Sad memories that cross the years: I go back to an eighth grade girl who tried to hang herself. After a few days in a hospital ICU, she finally succeeded. The family allowed doctors to turn off the machines. Grief counseling began. Our school district offered help to teachers and classmates, no questions asked. If you have to leave class, here’s your pass. Don’t cry in front of the kids and rescue kids before they break down in front of each other.
Words can’t capture the sadness that permeated that year. Fifty years from now, that girl’s friends will remember what happened. Her close friends may cry sometimes, cry for the friend who never went to college, never made it to the wedding, never saw the baby, never shared a bottle of wine with her own sweetheart — the friend who never got to launch her own life.
In the past, years like the one I describe were rare. Tragedies do happen in schools. Determined little girls with button noses finally lose their fight with cancer. Drunken, partying teenagers lose control of the car. Strong, healthy young men simply swim out too far.
But we are talking about embarking on a learning experiment that might make those tragedies commonplace rather than rare in some areas. What does it mean if 1,834 people have died so far today from Coronavirus? The trend is beginning to improve, but Texas had 8,479 new cases a couple of days ago. At coronavius.jhu.edu, the U.S. case-fatality rate is listed as 3.3%. If that rate holds, 280 Texans can be expected to die. At least a few of them may well be be teachers.
The kids are fairly safe. Currently 0.026 of deaths are occurring in persons 0 – 14 years old. But spread that 0.026 across the country and a few children do die. Mathematically of that 280 people maybe one death would fall into that category of 0 – 14 years. Obviously we cannot predict deaths exactly. Maybe no little kids would die, maybe two would die. Regardless, the number’s tiny. But let’s look at teachers 45 to 64 years of age: they form 16.7% of COVID-19 deaths. Doing the math, 47 persons in that age group will die. It’s remarkable how the death rate rises with age.
That’s 47 people in a key age range and those are the numbers for just one day. Texas reported 9,408 new cases yesterday. That’s 310 eventual deaths if that 3.3% holds, or 52 deaths in that 45 – 64 age range. And while the risk is lower for younger teachers, it’s still substantially higher than it is for the kids.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/06/23/coronavirus-covid-deaths-us-age-race-14863
Any death is too many deaths, but we are in the middle — I hope we have reached the middle — of a pandemic. Deaths will happen. Regularly.
We broke out of our sheltering too soon. I hope we have learned a lesson: we must be careful not to return to the classroom too soon. Current U.S. deaths total 160,090. That tiny percentage of young kids who are endangered by the virus? They should be a concern in and of themselves, but the main problem is simple. Kids get sick. Then they get everybody else sick. I spent almost a month on antibiotics a couple of years ago — and quit subbing elementary schools after that. (I am a retired teacher who sometimes substitute teaches.) That second illness was particularly memorable — eighteen days of bug-killing drugs, fleeting on and off fevers and an insane number of nosebleeds. I can remember the too-hot little hand of the nonverbal special education student, an early elementary boy with large, dark eyes and dark hair. I figured out how ill he was while walking him to the bathroom, late in a long morning of exposure, and the better part of a miserable month before I quietly quit taking positions involving nonverbal and elementary students.
Working people between 25 and 64 years of age? That was me, holding that poor boy’s sweaty hand. A stunning 19,762 of people in the 25 – 64 age category had died from this virus by June 17th. It’s worth noting that total deaths then tallied only 103,339. Numbers have climbed rapidly. I’d guess the actual total to be higher than recorded deaths, too. Some fatalities attributed to heart disease, strokes etc. may have been coronavirus instead — it took awhile before the blood clotting aspect of the disease was understood.
Eduhonesty: If we do too much too soon, many schools will end up with inevitable losses of staff members. Yes, kids can and do spread this virus. Let me return to the end of my previous post. I want to highlight what happens when a beloved adult passes away.
Grief happens, grief that can set the stage for years of sadness and decades of nightmares.
Let me offer a scenario that might unfold soon in this country:
Ms. Jones always stood near the door, smiling every day as “her” kids walked into their classroom. Sometimes she sat in her chair at the front of the room, behind the Thor Kleenex box holder and the Avengers bobbleheads. Her pink sweater was always hanging over her chair. She gave out Dojo points for good behavior, and snacks if a kid’s stomach hurt because he or she missed breakfast rushing to meet the bus. She helped students find fun books. She talked to them about their interests, encouraging them to explore new ideas and try new activities. “You can do it! I will help you,” she would say. On a lucky day, a kid might even get to help her feed the fish in the aquarium in the corner.
