I would sign up to bring cupcakes and maybe coffee.
Not good cupcakes. Like Giant Eagle ones.
Maybe just Little Debbie Swiss rolls.
You could unroll the swiss roll and divide it among several students.
The point is, I'd be willing to throw small amounts of money at the problem, but not deal directly with children.
The treats were for the substitute teachers, not the kids.
They just cancelled public school here for the next two days. We're supposed to have an ice storm tonight. Look at us! We're WINTER.
Good luck with the whole electric thing.
Also Ace came to school with me for the past two days, since she tested positive for Covid last week. So this week is a big fucking wash now. Today is the only day where I can control how many people are talking to me at one time.
1. The mental health thing is comp'ucated, because suicide attempts among kids are higher when school is in person. Plus, some black families feel safer with remote schooling. Also, when kids live in hosueholds with vulnerable family members, remote school should be an option. The parents should not have to become home schoolers.
2. My new town has a billboard advertising for substitute teachers and part-time employees for the after s hook programs. In Canada, Tim's mother did substitute teaching, including a few long-term (6 month) supply positions, but she was a fully qualified teacher. They moved around, so she dropped out of the labor market and could not get a permanent position in the city they lived in since the 80s unless she wanted to teach in a classroom for kids with severe developmental disabilities. In New England, they will accept any warm body. I did it a few times in Maine.
They really ought to have a few teachers who are benefits-eligible and in the union who can fill in as needed instead of relying on people who are willing to take a day or two of work and don't need more.
The mental health thing is comp'ucated, because suicide attempts among kids are higher when school is in person.
Really?! We had a really distressing number of suicides last year, so I'd extrapolated the opposite without actually having any idea.
10.1: Do you have a source for that? I find stories like this instead. In pandemic's isolation, an alarming number of teenage girls are attempting suicide https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/01/teenage-girls-suicide-pandemic-covid/
10: comp'ucated Is that a typo? Or are you making fun of how I talk?
Both could be true. Attempts up, completions down.
I honestly think this is just something where you can't really do anything, more money or not. If literally 50% of people get sick the same month nothing is going to function well. It doesn't matter how much money you have. The subs will get sick. The person arranging the subs will get sick. Just accept that it's a lost month. Also at least let the kids watch movies in the auditorium.
The pandemic is obviously rough on lots of people's mental health, but this month is going to suck for kids no matter what we do. I don't think mental health is a significant reason for keeping schools open. It's because parents need child care, and it's totally fine that that's the reason, we don't have to pretend everything is done for the sake of the children.
Suicide and other forms of violence have gone way up during the pandemic within the university system where I work. I believe this is true if not everywhere at least all of the places for which I've seen data (which isn't great, because reporting, particularly while institutions are remote, is terribly spotty). Regardless, I'm absolutely certain the solution is more dilettantism: in this case, parents volunteering to teach or be custodians or whatever, so that schools can remain open even if their workforces are decimated by COVID. Sarcasm aside, I know that de Toqueville admired the American mania for volunteerism, but maybe it's not the worst idea to pay professionals a decent wage to do important jobs.
11 and 12: Here's a twitter thread from a suicidologist.
https://twitter.com/tylerblack32/status/1486111652076527623?s=21
Going off of memory, I think that there is evidence that eating disorders got worse, and some girls engaged in more acts of self harm that were not necessarily suicide attempts.
15: But that's what's so gross. There's an entire Koch-family funded "must have schools open now" program which seems to be about schools as child care so that the parents can work but cloaks it in the language of "school is the most precious thing ever" except when teachers unions ask for more money to make things safer. For example, the economist Emily Oster at Brown has been vocal about this, and she is funded by the Mercatus center at George Mason University.
The pandemic is tough for everyone, but kids don't exist in a vacuum. Kids also struggle when high transmission levels lead to their caregivers' deaths.
See also https://twitter.com/tylerblack32/status/1286713750624641027?s=21
13: Is that sarcasm, peep? You know I'm a terrible typist.
20: Just silliness, mostly. It's unusual for a typo to get all the way to the punctuation.
