Last week during Governor Murphy’s COVID update, he stressed that parents were calling mental health hotlines about how their child was depressed and filled with anxiety, particularly in the morning before school.
In addition, today I got a call from a teacher about how she is breaking up fights in school and the kids are so depressed and angry. She has no idea how to help them. She is feeling the stress also. Why are we doing this to our school kids when they are more likely to be harmed by so many other things in life? Kids between 5 and 17 had 18 times more suicides and 5 times more drownings over the past 20 months than COVID deaths.
With the first and second wave behind us, there is no expectation that there will be a significant rise in child deaths from COVID. When can we get these kids back to a normal, mentally healthy childhood?
Even now, All people in NJ are more likely to die from heart disease or cancer.
There isn’t any other mitigation strategy but the “swiss cheese” method to combat COVID19 in schools? That is the concept of trying a bunch of ideas with large holes in it, in the hopes that something will work. Meanwhile our kids are suffering. Besides masks, schools are not allowing students to interact with each other, keeping them 6 feet or 3 apart, and constant quarantine of healthy kids. Schools have all different hair brained strategies like having kids eat lunch on the ground outside and inside, not allowing locker use, one way walking in the hallways and plexiglass at desks.
This isn’t science anymore. Its superstition.
Instead about trying all kinds of goofy stuff, what about HEPA filters? That’s what the restaurants and casinos used to open back up without restriction. Each of the school districts received millions of dollars in ESSR funding. What are they doing with that money besides finding new ways to torture the staff and students?
The mental gymnastics you have to go through to justify that swiss cheese works for schools is tiring.