I’d guess only the white people even want the 1950s back, and many white people would opt out, given the choice. June will not be helping the Beaver with his homework after vacuuming in her heels and pearls. Ward won’t be pontificating at the dinner table before firmly telling Beaver that his schoolwork comes before having fun in the park.

Why this time travel post? Because teachers — once again, you have been set up. Parents, once again, you have been set up. And we are all getting so used to these set-ups that we just keep going… and going… and going. More laptops! More shields! More sanitizer! More ventilation! Not yet? Then when? What do you mean you can’t …?!?”

“What do you mean you can’t …?!?”

“Well, at least I can open the windows…” teachers say, as they throw up their hands. Those who can open the windows anyway. They go online and find plans like this: https://thrivedirectcare.com/thesimplepathtohealth/2020/8/1/covid-care-diy-home-negative-pressure-room-for-under-25. Others toss up their hands and try to figure out how to duck and cover when there’s no place to duck and nothing to use for cover.

“What do you mean you can’t …?!?”

Parents demand that teachers make the unworkable work — or worse, don’t demand anything because they can see their kids are falling behind and they have given up any sense that the playing field ought to be fair. Not enough experience with laptops and internet connectivity problems? No way to stay home because the job pays the rent and the job can’t be done from a nice, quiet bedroom? No way to explain problems to a boss, nothing anyway that won’t end with another version of unemployment, or at least a sharp rebuke:

“What do you mean you can’t …?!?”

Desperate parents are pointing fingers at teachers for policies they did not make and cannot change, watching as their children fall behind. Desperate teachers are pointing fingers at parents, as they face evaluations based on the behavior and learning — IN SOME PLACES, THE STANDARDIZED TEST RESULTS — of children who are sometimes not even logging in to hybrid or online classes.

Is anyone in authority stepping in to own the fact that we have been operating with a discriminatory system of education for — not merely for decades — but forever? Yes, certain principals and school boards have been absolutely stellar in their support of parents and teachers during 2020. I don’t want to diminish the extraordinary support efforts by those administrators.

But let’s step back from this picture. Why are we getting such disparate results from online and hybrid learning?

Because the differences are huge — and they are growing. Online learning IS working for many students. But I know from social media posts that online learning works better for some students than others. It works for kids with parents who can stay home to help manage assignments and devices, especially when those kids are comfortable with their devices. It works for families who can easily afford to pay for sitters during this time. It works for students who are determined to go to college — when those students have the connectivity and support they need. Peer pressure helps to make online learning work. The more kids managing to meet expectations, the more kids believe they ought to be meeting expectations. It works in districts that can afford to hire new staff and pay for full-time substitutes in a crisis — since part-time subs have become thin on the ground. Especially for hybrid learning, extra staff can make or break how well this option works for students with special needs and language challenges. The alternative may be one teacher trying to teach 30 students online and in person all at once while entirely on his/her own.

I want to put our PROPERTY-TAX-BASED SCHOOL FUNDING out front and center today. Somehow, the big school funding cheat IS STILL GETTING IGNORED. Government grants are used to even out the funding picture, but those grants are capricious and come with strings attached and time limits. My one experience with a SIG grant led to the mandatory loss of the best principal I ever knew.

The U.S. school funding system ensures a wide disparity in funding per student — one favoring kids in areas where the homes have manicured lawns and oodles of expensive decorations displayed during the holidays, some put up by companies that climb the ladders for people who are busy or afraid of heights. In those neighborhoods, a modern June who can afford a nanny may be working at home on her MacBook Pro, cashmere cardigan draped over her shoulders as she takes a coffee break to help the kids.

Here are numbers worth chewing on in these tumultuous times:

Percent of workers with the ability to work from home by income percentile

Income percentile	Percent
Bottom 25	6.6%
25-50	15.5%
50-75	31.7%
Top 25	55.5%

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/15/business/economy/coronavirus-worker-risk.html — See this chart for more details to explain the above chart.

