#school reopening

[justsomeantifas]

4:54 vs. 5:14. The mere threat of action mobilized a response in 20 minutes.

Strikes work. Withholding your labor works. Threatening working class mobilization works.

Let's get going.

[adriensaltprompts]

Don’t Let It Happen.

Posted July 26th, 2020. Everything covid deniers say in this are literal things people have told me to my face.

-

Mayor Bourgeoisie orders all the schools in the city to reopen.

Chloe, of course, will be staying home.

(Sabrina? Not so lucky.)

Adrien? Will also be staying home.

So will, it should be noted, every child of every rich family or

 government official. (and let’s be honest--all the government officials are rich, and let’s be honest, every one of them is corrupt)

The rest of the children?

Expendable.

(Archived read-more link)

Ladybug stands up and calls for the Mayor to rescind his decision, to look at the facts, to face the facts. If the schools reopen now, in the middle of the pandemic, children will die. Their teachers will die. Their families will die.

The poor will die.

The Mayor refuses, and condemns Ladybug for her speech.

She’s expecting to have an ally in Chat Noir, but to her shock and dismay--

He’s on the mayor’s side.

He wants the schools to reopen. He insists that keeping kids at home is cruel and unfair. That kids should be in school with their friends.

Ladybug tries to make him see sense--

But he doesn’t believe her. He doesn’t believe that Covid19 is as dangerous as people say. No one in his family has been affected, no one that he knows has been affected.

Ladybug tells him, in tears, that her grandmother got it, and died just a week ago.

And Chat Noir, isntead of showing sympathy, just scoffs.

“She didn’t die of Covid19,” he says scathingly, “She probably had an underlying problem? Right? That’s what killed her, not the coronavirus. No one has died from the corona virus. Hospitals are lying about how many people are dying from it so they can get more money. It’s not lethal, more people die of the flu than this. More people die from car accidents than this. The schools need to reopen. It’s important for kids to be in real schools with their friends. Kids don’t get the virus, they’ll be fine.”

And all Marinette can do is just stare at her partner, the person she thought she knew, the person she thought she could trust.

Chat Noir publicly stands against her, stands with the mayor, stands with all the people who don’t care about anyone but themselves. With all the people who would like to see the poor children sick and dying if it means the parents are free to go back to work.

Chat Noir would rather see Marinette and all her friends forced into classrooms too small to social distance in, into hallways cramped and crowded and not well enough ventilated, he would rather they die and watch their friends die and their teachers die and their family members die, all because it’s ‘good for them’ to be with their friends, it’s ‘better than being stuck at home with no human interaction’.

 Being dead is better than being home-schooled, as far as Chat Noir is concerned. And he’s pushing this ideology onto everyone. Forcing everyone to face the possibility of death, because as far as he is concerned, the corona virus isn’t fake, exactly, but it’s being blown out of proportion. It’s harmless. No one has died from the corona virus.

It doesn’t matter that Marinette tried to argue with him, tried to explain that if she pushed someone off a building, yes, it would be hitting the ground that killed them, but that doesn’t change the fact that if she hadn’t pushed them they wouldn’t have died.

Chat Noir doesn’t care that her grandmother died in the hospital, doesn’t care that she and her family haven’t even been able to hold a funeral for her, he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care about anyone but himself.

But Marinette does. She care about her friends. She cares about her teachers. She cares about everyone that would be at risk if the schools are allowed to reopen.

So she does everything in her power to stop it from happening.

As Ladybug, she gives speeches, she goes on the Ladyblog, she goes on every news station that will take her, she goes on the radio, she tells everyone not to listen to the Mayor. She tells everyone to keep their kids home, where they are safe, she tells the teachers and principals and janitors and secretaries and every single person involved in the running of schools to shut the schools down before they can open.

As Marinette, she talks to her friends, she shares the videos and recordings of her speeches as Ladybug, she and her parents hang banners from every inch of their house, and they get a giant flag to fly on Marinette’s balcony, and Marinette creates face masks that she gives away for free with slogans like “don’t stay in school” and “reopen the government before schools” and “if it’s safe for me, why isn’t it safe for Mayor Bourgeoisie?”

With the combined charisma and leadership skills of her civilian identity and her hero identity, she manages to get almost everyone in her school organized through social media, and as a protest, they all refuse to sign in to any of their online courses for a week straight.

Including many of the teachers.

This is just a preview of what will happen if the schools are reopened.

This is just a preview of the strike that is to come if they are forced by their government that doesn’t care whether they live or die only if they can be exploited for profit to return to cramped, underfunded buildings that will guarantee a tragedy.

If the schools reopen, none of them will go.

If the schools reopen, it will just be an empty building.

If the schools reopen, none of them will return.