I agree with 10.1. In the UK AIMHMHB suicide rates dropped significantly during the first year of the pandemic - and the CDC said the same was true in the US. https://www.statnews.com/2021/11/16/the-pandemic-didnt-increase-suicides-that-shouldnt-be-a-surprise/
In SE England, I noticed a lot more pressure on CAMHS beds once the schools reopened- even more than you normally get at the end of holidays. Mostly eating disorders.
This really shouldn't be surprising for anyone who actually remembers school.
I'm mostly just impressed that conservatives have embraced the cause of teenage mental health and suicide prevention. Seems like a real change of heart for them. I wonder what other vulnerable people they might start caring about.
22.1: From ajay's first link
It isn't yet fully understood why, but one leading explanation is that people inherently want to pull together during turbulent times.
That doesn't seem like an accurate description of the response to the pandemic.
22.1 And in a purely pragmatic way, spending more time at home may have made it harder to attempt suicide. In 2020, with many people stuck at home, there were far more people around to intervene. If someone did attempt suicide, there was a greater chance that someone would find and rescue them.
This factor might work against suicides among teens and for suicides among adults living alone.
I don't think mental health is a significant reason for keeping schools open.
What the fuck? Maybe you just mean this in the sense that "if schools can't function for a month due to omicron, shutting them down for a month is no biggie," which I can get.
But dismissing the mental health of a plurality, if not a majority, of kids for nonexistent personal or public health benefits is just ghastly. Community spread is completely untethered to in-person schooling, and the risk to vaccinated children is microscopic. Tens of millions of children spiraling into depression isn't something I'm willing to wave away, nor do I think we need a body count from suicides for that to be true.
I just don't think it's going to make a big difference. I think people are overstating the impact that any decisions around school are going to have on mental health. Everyone's anxious and depressed because of the Omicron wave, not because they're home or at school.
But I think lots of people want to invent kid-centered reasons for their position on opening or closing because otherwise it sounds selfish, but I think it's mostly motivated reasoning.
Of course if I thought the decision one way or the other actually had a large impact then that would be a huge factor.
28: JRoth - depending on where you are, it is not true that community spread is untethered yo in-person schooling. I've been following some ID docs in Iowa as well as an epidemiologist in Toronto who present Dara that it is tied to school transmission.
Also, not all kids are vaccinated, not ALL kids are eligible for vaccination, and we still have an obligation to protect those kids through massive mitigation. It's not their fault that their parents didn't vaccinate them.
26: Of course, but the total picture is mixed.
The data I've seen indicates that there was a substantial drop in child suicides/attempts from the onset of the pandemic (March 2020) to summer 2020, followed by a marked increase afterwards. The "closing the schools is actually good for mental health because schools suck" argument seems to generally ignore what happened after the first few months.
The deseasonalized time series results showed that the number of suicide attempts among children decreased from 12.2 at the lowest level (July to August) in 2019, to 7.8 during the first lockdown period (March to April) in 2020 in France (−36%; Figure; Table). However, the number of suicide attempts among children increased substantially from the lowest and highest levels of 12.2 (July to August) and 22.5 (November to December) in 2019, to 38.4 just before the second lockdown initiation (September and October) and 40.5 (early November to December) in 2020 (+116% and +299%, respectively).
At emergency rooms in 38 children's hospitals across the nation, the number of suicide and self-injury cases in the first three quarters of 2021 was 47% higher among 5- to 8-year-olds and 182% higher among 9- to 12-year-olds than they were for the same period in 2016, according to statistics compiled by the Children's Hospital Association.
In May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescents aged 12-17 years, especially girls. During February 21-March 20, 2021, suspected suicide attempt ED visits were 50.6% higher among girls aged 12-17 years than during the same period in 2019; among boys aged 12-17 years, suspected suicide attempt ED visits increased 3.7%.
Of course it's not at all obvious that these statistics have any bearing to whether school should be open or not. What may be more relevant in discussing costs and benefits is that schools have generally not been closed in Europe.
To build off 33.1, this tweet that was part of the thread linked in 18 seems oddly excited and triumphalist about the left part of the chart (March - June 2020) and doesn't seem to notice anything troubling about the right side of the chart (September 2020 - Feb 2021).
Community spread is completely untethered to in-person schooling
Funny how my kid brought Omicron home from school....
