Sunday, August 28, 2022

‘Treat This As You Would Any Illness’: Schools Across U.S. Downgrade COVID Rules; Study: The More Insane Public Schools Were About Covid, The More Parents Abandoned Them , and other C-Virus related stories

‘Treat This As You Would Any Illness’: Schools Across U.S. Downgrade COVID Rules:
As students return to classrooms from summer break, school systems nationwide continue to scale back COVID masking and quarantine requirements — in some cases nearly resembling pre-pandemic sickness protocols.
“Please treat this as you would any illness,” said a document from Hendry County School District in Florida.
The district’s rules specify that staff and students experiencing coronavirus symptoms should stay home, while those who are asymptomatic and fever-free for 24 hours may come to school with or without a face covering.
Across the country, over 95% of the 500 largest school systems had no mask requirement as of Aug. 22, according to an update from Burbio, a data service that tracks school policy. Several, however, do still require students to wear face coverings for three to five days when they return to campus after finishing a five-day quarantine.
Those policies come after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in mid-August eased their K-12 COVID guidelines. Rather than recommending anyone exposed to the virus self-isolate, the CDC now calls for only individuals who test positive or experience symptoms to stay home, effectively doing away with the test-to-stay programs many schools used during the previous academic year. The guidelines still recommend universal masking where COVID levels are high, as they are in several regions of the country, including New York City. --->READ MORE HERE
Phil Roeder/Flickr/CC by 2.0
Study: The More Insane Public Schools Were About Covid, The More Parents Abandoned Them:
As a new academic year begins across the country, parents and children are still trying to recover from the lockdown-related disruptions of the past two years. Many students may take years to overcome the learning losses they suffered due to Covid lockdowns—and some might never overcome it at all.
A recently released study demonstrates the unnecessary nature of much of this damage. That analysis shows that public school districts with tighter Covid restrictions suffered larger enrollment losses, while showing little correlation with Covid case rates.
Diverging Enrollment Trends
The analysis, conducted by Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute, analyzed enrollment data from 48 states (all except Kentucky and Tennessee). Overall, public school enrollment dropped by 2.7 percent in the first pandemic year, which began in the fall of 2020, and remained largely flat in the second pandemic year, which commenced last fall.
But cross-referencing these enrollment data with information on schools’ types of learning mechanisms reveals a different phenomenon. Malkus classified public school districts into three categories, based on their use of fully remote and hybrid methods of learning compared to fully in-person schools. The Return to Learn Tracker shows sharply divergent approaches to learning for the first pandemic year of 2020-2021—many schools remained fully remote or in hybrid form, while many others returned to fully in-person learning in the fall of 2020.
That natural experiment of districts’ differing approaches yielded different results for enrollment. Malkus found that the third of public school districts with the most remote learning during 2020-2021 lost additional students in 2021-2022. Conversely, the third of the districts with the most in-person learning during 2020-2021 gained back last year nearly half of the students they lost during the first year of the pandemic: --->READ MORE HERE
Follow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:

IRS to forgive $1.2 billion in late filing fees from COVID pandemic

Federal Judge Protects The Religious Right Of Marines To Refuse COVID Vaccine

USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates

WSJ: Coronavirus Live Updates

YAHOO NEWS: Coronavirus Live Updates

NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest

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