of social distancing absurd. A high school English or math classroom can easily have over 100 students cycle through during the day. Cafeterias and playgrounds see almost continuous use and cannot be feasibly cleaned between classes.

Proposed measures to minimize transmission at schools are either unworkable or undercut the academic advantages of in-person instruction. Mandatory masks, as proposed in Lake County, cannot prevent transmission in an environment where children eat and play. Daily temperature checks, as suggested in Orange, Osceola and Polk Counties, won’t catch pre-symptomatic students.
Many districts in Florida and across the country have proposed a complicated hybrid model of online teaching with occasional weekly face-to-face instruction to minimize student time on campus. Every proposal made runs into hard limits stemming from decades of underfunding the public education system. There are not enough teachers to adapt and implement the curriculum to small, socially distanced classrooms. There are not enough facilities to handle the student body. There are not enough janitors and facilities staff to disinfect facilities.