As you might expect, I have been understandably inundated with emails and calls from parents, students, and community members about COVID-19, NTI, in-person instruction, and athletics. Up to this point, I have personally responded to almost every communication. While I will continue to read every email and listen to every voicemail, I can simply no longer respond to everyone personally. What follows is an explanation of my approach to the issues. If you have specific concerns please discuss them with your child’s teacher(s), coach(es), and school principal. If that does not work, please contact the assistant superintendent who works with your child’s school. The contact information and list of schools for each assistant superintendent is at this link.
No one in JCPS is under any illusion that NTI is anywhere near as effective as in-person instruction. We face this fact every day. With NTI, we are doing our absolute best in an unprecedented situation that has already killed tens of thousands of Americans, with tens of thousands more almost surely to come. In addition to having a regular paying job and being a member of the Jefferson County Board of Education, I am also the primary caretaker for our fourth-grader during the day, so I know first-hand how challenging NTI is for parents and families. My kid wants to go back to in-person school. In fact, last night he asked me to vote to let him go back. He also regularly instructs me to, “Tell Marty (Pollio) that NTI is too glitchy.” I deeply understand the frustrations families have because I experience all the same frustrations. Unless someone is doing their own job while trying to help their child with NTI, they just can’t understand how hard this is on families. It’s beyond hard. It’s basically impossible. I also recognize the validity of the arguments about the negative effects that a lack of in-person instruction might have on educational, social, and psychological child development.
The problem is that if we return to in-person schooling anytime soon, we will consign many of our fellow Louisvillians to serious illness, extended hospitalizations, lifelong pulmonary and cardiac problems, and death. As State Health Commissioner Dr. Steven Stack recently reported to the Kentucky Board of Education: “As we allow more activity to happen there is more disease. As there is more disease there is more death. We know this will happen.” And when people die from COVID-19 they suffer and die alone, isolated from loved ones. In short, even though NTI is a pale imitation of in-person learning, there is no workable alternative to NTI right now.
Among the many challenging things about COVID-19 is that there are many things about it we simply do not know and accepted scientific knowledge about the virus changes regularly. However, there seems to be an emerging consensus regarding a few key findings.
- As Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, states: kids may be less at risk of infection, “but not meaningfully different enough that I would take solace in it or use it for decision making.”
- As Dr. Stack states: “Kids very much get the disease and spread the disease. The viral load in infected children is higher than people in intensive care units. They definitely can infect other people.”
- As Dr. Megan Ranney, an expert in adolescent health at Brown University, states: “Death is not the only severe outcome. Many adults seem to have debilitating symptoms for weeks or months after they first fall ill.”
- Dr. Stack adds, “we cannot be confident at this time that negative COVID-19 health outcomes for kids will be rare occurrences.”
- COVID-19 induced myocarditis appears to be a legitimate danger to the long-term health of children, and could lead to sudden cardiac arrest in student athletes with undiagnosed myocarditis, which, as Dr. Stack notes, requires several expensive tests to identify.
If we return to school, we will be experimenting with children’s lives and long-term health.
Moreover, Louisville’s infections are more heavily concentrated in low-income and African American zip codes. We know that our neighbors in these groups already suffer worse consequences from COVID-19. As a result, if JCPS makes a decision that leads to more infections, our actions will have an especially negative impact on people in these groups. On top of this, many of our students in these communities live with older caretakers who are at much greater risk. Thus, many students from already challenging environments will lose their family members and caretakers, and many more of their families will take on mountains of medical debt that come with prolonged hospital stays and lifelong health problems.
If there is one thing public health experts seem to agree on, it’s that the positive rate in a community needs to be five percent or below to even consider a return to in-person instruction. The rate in Louisville has been at 10 percent for over two weeks. In fact, Louisville is now in the midst of what the CDC categorizes as an “uncontrolled spread” of COVID-19 that is overwhelming Louisville’s public health capacity. “Uncontrolled spread” is the most serious of the four different categories the CDC uses to designate the extent of the pandemic within a given area. Recently, Louisville Health Department Director Dr. Sarah Moyer warned of an “alarming” spike in local cases. “We have a quickly spreading wildfire on our hands,” Moyer has said, “and people seem oblivious to the flames.”
I will look for every opportunity to support a return to in-person instruction, but as an elected leader in our community in whom people have placed their trust, I cannot remain oblivious to the flames. Unless public health advice changes, I will almost surely not support in-person learning until the local positive rate is consistently below five percent. Sadly, local school districts have to rely on federal, state, and local governments to control the spread of the pandemic and, in my view, no governmental entity is doing nearly enough.
In addition, while the rate of COVID-19 transmission is so high I simply cannot ask teachers to choose between doing their jobs on the one hand and risking their own health and that of their families on the other. Many JCPS teachers have children of their own whom they must assist with NTI while they attempt to teach dozens of other people’s children using pedagogies that are not as good, using methods with which they are not as experienced, and using tools that are not always reliable. Teachers have long been overworked and underpaid, and they are especially so now. Asking them to risk their lives to do the jobs they love would not only be cruel, it would also drive many from the profession, worsening the nationwide teacher shortage to which JCPS is not immune.
I read up on COVID-19 and schooling every single day and I continually weigh what seem like hundreds of different factors against each other. Someone else sitting in my seat on the board may weigh the same factors and come to a different conclusion. However, my analysis of the ever-evolving information leads me to believe I am making the right decision in postponing in-person instruction.
JCPS staff and families are going above and beyond to do our part and many governmental figures from both political parties are failing to do theirs. It is a moral outrage that kids can’t be in school and parents and teachers are having to bear this burden so people can go out to eat at a restaurant and do other trivial activities that could be suspended. Moreover, it is deeply unfortunate that many private schools are acting in what I believe to be a deeply irresponsible and even unethical manner by holding in-person instruction. This makes me angry, but the answer is not for JCPS to adopt their irresponsible and unethical ways.
Though I was in the minority of a 4-3 vote on September 8, I also voted to suspend all JCPS sports activities except golf and pod conditioning where it is fairly easy to social distance. I did so after listening carefully to Dr. Stack’s testimony before the Kentucky Board of Education. I challenge anyone to assess the evidence Dr. Stack presented and come to the conclusion that we should even be discussing opening schools at the moment. For me, the evidence he presented also cast serious enough doubt on our ability to conduct activities safely that I voted to suspend most JCPS sports.
All over the country, we have seen that the resumption of in-person activities leads to flare-ups of COVID-19 even in the presence of strict guidelines, which then leads to the cancellation of activities. Thus, I can only conclude that it would be arrogant of me and of JCPS to believe we are somehow able to manage a situation that few if any other entities have been able to manage, including entities that are much better resourced than JCPS. Among my many concerns about in-person athletics is that, because it will almost surely lead to flare-ups of COVID-19, sports will prolong the period that we cannot return to in-person instruction. I was once a JCPS high school athlete. I love sports and I know how beneficial they are for kids. However, academics must come first.
Dealing with a completely unprecedented situation is not something I expected to face when I ran for school board. I fear that because no one has any experience we can draw on to help us make our way through this, many of us are too slow to adapt our thinking to a fundamentally changed reality. It’s not easy to adapt. Many of our foundational assumptions about how the world works simply no longer apply. I am trying my best to adapt, and I have spent countless hours researching, analyzing, and listening to feedback about COVID-19. Even if you don’t agree with me, I hope you see that I’m making decisions solely on my evaluation of the best existing knowledge we have about the virus.
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