Schools to close again.. Covid

I just commented on what you actually said, and you called it “personal insults”.

Hey mods, feel free to punish me appropriately if any of you feel I’ve crossed the line between commenting on what this poster actually said and “personal insults”. I won’t protest.

Her tweet earlier has me questioning if we are reopening. The fact there is a Tuesday meeting is I'd say, see what hospital numbers are like.

Up until this afternoon I was 80% we'd reopen. Now I'm definitely more 50/50. Seems like a repeat of last December.

Hope we open. Online learning sucks.

Ya, if I'm standing in my classroom at 9:00 on January 6th with students in front of me then I'll believe schools are open, I'm going to be skeptical about any announcements until then.

Donnelly and Foley, I suppose, expose the underbelly of public policy in that everything is underpinned by an agreed position. This is the "collective responsibility" thing is practice where you cannot say something until it is kosher to do so.

To be fair to Donnelly, he might privately know that you don't recklessly open schools on 20k cases and with hospitalisations likely to double in a week, but when in an interview it's a binary matter.

If you say "to tell you the truth we'll have to see, Gavin, it doesn't look great to be honest" it'd be the lead story on the news tonight. It's not the most edifying spectacle but it's how the public service works. That's why you get plodders who would get light-headed if they had to go off script reaching great heights, and often talented people disaffected by the stultifying restriction.

They are repeating the default position. I could say to you "schools won't open". Evidence? None. Just a hunch.

But "schools will open?" How do I know? Check your school calendar - there in black and white.

But it means that in a fluid situation politicians' comments are no guarantee of anything.

Let me put it another way, in 2019 or 2020 the Minister for Education did not have to have a meeting with public health officials and what she will inevitably describe as "stakeholders" two days before schools went back.

If worst comes to worst and we are closed do ye think some teachers will still be able to work from the school? We were live teaching per timetable last year and my WiFi at home is not good enough to support this so I'd need to work from school.

yeah I'd say that will be totally fine. If there is a closure again this year, I would like to think that the Dept will come up with a more sophisticated approach than 'full closure', which could well be what the Tuesday meetings are about. ASD classes and Special school settings should not go back online for example and if they are serious about a Leaving Cert, 6th years should be back too.

Yeah...or report the post.

Possibly, but the same point could be made about being in the pub at 19.55 and 20.10, but look at what they went and did there...

Reduced numbers = reduced opportunity for transmission and I'd imagine that is the way they will be looking at it

In theory I'd agree, but if numbers are as high as they are, LCs will be hit just as much as everyone else. Probably better to have them all online for say 2 weeks than have a handful in the classroom and some trying to listen in from home, or duplicating the work because you're putting it on teams after class.

No recruitment/appointment for the LC/JC exams yet either, or timetable for that matter.

People in schools are not getting progressively more inebriated as the day goes by anyway, though I'm sure some must be tempted.

I totally agree with this. I certainly know that I'd have half my LC group out - some come and go as they please anyway. Those who wouldn't be in (and there'd be plenty with infection rates as high as they are) would lose out completely.

They've put a cap on PCR testing 4-39 year olds so in true Department of Ed fashion... If you don't test then it doesn't exist (Just like the Junior Cycle at this stage 🤣).

Norma says wait till Tuesday.

I might be giving her too much credit, but maybe this year she wants to make a full statement when she makes it.

Last year, it went from 3 extra days holidays, to special Ed only, to 6th Years… to remote teaching til whenever.

We waited til the end of February to hear plans for LC and JC.

Maybe Tuesday evening she will announce the full plan, because nobody will believe ‘all will be as normal’.

The uncertainty is a killer. You can be sure of nothing any more.

The fact that we are all calling for them to ‘call it’ when they have very clearly said schools will be back shows that we don’t believe them.

If there was nuance in their statements they’d have some hope people would believe them.

Ventilators? Yikes! Things are way worse in schools than I had realised.

What will a 1 week delay achieve? What changes after that week that makes schools in any way safer than they were the week before? The answer is of course nothing. If there's any delay at all it will be next to impossible to reopen schools for weeks to come.

A short, sharp closure could absolutely work now. The delay the last time was to allow for the vulnerable to be vaccinated, worth keeping things shut for as long as we did. This time you just need to quash it in the population, whatever is seeded over Christmas, with current high vaccination rates the maths is wildly different from last year.

17th of January could easily do this, or certainly help. Take back the discretionary Easter days and you'd only be talking about 3/4 days out of school really. Honestly we won't have the staff to open next week anyway or very close to not having it, we won't be the only school!

I agree there's no logical reason to the whole "if we don't open this week we won't open for ages". But the politics of it all means this will be the case.

The government want to open as scheduled. The unions don't. If the government cede to the unions then they (the unions) have their precedent of "well you agreed the numbers were too high last week. They're still not looking great so you must be having a laugh if you're considering reopening this week".