The family of the fifties may be gone. But those moms and dads at home are an immense advantage for online and hybrid learners — and socioeconomic status has a great deal to do with who is at home and who cannot be at home. This game’s fixed. Damn, that fix has been in for as long as I remember. It’s why my long ago childhood high school in South Tacoma had no calculus class. It’s why the district I retired from has no calculus class. But if you want calculus — and other advanced high school mathematics — come to where I now live.

From the Glenbrook North website under the Honors category:

AP Calculus AB 183 or AP Calculus BC 183 and/or AP Statistics 183 and/or AP Computer Science or AP Computer Science Principles

AP Statistics 183 and/or Advanced Topics 173 (must have completed BC Calculus) and/or AP Computer Science or AP Computer Science Principles

Eduhonesty: Bits and pieces of the issues splashed across the internet — teachers, parents, schools, tech budgets, PPE demands, ventilation problems that keep schools closed, Zoom and Google rooms — factor into the evolving chapter of 2020, a year of learning haves and have-nots.

But the REAL problem is and always has been a staggering ability to ignore THE SHEER POWER of financial funding differences — even in 2020. It’s the $$$. It has always been the money. And we won’t manage to make any serious dent in the achievement gap until we acknowledge this truth. That income in the chart above? It opens doorways. It allows people to buy expensive homes in districts with ample funding for schools, homes often filled with laptops, software, books, and other pricey educational advantages.

For the moment, I am going to ignore the racial schism that is part of the funding picture — other than to say that I believe property-tax-based school funding is being used with great success to bypass Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That’s too nuclear an issue to come at sideways in a sound bite, though. Funding’s contribution to de facto segregation deserves its own post.

This post is a plea not to point fingers at one another as we struggle to make schooling work this year. Finger pointing allows the people responsible for the UNFAIR system of U.S. property-tax-based school funding to continue distracting us all. I have gotten lost more than once as I wrote this post, wanting to attack the lack of technology in academically-disadvantaged districts. But why is that tech broken or missing?

IT’S THE MONEY. Money may not be the root of all evil, but money is certainly the source of all goods and services in a classroom. Money HEAVILY influences the fact that over 95% of the kids where I live go on to college, while almost half the kids in that district from which I retired drop out of high school.

As long as we continue to distribute funds as we always have, ignoring socioeconomic forces and giving the haves MORE money than the have-nots, not much can be expected to change. I’d call the achievement gap indestructible with a set-up like that. My girlfriend and I laughed when our children’s school district asked the PTO to stop raising money because they had enough money and they didn’t know how to spend more. It seemed funny at the time. I had just begun teaching back then.

It doesn’t seem even a little bit funny now.

Step back, reader. Step back and think about this picture. Follow the money. Parent, teacher, taxpayer, it doesn’t matter. You have been set-up. We have all been set up.

This system, was never intended to be fair. Politicians moved into America’s best school districts or sent their children to private schools. They had no incentive to change a system that favored them. Our schools are like the electoral college: Winners don’t tamper with systems that reward them. Politicians never seem to make substantive changes to the U.S. educational funding system — which just “incidentally” tends to put the best schools exactly where they live.

This post was inspired by a woman looking for a YouTube video on good nutrition. She asked social media friends if they knew a source of good advice for children about healthy eating habits because — kaching! — her kids were much more likely to listen to a YouTube video than her. I segued from the video request into voting.

Who do kids listen to? Other kids. Who do young adults listen to? Other young adults and sometimes their brothers and sisters.

Teachers, I would like to offer an end-of-day suggestion for the next week: Before students leave school, especially high school students, I would take a minute to say something like, “Don’t forget to remind your brothers and sisters who are old enough that there are only a few days left to vote. This is an extremely important election.”

The youth vote will matter more in the next 10 days than ever before. All across the internet, columnists, bloggers and others are pushing to get the vote out. Whether in person or by mail into a designated dropbox — I would not risk the U.S. mail at this point — it’s time to vote.