Then Joshua got sick. Or maybe a few kids got sick before one of them was tested. Suddenly, everybody had to go home. And Ms. Jones never came back. For long days, maybe weeks, that pink sweater hung there. Then one day, the sweater, the bobble heads and other favorite bits of the classroom just disappeared. Counselors talked to everyone, of course.
“Ava” tried to make sense of what happened. Joshua and the other kids hadn’t been that sick. But somehow Mrs. Jones had gotten very sick, along with Megan’s grandpa and a few others. Ms. Jones had not survived. Megan’s grandpa was still in the hospital although Megan said he was going to get out soon. He was going to go to a special place to learn to walk again. How could an older person forget how to walk? Ava wondered. Could that happen to anybody? And what about Ms. Jones children, Justin and Hannah? They were in high school, she knew. She had met Hannah, who used to pick her mother up after school. Thinking about Hannah made Ava cry.
No children die in this scenario. The probabilities strongly favor those children making it through the streak of coronavirus. Maybe none of them will even get severely ill. That’s a tiny, tiny death rate for those elementary school children.
But let’s not make any mistake. The kids in Ms. Jones class just got emotionally nuked. Their whole world suddenly exploded in a shambles of ruin and pain. Especially if Ms. Jones is the same age as their parents, that world became exponentially more terrifying. Why not dad next? Why not mom? Why not anybody? Because children don’t understand percentages. They do understand gone forever — most of them anyway. The littlest ones may have trouble understanding that idea at first.
Politicians talk about this pandemic in terms of survival. The children will survive, they say. They don’t say the adults will survive because they know that’s not true, not for all adults. They emphasize cleanliness and masks instead. Hello, certain governors? Hello, those of you who have looked at charts like this and decided the children are safe?
Actually, a few of those children won’t survive. Unfortunately, 0.06% is not zero. But that’s only one risk. A huge risk is being ignored. What about mental trauma that we will be inflicting on our children? It’s been more than fifty years since my grandpa’s funeral. I still remember moments of that funeral. My grandma’s death kicked off a health anxiety which has dogged me ever since. Here’s an especially scary one: “While the jury is still out on whether trauma directly causes schizophrenia, according to research conducted by the University of Liverpool, children who experienced trauma before the age of 16 were about three times more likely to become psychotic in adulthood than those who were randomly selected.”*
We can’t put numbers on psychological risk. Everyone manages — or fails to manage — grief in their own way. But those leaders reopening schools should not ignore the psychological harm that opening schools may cause. “Ava” will never be the same after Ms. Jones fails to return to her classroom. Ava will almost undoubtedly “manage” — but what does manage mean? Scared to death is one possible definition of managing in this scenario, the one where Ava has panic attacks whenever anyone she knows enters the hospital. Maybe a low thrum of anxiety will begin to run through every single day of Ava’s life.
Children bring greater and lesser degrees of resilience into experiences that shape their lives. Some live in the present and devote only brief windows of time to past, unhappy events, while others obsess over those memories. What we must NOT do is assume children’s resilience, assume that our children will be able to handle whatever we throw at them.
It’s been the better part of a decade since that girl in my school decided to kill herself. I guarantee readers that all of her teachers remember her face, her laugh, their own personal classroom moments with her. Death marks us. Death takes us on journeys into the past that we can’t always escape.
Ava will never be the same. Maybe in a few years, the conversation won’t automatically bring tears. Kids in Ava’s class will work through what happened as best they can. Maybe Ava will sit down on a bench at recess to talk to a red-haired boy who had also been in Ms. Jones class.
“She sure loved all those Avengers movies,” she will say.
“Yeah, she sure did. I just got a fish that looks a lot like Fred. He’s got one of those long orange tails.”
“I liked those fish. I hope her kids are O.K.”
“I miss her a lot.”
“I miss her too.”
Children love so easily and so fiercely. Because of that, children can be hurt forever. And sometimes, children can even be broken.
That research study from the University of Liverpool is real. The mortality rate for children should not be the only number used to decide on school openings.
*https://www.brightquest.com/blog/can-schizophrenia-be-caused-by-trauma
I’d like to ask readers — don’t think of schools, those faceless brick and concrete buildings, when the talk of starting school comes up in your community. Think of Ava. Think of the young children you know personally who will walk through those big double doors every day.
Is opening safe? Safe is not only measured in numbers of the living and the dead.