Unpacking Truth

Is The Tide Turning?

This was yesterday’s post…not sure why it only delivered to 10 inboxes. My apologies if you are receiving this twice.

I am not going to even try to pontificate why the Left leaning newspapers are going to write articles shining a positive light on how school districts that re-opened, with minimal restrictions flourished during the nonsense of the last two years. I came across this article in the Washington Post and I just about had to pick my jaw off the floor. Why now admit these schools were right? Why highlight they were in red leaning school districts?

I lived this in real time with my children. My kids’ school opened for classes Aug 4, 2020 and they were in person with no school closures for the entire ‘pandemic’. Sure there were cases of COVID but no student or teacher was hospitalized. I saw my kids happy to be with friends, enjoying learning and participating in sports and music lessons. But then I also got to witness what my patients were going through. I heard from kids about how they hated online learning. How this missed their friends and wished they could be in school. And, once they were back in school, I learned how they hated masks and how they did not even know who their friends were because they could not see their faces. It made me sad to hear these stories, especially knowing that within the same town, my children were safely going to school and enjoying learning while being with friends in a mostly mask free environment.

As school systems around the country were battening down for their first remote start-of-school in the fall of 2020, the Lewis-Palmer district here was embarking on another kind of experiment: Elementary students would be in class full time, sitting maskless at communal tables. The band program would resume in-person classes, saxophonists and flutists playing a few feet apart. The high school football teams would practice and compete.

While most of the nation kept students at home for part or all of the last academic year, these schools in the suburbs of Colorado Springs, like thousands of others around the country, opened with the overwhelming majority of students in their seats. Masks were optional in elementary school. Although middle- and high-schoolers began with hybrid learning, in November, high school-aged students with significant special education needs were back in-person five days a week.

Remember this at a school in Washington state??

The Washington Post goes on to even admit that it was the teachers’ unions who fought reopening and referenced the damage done to learning and mental health:

In the country’s largest school systems, such as those in New York City, Los Angeles, D.C. and Chicago, teacher unions and concerned parents fought plans to reopen. Public health officials warned that social distancing would save lives, and schools responded by devising hybrid programs or simply sticking with virtual learning. But, over time, these measures also imposed costs: Today, students are contending with significant learning loss and mental health issues.

In addition to the harms caused to children’s education and their mental health, we have seen a huge increase in the number of children being referred for speech delays and impairments from not being able to see faces to learn proper enunciation. Some speech therapists are seeing an increase in referrals from pediatricians up 364%.

Yet thousands of school districts — typically small ones in conservative-leaning counties — reacted to the pandemic like Lewis Palmer District 38 did. Officials in this largely White and affluent school district of 6,600 students near the U.S. Air Force Academy argue they took the right approach to reopening schools. No child was hospitalized with the virus; two school system employees were admitted, though contact tracers did not determine where they contracted the virus, school officials said.

I really hate that this has become a red/blue issue. However, after studying much on how the two sides of the political aisle use different parts of their brains to make decisions, goes along way in explaining this madness! One side thinks through things critically which requires using the frontal cortex to evaluate true risks and benefits. The other side makes decisions based on feelings without a true assessment of long term implications.

“We didn’t just exist through the pandemic,” said Mark Belcher, director of communications for the school district. “We made progress through the pandemic.”

Still, the district took liberties. The El Paso Health Department, for example, “strongly encouraged” children 10 and younger to wear masks. Lewis-Palmer decided to require masks only in hallways for this age group, and it allowed them to go maskless in classrooms. Officials relied on a state constitution that gives school boards complete control over their schools.

“We wanted it to be as normal as possible, and children wearing masks is not normal,” said Chris Taylor, president of the Lewis-Palmer school board. “The focus of the board was to give parents as much choice as possible — and children could wear masks if they wanted.”

Lewis-Palmer students in band practice…

That SAYS IT ALL!! And this is why we can’t let the distractors with the Russia-Ukraine war pull our attention away from the hell we have lived through these past two years. We need to continue to understand the disastrous outcomes of the lockdowns and school closures so we NEVER DO THIS AGAIN! Children’s lives and livelihoods were sacrificed by the fearful and the powerful for a disease that would never harm them.

Many of us knew that the lockdowns would have little benefit to stop the spread of an aerosolized virus. We also understood through critical thought that the collateral damage of closing businesses and schools would total an amount of destruction likely never to be fully comprehended. Perhaps the Washington Post is trying to get on the right side of history before it’s too late. Even institutions like Johns Hopkins are publishing research that supports lockdowns as a complete social and economic failure.

While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.

Thanks Captain Obvious!