I would NOT say anything about who should get that vote. Don’t open up that risky can of worms. But helping people to get to the polls — there’s no conflict of interest there, no line you should not cross.

Eduhonesty: Anyone want to throw together a YouTube video? If not, Plan B will help. Ask your classes to encourage the nation’s young and new voters to do their part. On the cusp of this election, any and all encouragement has the potential to help.

P.S. Nonteachers, please ask young voters to talk to their friends who can vote. I’d encourage going together to polling places. Where COVID makes sharing a car too problematic — which seems to be most of country at the moment — arranging to meet at a polling place to socially distance together in line while wearing masks will work fine.

“It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices.”   Wisdom from Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Most teachers don’t struggle to get their laundry done. In the following link, the New York Times discusses a strategy becoming more common in New York and other areas, especially more poverty-stricken areas — washers and dryers to help students who don’t have easy access to laundry facilities. Homelessness and poverty have thrust schools into expanding roles that even include helping students clean their clothes so they can dress for school.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/us/schools-laundry-rooms.html. Since clean clothes can make all the difference in preventing bullying and boosting student attendance, it’s no surprise some schools have begun doubling as laundromats, providing fresh outfits and other sundries for students, such as tampons and pads.

What are those students doing now? How are they managing laundry and food?

Eduhonesty: An idea for districts that are remote right now — can you allow carefully scheduled, socially-distanced laundry for students? I assume you are already passing out the food the kids would have gotten had they been in school. Maybe offer to throw in feminine sundries as well? Some students may not have an easy way to get to the laundromat, and all those quarters may be a challenge too.

Your students would appreciate clean clothes.

Reader, if your anxiety is ratcheting up because of fears of learning losses. I am going to make today’s helpful suggestion: let yourself off the hook. A wise friend of mine brought this home to me in my teens. If you can’t fix it… If you can’t change it… Let it go. I am not saying toss up your hands. Lessons must be planned. Kids have to be led online, yours and the ones in your classroom. The dog has to be walked. But whatever your particular best effort is — that effort has to be enough, and it doesn’t have to be as good as your next-door neighbor’s effort, either. If Suzy Superteacher seems to have all of her students engaged and working while she tweets about how much she loves online learning… Well, that’s Suzy. We will always have Suzies among us. You’re entitled to have a few Invisible Young Men and Women in your classes, occasional crashes and even some spam. If you are in the classroom, don’t let Suzy’s mastery of spacing masked kids in perfectly aligned, quiet rows throw you off your game.

A tip for that absentee problem: I am sure you are contacting parents or guardians. You might try contacting friends, too. If Jamie and Christopher are friends, tell Christopher how much you miss Jamie. Ask him if he knows what’s going on with his friend. Can he think of any way you might help?

But don’t lose sleep. Don’t skip meals. Don’t spend all your waking hours trying to fix just one more thing. Turn on the TV and watch Lucifer or Supernatural. Carve pumpkins. Make bread pudding. Go for a drive to look at the fall leaves. Build a board game you can use at home and in classes. Brush up on your French.

Try “7 Mantras for Anxiety That Can Help Calm Your Mind Immediately.” https://www.boardandlife.com/mantras-for-anxiety/#:~:text=%207%20Mantras%20for%20Anxiety%20That%20Can%20Help,one%20is%20a%20personal%20favorite%20of…%20More%20 I especially like the one that says, “that cave is not meant for you.” You can’t go wrong with “Breathe in. Breathe out.”

Not a Marvel or DC superhero? Neither am I. Superheroes are thin on the ground right now and I think we are better off leaving them to battle giant robots. After all, the way this year has been going, I wouldn’t exactly rule out the arrival of giant Venusian robots — or even a resurrected Thanos. But YOU can’t fix those problems.