My kid just brought home lots of badly done art.
I guess there's a snow-thing tomorrow.
Utah's governor signed an executive order allowing state employees to use leave time to go volunteer as subs.
33: DB, it's odd that they are comparing the numbers in 2021 to 2016 numbers. How do the 2020 rates compare to 2019 rates?
42: unfortunately no one seems to publish any actual data, as opposed to citing unlinked studies in advocacy press releases. But everything I can find on Google indicates that the "COVID is actually good for kids' mental health" story hasn't been supported by the data for at least 18 months now.
43: Nobidy is saying COVID is good for kids mental health - except possibly some bullied kids or kids with severe disabilities who had better access through ZOOM, but I believe that suicide rates went up between 2016 and 2019, which, by definition, is for reasons unrelated to COVID, and we are now close to the 2019 rates.
Your point that lots of people aren't publishing actual data and just advocacy press releases is what I'm really frustrated by, and frankly, there are certain people (Lucy McBride, Monica Gandhi, and Joseph Allen among them) I no longer trust to be honest about the data.
15.1: If literally 50% of people get sick the same month nothing is going to function well. I think Nate Silver's claim is that by acknowledging this you're more morally obtuse (or possibly politically inept; he danced back and forth when people started at him like he had just beshat himself) than the architects of the Iraq War.
Yeah it's super-frustrating and I suspect a lot of cherry-picking is going on. People who write press releases aren't interested if the data doesn't fit a narrative.
I think the thread I linked in 34 was pretty tilted, and I saw some of that perspective echoed in 22, which is why I spoke up, but I guess a more accurate description of the point I am trying to make is just that we shouldn't necessarily be sanguine about kids mental health these days. (I hadn't realized how seasonal / tied-to-school suicide has been, so I did learn something.)
46: I'm not sanguine. Though I remember some young people with schizophrenia saying Covid wasn't the worst. Their initial psychotic break was.
I don't think that in-school or out-if/school is the major issue. Kids with parents stressed by economic insecurity due to the pandemic are also going to be stressed.
And look, I don't know, and I don't think anyone really does. And that's the problem. I think the triumphalist tone is due to his being an expert lectured at by non-experts who pretend to be experts because they are MDs who are really just advancing an agenda.
Which agenda ignores that COVID is not necessarily benign in kids. You have the risk not only of hospitalization and death but also Ling COVID.
New NEA poll of teachers
-- 55% say they will leave teaching sooner than they had originally planned
--90% say that feeling burned out is a serious problem
-- 80% report unfilled job openings have led to more work obligations for those left
Granted, it would be good to see results from before the pandemic to compare* since I bet those views predate the pandemic for many; however the Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 567,000 fewer educators in America's public schools today than there were before the pandemic.
*For instance a recent poll trumpeted high rates of fears about inflation, but someone compared it to a 2013 poll and it was not that different then. Some concerns like inflation and crime rate perceptions are pre-loaded (and context that is almost never added in media reports).
Even before the pandemic we basically lost all our math ed majors. We used to be able to run special classes for math ed majors with 15-20 people in them, and it dropped to like 5. Absolutely there's a major teaching crisis, and covid has made it worse. (Though it helps a little bit that the demographic cliff means fewer teachers are needed.) I think my brother is likely to quit teaching soon, due to absolutely insane documentation requirements (he has a weird job where he has 7 distinct preps every day which makes already onerous paperwork requirements just ridiculous).
Have they tried giving teachers more forms to fill out?
I should read all the comments before commenting.
A good friend left teaching in exurban DC because of the way teachers were treated in 2020-21. This is a person with a master's from Georgetown, a second master's in education policy, and a commitment to education greater than the heart issues that would have kept a lesser person out of the classroom.
Covid denial and the political support for that denial at local, state and national level drove her out. Even spending more money --Â definitely not a sure thing although her area is very prosperous -- isn't going to fix that.
Would it help to levy personal fines against teachers who mentioned evolution?
My sister is planning to quit teaching high school so she can become a scrum master. Better pay and less abuse.
I am curious if we'll find a divergence in adult suicide rates by whether they worked from home or had to keep going to a populated workplace.