Some of the students and teachers refuse to be a part of the protest. Adrien is one of them, and he’s sent Marientte several private messages trying to convince her to stop, to change her mind, to realize how irrational she’s being.

She tells him about her grandmother, and outlines what is going to happen if all of the children in the city are forced into tiny buildings and tinier classrooms together.

And his response is almost identical to the response Chat Noir gave her. The same science-denying, compassionless refrain of ‘no one has died from the coronavirus, hospitals are lying so they can weasel extra money, she had underlying causes, she would have died anyways’.

She sends screenshots of the conversation to first Alya and Nino, and then to the rest of the class.

She blocks Adrien from all of her social media, and whatever feelings she had for him are smothered by the pit of black rage that boils in her blood whenever she remembers what he said, whenever she remembers what Chat Noir said, whenever she remembers what the Mayor said, whenever she remembers what anyone who is downplaying and laughing about the pandemic has said.

They only care about themselves.

They only care about money.

The Mayor presses forwards. Threatens the schools with retaliation if they don’t open. Mr. Damocles makes an announcement that the school will be reopening on shedule, and that masks will be provided to students.

Marinette’s parents receive in the mail, a waiver, declaring that, with their signature, they will place no blame on the school or the city of Marinette contracts Covid19 and gets sick or died.

Her father wants to tear it to pieces, but her mother stops him. And she calls up every news station that Ladybug has appears on. And she sends them pictures of the waiver, she tells them exactly what the schools are doing. Her father calls the parents of all of Marinette’s friends and tells them not to sign the waiver, he tells them not to give in to the threats from the school or the government.

The protest, which was supposed to lask a week, extends to two.

Marinette gets her hands on the waiver, and brings it up to her room so she and Tikki can read it together.

And the pit of rage deepens with every word she reads.

Marinette lives right across the street from her school.

Tikki is the one to say the words, “Let’s go, Marinette.”

And Marinette replies, “Tikki, spots on!”

And they go out.

As Ladybug.

First to Marinette’s school. 

They make sure no one is inside.

They use her Lucky Charm, and get a vacuum. She turns it on.

And then they destroy the school.

Use the yoyo the slice through the concrete like it’s butter, like the yoyo is a lightsaber. They use her supernatural strength to turn that concrete into dust.

Every square inch of the building is reduced, very quickly, into dust. Dust which gets sucked up the instant it’s small enough into the Lucky Charm vacuum, so that it can’t get blown around by the wind and pose a danger to anyone or anything.

By the time she is done, there is nothing except different colored patches of tiled flooring to show that a building ever stood where her school used to be.

She turns the vacuum off.

She goes back to her house to detransform and retransform beore her timer counts down, and now that she is retransformed and Tikki re-fueled, they have no timer, though the Lucky Charm remains.

Then she moves onto the next school, a few blocks away.

Chat Noir shows up to stop her, enraged far beyond anything she would think reasonable or deserved, and it doesn’t take any effort at all to subdue him. She’s fought him too many times to ever lose to him. And without her there to stop him from making mistakes, he’s brash and bullheaded and wouldn’t know strategy if it hit him over the head. She tied him up with her yoyo and snaps his baton in half within thirty seconds flat.

And after thinking about it for a second, she reaches for his Miraculous.

Because Chat Noir is not the sort of person she can trust to help her, and this latest stunt is the straw the breaks the camel’s back. She could handle it when it was just her being affected, but now he’s putting the lives of everyone at risk, more blatantly than ever before, and that, that she cannot take.

For once in his life, Chat Noir does something intelligent.

Before she can grab his Miraculous to take it from him, he casts Cataclysm.

But unlike him, she isn’t on a timer. And he has no way of escaping.

It takes exactly five minutes for him to be forcibly transformed back, and yes, she’s surprised to see Adrien, but not as surprised or distress as she would have been if he hadn’t already shown his true colors. If all her friendly feelings towards him hadn’t already turned to burning hatred.

She takes the ring with ease, though he puts up a struggle, and the exhausted Plagg disappears into wherever Kwami go when their Miraculous isn’t being powered by a human soul.

She puts the ring in her yoyo rather than equipping it. Plagg deserves a chance to rest.

She leaves Adrien, crying, shouting, raging, there, in the ruins of a school whose name she doesn’t know, the sort of deathtrap he would sentence her and all of her friends and millions more kids they will never meet to, while he and his only friend, Chloe, had the privileged of staying home safe.

And she moves on to the next school.

And she doesn’t stop until every school in Paris is destroyed. And the only reason she stops when she gets to the invisible boundaries separating Paris from other nearby cities is that the sun is rising, and she’s tired, and she’s hungry.

She has time to go back home and sleep and eat.

The schools aren’t set to reopen for another three months.

The next day, there’s nothing to stop her from going out of Paris and destroying every school building she comes across, still with that first Lucky Charm, still with the ability to reset everything back to the way it was. But not yet.