What can you do? Let it go. Do your best. Then go ladle out bowls of bread pudding while finding the remote. For parents trying to hold together online learning, I’d work on reading especially. Everything depends on reading. If reading skills improve, other holes in this year’s learning can be attacked later. Or not attacked. Freddy can always use his phone to find out who won the Battle of Shiloh. Teachers, shared lesson plans are probably your best friend right now. Buy lesson plans when those minutes simply are not there. Teacherspayteachers.com anyone?

Parents, teachers, and other readers, oodles of virtual hugs to all of you. We will get through this together.

Readers, once again I share lyrics from “Just Dropped In” by Kenny Rogers & The First Edition, Eagles of Death Metal, and others.* Originally intended to be a warning about LSD, those lyrics just fit this year too well. “Just Dropped In” makes me think of school openings, as we step carefully into the abyss — because national attempts to open schools have become surreal in many locations.

We are living in a time of jagged sky. And as we drop in to see what condition our condition is in, I’d like to share with readers: “Children of all ages now make up 10% of all U.S cases, up from 2% in April,” according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Yes, children fare better when they get this disease, with “only” 109 recorded deaths in school-age kids as of September 30, according to “COVID-19 Cases Rising Among U.S. Children as Schools Reopen” in Education Week (https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/09/30/covid-19-cases-rising-among-us-children_ap.html). Searching for this information is surprisingly difficult, I should note. Sources contradict each other. Information that ought to be readily available is simply… not.

Most cases are among kids aged 12 to 17. As is true for older COVID victims, black and Hispanic children do not do as well as white children. According to the CDC: More than 75% of children dying from COVID-19 are minorities. (https://www.fox5dc.com/news/cdc-more-than-75-of-children-dying-from-covid-19-are-minorities) Still, children overall are least likely to suffer serious complications. If this were only a disease of children, few people except for medical researchers would even be concerned.

But children go home. Many children go home to multigenerational households, especially now that COVID has eaten up so many jobs, leaving people and families without money for the rent or mortgage. Some children go home to shelters. One reason for the strong push to open New York City schools has been a profound concern for homeless students: From https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/19/nyregion/student-homelessness-nyc.html: “By day, New York’s 114,085 homeless students live in plain sight: They study on the subway and sprint through playgrounds. At night, these children sometimes sleep in squalid, unsafe rooms, often for just a few months until they move again. School is the only stable place they know.”

It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around a number like “114,085” when talking about homeless children in one location. That’s more than twice the average number of people who visited Disneyworld each day — back when people visited Disneyworld. Those students are holding onto the edge of a harsh reality by their fingertips, and any honest person must admit teachers are sometimes the only rescuers those children will find.

Teachers are mandated reporters for a reason. A mandated reporter is a person legally required to report suspicions of child abuse or neglect to relevant authorities. Teachers see the bruises, they find the lice, they hear the stories. Sometimes they grapple with the drug paraphernalia that comes to show and tell.

Online schooling has opened up its own ruthless realism — and teachers are left to decide what to do about the gun spied on a home desk or the obvious hoarding that has piles of trash climbing the wall. No one wants to call family services without excellent reason, but when enough discarded food and other refuse comes into view, questions of health, sanitation, possible insect and rodent infestation, and fire safety necessarily follow. Simply, what does the teacher do when Ben sets up his laptop in the kitchen and she sees all the dead flies floating on top of the scum in the water in the sink?

On the coast, teachers have been fleeing fires while simultaneously trying to begin online instruction. Those teachers especially are trying to crawl out of some pretty dark holes. So are their students, especially any students with asthma or breathing challenges. Even if no one has to evacuate, that air may be gray with ash. Does it seem those fires are over? Forest Fires have mostly fallen out of the news, but according to the California Statewide Fire Summary for October 11, 2020. “More than 13,400 firefighters continue to work towards containment on 21 major wildfires across the state.” (https://www.fire.ca.gov/daily-wildfire-report/).

