Are you crazy ? What has happened in this district is certifiable. In what world did you decide that junior high kids could go to class and not try to take their masks down and play tricks with it? That they would not kid around and blow air on some other kid? Do you know kids at all?
In junior high they all love each other unless it’s the other way around. They hug. They kiss. They pick each other up. They wrestle. They share drinks and food. They can’t keep from reaching out to each other while passing in the hall. They go to the little malls together sans masks, laughing in each other’s faces. I just saw a gang of them at the Westcliff Shopping Center. They’re adorable. You can’t help but smile (or if you’re an ex jr high teacher) laugh out loud. They are great. They are fun. They are like awkward puppies. Are we making them into killers?
In what possible universe do you reside? High school kids are almost as bad; only not quite as cute and adorable. They hug too. They hug a lot, and kiss way more.
After school it’s “let’s go crazy time”, walking with no mask, five kids in a car, talking loudly in each other’s faces...it’s insane . What THEY are doing is totally normal. What YOU are doing is almost criminal.
They are singing and laughing their brains out. They are so happy to be out and be together. These cute kids will take their well-deserved happiness home with them to their families. Their families who will go out in Newport and Costa Mesa and wreke havoc in the two communities because this is the way this virus works.
You have made the unfathomable decision to put the junior high and high school kids back in school for what reason for God’s sake? What could possibly be important enough to put ANYONE’S life at risk?
You say you are worried about what the kids are learning. What do you think they’re learning right now about what it means to be human; to be so uncaring that you made the decision to send kids off to school knowing that someone might die for that few months of school. If one person ...yes, just one person, dies will it be worth it?
You did this on the flimsiest reasons, based on paper-thin data.
You cannot think that kids in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach are going to be mortally damaged by going to school on a computer for a few more months.
Can you?
I wish the current phony attention paid to children’s mental health had been present in 2019 or 2018 or 2017. You get the idea. But no, when certain of the community is pressuring you to keep school open you put your conscience and humanity over in the corner and open the schools
And the mist disgusting of all, we are turning a cold shoulder to our teachers by not listening to their pleas for a safe environment. Every day they walk into a school that they consider to be a dangerous environment.
.
Who are we?
Why sometime in the future and these kids whose mental health you are so worried about, ask you why you chose to stack their discomfort taking classes on a computer for a few months, against the death of ANYONE what will you say?
After this is over and you reflect on this decision, and after you spend the usual time justifying and justifying repeatedly, what will you think of yourself?