And she finds, when she reaches the next city, that people have watched her, and taken her example to heart.

The civilians are already destroying the schools, so that they cannot be reopened. So that their children cannot be sacrificed and their blood used to oil the machine that is capitalism.

And it doesn’t take long before other cities, other countries, start doing the same.

Because buildings can be rebuilt.

But you cannot bring people back from the dead.The only way to fix a tragedy is to prevent it from happening in the first place.

If schools are reopened before it is actually safe, children will die. Teachers will die. Children will infect their families. Everything will get worse.

Do not send your children to school.

Do not allow your school to be opened.

Do not go to school.

Don’t let it happen.

Protest. Strike. Graffiti the walls with inappropriate things that must be removed before the building can reopen. Throw every wrench you can into the cogs. 

Do not sign the waiver they send you that says you will not hold the school or the city accountable if your child gets sick or dies.

Hold them accountable.

And don’t let it happen at all.

Do not get in the car when your parents try to drive you to school.

Do not get on the bus.

They can punish you, but you will be alive.

Organize with your friends, you classmates. Stage walk-outs. Refuse to enter the building.

Do not let the schools reopen in the middle of this fucking pandemic. If you are a teacher, principle, secretary, nurse, JANITOR, strike. If you are a student, protest. If you are a parent, keep your kids home.

WE have the power to stop this tragedy from happening.

All we have to do is use it.

Do what is right. Even if it’s scary. Even if you’ll get in trouble.

The alternative is worse.

We don’t have a superhero to save us. We only have ourselves. And we can stop it if we work together.

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

DfE's Covid helpline goes down days before schools reopen

Department for Education’s Covid-19 unable to take any calls from school leaders due to technical issues - with just days to go before schoo

I swear if you put all of this in a political sitcom, people would slate it as being unrealistic.

Would you really trust this shower of incompetents with your child's safety?

[madness-in-the-middle]

I think some parents and community members need a reality check

Many parents and people in the community seem to be under the impression that schools are going to be perfectly safe to return to because of all the extra precautions and equipment. The following is an account from a middle school teacher who teaches at a public school that is normally populated by about 1500 kids. We’re pretty middle of the road. Not a “bad” enough school to get the heavy investment of state and federal money, but not “good” enough that we have a bunch of parent and community donations. We rely solely on what is provided by the district.

The dristrict/state promised:

Desks would be 6ft apart as much as possible

Class sizes would be smaller to limit cross contact between kids

Masks would always be on

PPE and sanitizarion equipment would be provided in excess

Facilities would constantly be cleaned

Mass gatherings (lunches/breakfasts) would be limited and restructured from years past

The reality so far:

Classes exactly the same size if not bigger than last year.

Desks don’t even have 1 ft between them because of how many have to be in a room

Children being allowed exemptions/no punitive actions being allowed to be enforced for kids refusing to wear masks

One gallon of hand sanitizer per classroom

No gloves

Two 50-packs of hand sanitizing wipes per teacher. To be clear, we are supposed to sanitize every desk between every class. These won’t even get us through day one. We were not provided with any other surface cleaners.

No soap or paper towels for hand washing in classrooms

Lunch and breakfast procedures were only released today, the Friday before our physical return to campus and they are exactly the same as previous years.

There are no class “pods” or staggered transitions. All students will flood campus at the same time in a mad dash to change classes. Oh but don’t worry, they have one minute less of passing time.

Some side notes that are already concerning regarding cleanliness and safety:

With only half of the staff on campus and no children in the building, the classrooms’ trash hasn’t been emptied all week. The teachers have been required to be on campus unless we have an exemption so there is trash.

The staff bathroom is already out of toilet paper and paper towels and has been for two days. I can’t imagine what the student bathrooms will be like

The FM mic that needs to be worn for deaf/hard of hearing students is supposed to be shared between each of the students’ 7 teachers and just wiped off with alcohol wipes in betweeen. I have yet to be provided with these wipes.

We have been told we have to be out of the very limited sanitation supplies before we can request more, but it will take about 2 days for them to arrive

Teachers were given 1 single layer nylon face mask each

We aren’t allowed to send students to the nurse or front office and instead have to call and have someone come to our classroom. As of 4:45 when I left campus today, the Friday before our Monday return, the phone and intercom system in our building wasn’t working

The ac is not working in an entire building on campus and is also out in many individual classrooms. (I teach in south Florida where opening a window for airflow is not really an option due to rain and heat)

I understand that public schools do in fact provide a picnic funded service and need to have an option to be open. But don’t bullshit everyone and lie to constituents by saying it’s going to be safe when everyone who has ever worked in a public school in any capacity knows it’s just not possible. Parents don’t know what they’re sending their kids back to. Tell the truth so people can actually make an informed decision.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Why does Biden continue Trump’s anti-people policies?