We are careening from one monster piece of news to the next right now. Except there’s seldom time to put news in context before the next cataclysmic event starts being twittered. News fatigue results, as teachers, parents and almost any adult who is not a news junkie begins to duck potentially useful outside information.

Teachers, we have to fight the almost inevitable burn-out that can results from this endless stream of bad news, weird news, and unavailable news.

Eduhonesty: Hugs, teachers, parents and anyone else who has stumbled on this blog. The issues I have raised here cannot be addressed in sound bites. I would just like to continue to plead — please be KIND to each other, readers. Teachers, we cannot know how complicated our students’ home lives are. We may need mom to keep Freddy online — but mom may not have the option to stay home from work. If Freddy’s sister is in charge, and she is managing erratically, please don’t get upset with mom or dad. If Freddy keeps popping in and out of class like Casper the Friendly Ghost, remind yourself that many of our supervising adults and babysitters are far less familiar with technology than the average classroom teacher. And mom or dad, please, please don’t get mad at the teacher. She didn’t create the crazy hybrid schedule. There’s a good chance she had no voice in this year’s in-person, online or hybrid schedule at all. That online platform you hate? There’s a good chance she had no voice in that selection. She may hate it too, even as she frantically tries to become proficient so she can do the best teaching job possible in impossible times.

P.S. Incidentally, about that barrage of news: don’t drop the $421 million in personal debt that the POTUS owes some unknown parties. That’s the piece from the last few weeks that should not slip away. That’s a great deal of leverage possessed by an as-yet-unknown party. Don’t let POST-COVID POTUS become too big a distraction.

P.S.S. Many teachers and districts might as well be “eight miles out of Memphis without a spare, eight miles straight up downtown somewhere.” The situations today’s teachers are confronting can be impossible. You can’t regularly work 12-plus hours a day to make the online and in-person lessons while setting up the tech to include various lost and challenged students still struggling to log on — and also take care of your family, get your own kids into their online classes, keep your kids in those classes, somehow get yourself and other family members fed, the dog walked, and the laundry done, while also helping students and family members with homework and classwork. You can’t.

So don’t try too hard. Do your job as educator as fiercely as possibly during the school day. Then give yourself a break and make bread pudding. Take the kids to the park. Find a way to relax. https://www.eduhonesty.com/there-are-no-venusian-robots-calming-down-in-fraught-times/

*If you are younger and somehow missed the song “I Just Dropped In,” I strongly recommend giving it a listen. It’s emblematic of an earlier, and I think kinder time.

Credit to “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Is In)” by Kenny Rogers & the First Edition, Eagles of Death Metal and others

The line in the title resonates with me. They fooled you, many of you readers out in non-union or non-collective bargaining states. They told you new laws would not matter to you. They even vilified teachers in the process, some deliberately and some simply because they caught a wave whose true dimensions they did not understand. Those latter writers understood only that “bad teacher” stories were selling for some reason. How do you destroy a union? You paint its members as lazy neer-do-wells and even pedophiles hiding out in secret rooms in New York where they send the bad teachers they cannot fire. Why can’t you fire them? The evil union, of course. Although New York mostly survived those gratuitous attacks, other teachers in other states did not — but then New York is a heavily Democratic state. I will return to this point later.

Here is the start of a story by Karen Matthews, an Associated Press Writer, updated 6/22/2009 6:05:42 PM ET: NEW YORK — “Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.” http://www.nbcnews.com/id/31494936/ns/us_news-education/t/nyc-teachers-paid-do-nothing/#.X3yD2hSSmUk

The wave of stories continued because they sold. The long-term impact of that hit job went unappreciated. The advantages of having a union and collective bargaining rights can easily go unnoticed in quieter times. Latent power is often invisible.

Now, in many areas, legislators and school boards have been working nonstop on plans to get students into school and only sometimes out of school when things go wrong. In lucky locations, teachers have the help of unions. If not for relatively strong unions, would New York City have a plan for shut-down in the face of exploding coronavirus numbers? In too many areas, no one has an exit plan because we have no unions, or unions are so gutted that they might as well be trapped in brown paper bags. We need to drop in soon — and find out what condition our unions are in. And then we need to begin reforming those unions. Or restoring those unions to positions of power.

