Our school district starts later than many, so I have been watching as other school districts open up and then bad things happen with Covid-19. I keep hoping our school system will watch this too, and make changes, but no. In fact, our school district has recently released their Final Version Covid-19 plan, which is to wait for the horse to get out, and then to start closing the barn door afterward (but only in increments). There’s a whole color-coded chart. We will start in Stage One, which is leaving the barn door open: vaccination will be optional for everyone including staff, mask-wearing will optional for everyone including staff, and there will be no distancing at all, and no precautions of any kind. The next step up, Stage Two, is “When the horse gets out”: at that point, we will have vaccinations/masks optional for everyone, and no distancing or precautions—but the stripe on the chart will be a DIFFERENT COLOR. The next step up from that, Stage Three, is “Horse is trampling more than x% of the population,” at which point vaccines/masks will be optional for everyone, and we will make sure people “social-distance” to 3+ feet apart. When the horse is trampling an even larger part of the population (Stage Four), vaccines/masks will still be optional for everyone, and we will distance to 6+ feet apart you guys!!!—which they told us last year was impossible to do, given the space limitations of our school building, so I am not sure how they plan to do this. The next step up from that is Stage Five: full remote learning. The stripe is PINK!! to show the danger!! There is no stage at which masks will be required for anyone.
You will not be surprised to hear that our school district has a large/active/vocal group of parents campaigning against ALL preventative measures, arguing that “Our kids have gone through enough!”—as if that type of argument is relevant in any way to this sort of situation. “Stop preventing kids from swapping hats in the lice outbreak! This outbreak has gone on too long, and our kids have been through enough! We need to get back to normal now!” “Three days of antibiotics for this pneumonia is ENOUGH, and the breathing treatments are traumatic! It’s time to stop living in fear!” “We’ve been aiming a hose at this fire for hours and the fire still isn’t out but we’re tired of this! Let’s turn off the hose and give everyone a much needed rest!” “People who need continuing treatments for long-term/chronic health conditions have had enough and shouldn’t have to go through any more! They can’t get back to normal unless they stop those treatments!” Or as Becky put it: “My kid was in a car seat for the first half of this trip. They have been immobilized enough! Let the kids move and stretch! No one has been hurt! Time to let my kid move around the car unhampered.”
I have, as you know, a child with a medically-suppressed immune system. There is a new recommendation that certain groups, including his group, should get a third Covid-19 shot, in part because it seems the vaccine does not always “take” in people with compromised immune systems. This is something that happened with his chicken pox vaccine, incidentally: he received both shots, but the vaccine did not take: it is exactly as if he did not get the vaccine. So he relies on herd immunity for chicken pox. Luckily (the doctor mentioned that for him chicken pox would almost certainly result in a nice long hospitalization) there has not been a huge outbreak of chicken pox, since most parents in our area get their children the recommended vaccines—or rather they DID do that, before the Covid-19 vaccine was recommended.
It has felt as if there is no way to make a decision here, since things have been changing so rapidly—but now we are in our final days for choice-making. The national/international pandemic news is worse every day, and yet the parents in our district are ramping up their “We need to MOVE FORWARD now!!” messaging, saying that no one should have to take even the smallest, easiest, most effective precautions, and that they only good option for kids is for things to be NORMAL—as if “normal” were a valid and chooseable option that the rest of us were rejecting for no reason. And the school seems to agree with them, and also is not offering any remote-learning option, so our choices are: send him to school, knowing he might be just the same as if he were unvaccinated, except also with a compromised immune system (a sinus infection two years ago landed him in the hospital for five days and then another two days, and included two separate surgeries), where he will be surrounded by students who are unvaccinated and unmasked—or else…figure out something else, for his junior year of high school, which is the one that at least until recently has been considered one of the most important for college. …Which would of course seem trivial if he were to end up intubated in the hospital, or worse.