By Greg Butterfield

New Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration is laying a course to continue many of Republican Donald Trump’s anti-people policies, only with some cosmetic changes. Why?

Those capitalist politicians elected to high office, whether a Trump or a Biden, do so with the expectation that they will carry out the interests of the capitalist system. And while a large part of the ruling class tired of Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic and the economic crisis, they still love many of the policies he put in place, like deregulation of industry, tax cuts for the rich, and strengthening police powers.

So Biden, the new “administrator,” is expected to carry on. As he told a Wall Street fundraising event during his campaign, “Nothing would fundamentally change.”

That’s good news for Big Capital. For the rest of us, not so much.

[robertreich]

Betsy DeVos’ Deadly Plan to Reopen Schools

Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos is heading the administration’s effort to force schools to reopen in the fall for in-person instruction. What’s her plan to reopen safely? She doesn’t have one. 

Rather than seeking additional federal funds, she’s using this pandemic to further her ploy to privatize education — threatening to withhold federal funds from public schools that don’t reopen. Repeatedly pressed by journalists during TV appearances, DeVos can’t come up with a single mechanism or guideline for reopening schools safely. She can’t even articulate what authority the federal government has to unilaterally withhold funds from school districts — a decision that’s made at the state and local level, or by Congress. But when has the Constitution stopped the Trump administration from trying to do whatever it wants? 

DeVos is following Trump’s lead — prematurely reopening the economy, which he sees as key to his re-election but is causing a resurgence of the virus. Let’s get something straight: Every single parent, teacher, and student wants to be able to return to in-person instruction in the fall — but only if no one’s life is put at risk. 

Districts need more funding, not less, to implement the CDC’s guidelines. Given that state and local governments are already cash-strapped, it’s estimated that K-12 schools need at least $245 billion in additional funding to put safety precautions in place — funding that Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration refuse to give. One might think an education secretary would be studying what kind of safety precautions would work best, and seeking emergency funding for those safeguards. Not DeVos. Just like her boss in the Oval Office, she’s been hard at work shafting working families to advance her personal agenda. In late April, she issued rules for how states should use the $13 billion allocated in the CARES Act for schools. Her rules would divert millions of dollars away from low-income schools into the coffers of wealthy private schools. It’s such a blatant violation of federal law that several states are suing her and her department. DeVos’ entire tenure has centered on shafting low-income students and their families — the very people she’s supposed to protect. She has repeatedly empowered the predatory for-profit college industry at the expense of the students they prey upon. Why? She has considerable financial stakes that are rife with conflicts of interest. Her financial investments are a web of holdings in for-profit colleges and student loan collectors. When DeVos took office, she repealed an Obama-era rule imposing stricter regulations and higher standards on for-profit colleges. She also stopped canceling the debts of students defrauded by these institutions — a move that has prompted 23 states to bring a lawsuit against her. In the process, she was even held in contempt of court for violating a federal court order. Now, in the middle of the worst public health crisis in more than a century, she’s jeopardizing the safety of our students, teachers, parents, bus drivers, and custodians, while rerouting desperately needed public school funds towards the private schools she's always championed. Remember, when you vote against Trump this November — you’re voting against her, too. It’s a win-win.

[rjalker]

Buildings can be rebuilt.

But you cannot bring people back from the dead.

The only way to fix a tragedy is to prevent it from happening in the first place.

If schools are reopened before it is actually safe, children will die. Teachers will die. Children will infect their families. Everything will get worse.

Do not send your children to school.

Do not allow your school to be opened.

Do not go to school.

Don’t let it happen.

Protest. Strike. Graffiti the walls with inappropriate things that must be removed before the building can reopen. Throw every wrench you can into the cogs.

Do not sign the waiver they send you that says you will not hold the school or the city accountable if your child gets sick or dies.

Hold them accountable.

And don’t let it happen at all.

Do not get in the car when your parents try to drive you to school.

Do not get on the bus.

They can punish you, but you will be alive.

Organize with your friends, you classmates. Stage walk-outs. Refuse to enter the building.

Do not let the schools reopen in the middle of this fucking pandemic. If you are a teacher, principle, secretary, nurse, JANITOR, strike. If you are a student, protest. If you are a parent, keep your kids home.

WE have the power to stop this tragedy from happening.

All we have to do is use it.

Do what is right. Even if it’s scary. Even if you’ll get in trouble.

The alternative is worse.

We don’t have a superhero to save us. We only have ourselves. And we can stop it if we work together.

[dudeinthestacks]

Yo teachers (and other school staff)!

Do you feel confident in your school’s reopening plan to keep your students safe? And you safe? 

Are your unions or staff in your buildings/districts planning any resistance to this push to reopen schools? 

How many of you have considered retiring/resigning/requesting a sabbatical?