Eduhonesty: When THIS song makes me think of the state of U.S. education, we have taken our foot off the gas for far too long. What happened to collective bargaining power? They came for our rights in the night, they came with fabricated stories or cherry-picked examples, and we just opened the door to votes that sucked away the individual worker’s voice. We let our voices go because we did not understand the implications of being muted, not well enough to rage as legislators stole away our bargaining rights.

I believe that part of the reason we did not rage is that teachers tend to be regrettably trusting — at least at first. They believe the Board has their school’s best interests at heart. They believe they and administrators are on the same team (In better schools, this is true.) and they count on the Your-State-Here State Board of Education to look out for the students in their care. This faith has been eroding, as teachers watched test-score mania and the Common Core gain momentum, but remnants of trust and goodwill remain.

Unfortunately, we were not paying enough attention to the “bad teacher” stories this last decade. They had a purpose, and only in the most naïve hands was that purpose believed to be improving education. Instead, those stories had everything to do with control. If you eliminate the right to collective bargaining and/or ban the union, then you then can’t be strong-armed into paying teachers a fair wage or providing students in poor districts with a more equitable learning landscape. You can keep things exactly as they are, no matter how unfair that may be to teachers — and students with the bad luck to be living in the wrong zip code. Or the wrong state, it seems today.

Florida is an outrage and not the only outrage.

I am not against sending children back into live learning situations, and I fully understand some of those attempts will hit COVID walls, as sick kids and staff members try to manage quarantines and shut-downs. We have no perfect solutions. Everyone is operating in perilous times, heading into an unknown future. Going to live instruction or a hybrid version of this may be the best of the bad options in many locales. But that choice should not be driven by politics — and teachers should be participants, not terrified onlookers, in the decision-making process.

Let’s focus for the moment on those legislators who negotiated away teachers’, students’, and others’ voices. Since their immediate acts took place in the then-present — our past — and the world was much quieter back then, too few people fought back. Nothing much changed in “Washington Elementary” or other schools when anti-union legislation slipped through. I am sure quieter times disguised the immediacy of the threat of that legislation. Maybe we thought we could trust the government to take care of us.

I repeat a question from my last post: Is the government taking care of us?

Yet the future eventually arrives, and the future is hitting us much harder than anyone anticipated. Now, teachers and students are not worried about having enough paper or a half-hour for lunch. They are worried about physical safety. In some locations, they are being badgered to open even when circumstances suggest opening might be unsafe. In some locations, they are even being given the choice to either enter the classroom or be fired.

That’s not true in Illinois — where schools were shut in Chicago and remain shut until they are considered safe — but then Illinois is a heavily Democratic state, like New York. So is California where many schools remain closed, depending on what condition their schools’ condition happens to be in.

Here’s why I think anyone with free time who is willing and able to take on the fight should be working for the Democratic Party right now: Democrats have historically been exponentially friendlier to unions than Republicans. Especially in these fraught times, we need to organize or reorganize in many places. We need to reclaim our voices. To do that we will have to break Republican strongholds. Those Republican governors, senators and representatives? They must go — even the ones I like, I’m afraid. I have voted for a fair number of republicans in my life — I’m registered as an independent and I always liked the designation.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. I upset some readers recently by writing that people in democratic states should not vote for third parties. But a third-party vote in a democratic state is a vote for the current administration. We can’t keep voting in republican majorities if we want to #ReclaimOurVoices and #RebuildOurUnions. We need to flip those republican legislatures — small and large. The we need to repeal a number of laws and

Those of us lucky enough to have a union? Let’s see if we can help our fellow teachers who are not as lucky.

P.S. In fairness, I should note that anti-union sentiment goes back to the very foundations of the first unions. That sentiment took on legitimacy and gained support during the time of Ronald Reagan, a snowball that has been rolling downhill since Reagan and the air traffic controllers. But teachers were a tougher target to assail — because America once thought highly of teachers. Fortunately, despite the hit job, many people still do. But for those teachers who can’t understand the negativity toward them, given all their hard work and selfless acceptance of substandard working conditions in return for a chance to help and even sometimes rescue kids — go looking for those stories about unions protecting bad teachers. Those stories have a great deal to do with the contempt teachers now sometimes encounter in dealings with administrations and parents.

Organizing and reorganizing can improve working conditions for teachers.

Although I’ll add one last blast — If conditions are too bad, I suggest taking a chunk of time daily to try to change districts. There are some great principals and good districts out there. You CAN also QUIT! I read a post from a woman whose spouse took a position as a fast food assistant manager and now is making more money than she is. Fellow teachers, you have degrees. You are articulate. You know how to work long and hard. Maybe it’s time to get your real estate license? Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards. A friend of mine who is an ER doc did a residency in occupational medicine to change into another field. It was a lot of extra work for awhile as well as extra educational fees. But she doesn’t have to get regular migraines from brutal night hours and changing shifts now. If Sunday night makes your stomach sink or even causes you to cry — think about it. You can move on.

It’s easy to get lost. Honestly, many of us feel adrift right now. One lost item that has not been receiving enough attention: EXIT PLANS for when the Entrance plan does not work. If we storm the castle and find we are outnumbered — what will we do next?

Eduhonesty: We talk all the time about opening schools. What about closing them? What are the exit plans? Where are the exit plans? I should give New York City credit here — although the state of school infrastructure remains highly questionable — because at least its version of a plan includes shutting schools when COVID positivity rates hit 3 percent. That’s a rational plan based in data. Other areas are going district by district and even school by school. That’s not any plan at all. That’s the Cherokee County School District closing Woodstock High School when COVID cases increased to a total of 14, with tests for another 15 students still pending, and hundreds of kids and adults in line to quarantine. That’s a bunch of struggling students and educators watching themselves crawlin’ out as they go a-crawlin’ in.

That’s “someone painted ‘April Fool’ in big black letters on a ‘Dead end ‘Sign,” if you remember the song, “Just Dropped In,” the countercultural song written by Micky Newbury that is inspiring my next few posts.

This is a union issue and that will be my next post. But for now, let me ask a critical question: Who is taking care of us? Is the government taking care of us? I’m afraid the post-COVID world seems to be pretty much everyone for him/her/they self. Lucky people have a good governor. In more fortunate areas, strong unions are attempting to guide school openings and closures. But other areas have neither the state governor nor the union to manage the situation — no central forces to fight on the side of good against one purely evil microbe.

Parents and teachers, on top of everything else, I am sorry to say I am going to recommend you talk with school administrators and members of your school board. It’s not too soon — in some geographic areas it’s rather late — to demand to know what happens if the COVID numbers start ramping up hard and fast. I believe we may turn the corner on this epidemic soon, but we are not there yet. What is the plan?

“We will assess that situation should it occur” is not a plan. “We will deal with things on a case-by-case basis” is not a plan. “Let’s see how the opening goes first” is for damn sure not a plan.

No plan has to be set in stone. A district can decide 3% is manageable and 3.5% is not, and a district can shift students and schools based on what is happening. Our leaders must be able to flex with changes and unexpected outcomes.

But this tripping on a cloud of hopefulness while falling from from eight miles high only ends in a crash, and potentially a crash of epic proportions. We can do better by America’s teachers and students. The old military maxim, HAVE AN EXIT STRATEGY, should guide all U.S. school districts as we open for live instruction .

COVID testing is producing a nonstop stream of numbers. Let’s use them wisely to build data-driven exit strategies — because, as 2020 keeps demonstrating over and over again, life is what happens when you are making other plans.