Sara Roos

TogetherApart: Co-location And Collaboration Constrained By Pandemic

In the wake of pandemic, priorities are rearranged.

Prior to schools’ closing in March, 2020, several LAUSD school sites were facing the prospect of sharing their campus with a charter school next year. These forced “colocations” are directed by the District when a “public charter school” requests public space for its operations under legal mandate from a voter initiative passed in 2000.

Proposition 39 addressed schools facilities issues by lowering the passage threshold for local school bond measures from 67% to 55%. With over $10m of vested interest from ubiquitous charter privateers Ann & John Doerr, John Walton and Reed Hastings, the initiative established a facilities payload for the charter industry. Along for the ride was the ideological position that charter schools had the right to request of the public District “reasonably equivalent conditions” for operations. The specifics for calculating and granting these conditions were litigated through a series of lawsuits (2007, 2010 and 2012) inordinately taxing on the public purse in contrast with that of the billionaire-funded charter school lobby.

The Price Of Pandemic Opportunities – Laptops, Public Policy And Science Awareness

All this isolating and cowering in the shadow of a revolution of computerized learning shouldn’t remove us from the exhilaration of making a difference. Our actions as individuals and as families may well be making a significant difference; data is too poor to know for sure yet. So while a “bend” in the curve is hard to attest, still the trend of cases is not truly exponential. The cases reported daily by LA County’s Department of Public Health are far from the predicted exponential plotted on a log scale below as the straight, dashed line in yellow (an exponential trend plots on a log scale as a straight line).

There are other aspects of slight positivity. The pandemic may be creating budding physicians and virologists and epidemiologists in the students among us.

Resource Links Update: Covid Safety And Education

Honestly, we do have education news in the pipeline, but it is hard to settle the nerves long enough to report.

So first: Supporting Kids’ Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic

And here’s a treat for your own, or even a geeky middle schooler on up’s, academically-oriented entertainment pleasure.

Education In The Time Of Plague

The following will be updated in the sidebar to the right as a running file of information and links about SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19. All articles for the foreseeable future will also feature these links at the bottom.

Talking To Kids/Learning About Covid:

- Introductory videos: Elementary School ~ Middle School ~ High School and up
- Life, interrupted: Steph Curry & Anthony Fauci interview
- Actual science: Virology podcast, Virology MOOC, Scientific articles about Covid (and other viruses) origins and evolution, Covid-19/SARS-CoV-2 preprints from medRxiv and bioRxiv (preprints are not-yet-peer-reviewed scientific studies).

Extracurricular Resources: Fun, Aid & Assistance – What To Do/What Can I Do?

Immediate And Peripheral Vigilance: LAUSD’s Schoolboard Election … Then Covid19

A running section appears in the sidebar to the right with information and links about SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19. All articles for the foreseeable future will also feature these links at the bottom.

In the meantime a primary election was held less than three weeks ago in Los Angeles County that is still being actively counted. Results continue to be updated twice-weekly with (2,101,601) ballots comprising more than 38% of the over 5.5m registered voters counted. As of March 17, 2020, there are 64K ballots left to count. A small subset of these will include yet-outstanding ballots from LAUSD schoolboard voters.

Representation on the LAUSD schoolboard matters all the more now under threat of pandemic than ever, since the unusual circumstances expose enormous issues regarding Education policy. The protective closing of classrooms forces into a limelight matters of online learning, homeschooling, equity and teaching and the role of Big Tech vs human practitioners in guiding, mentoring, instructing and raising our young.

An Updated Stack Of Links On COVID-19, LAUSD And Resources For Families

Please be wary of what you read on the internet, folks. I came across so much that is so suspect. From “public health professionals” no less, too. Following below is a list of reliable sources of information.

The last section at the bottom contains some crowd-sourced parent-lists of activities and Education-y suggestions. Other’s lists haven’t been vetted for accuracy. But they’re also less risky as they are, at least, not directives. Please take your information from public health agencies directly, not from random social media postings of folks self-titled as “pediatricians” or “epidemiologists” or “healthcare professionals”. Remember, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

LA EdEx’s updated resource links:

Stick To The Science, Stick To The Facts, And Stick Together

… a great mantra, as important for quotidian matters as during this time of pandemic. It was invoked as the guiding light of the State’s Covid-19 task force according to Carmela Coil, head of the CA Hospital Association (@1:04:04). Our public officials have been scrabbling all day to forward practical advice and transparency amidst directives hewed from excruciating tradeoffs – earnings, childcare, learning, economic impact, public health, safety, protection.

As Mayor Garcetti says, the choices we each make to further social distancing, do matter. See an example of our actions “flatten the curve” here (@ 5:25). And an exploration of geometric growth (@ 2:34) that demonstrates its potential convincingly and explains the course of a pandemic. Empirically simulate these phenomena for yourself to comprehend more intuitively how quickly these numbers grow, and may be contained. Figure 1 below shows the progress to date of diagnosed cases in Los Angeles County.

A close up of a map

Description automatically generated — *Figure 1: Daily incidence of diagnosed Covid-19, LA County,* 1/26/20-3/16/20

Growing likewise geometrically is a vast array of resources compiled by fellow parents and District staff to aid the forced homeschooling of so many. The “Science Mom” (assisted by Math Dad) who explained Covid-19 above has initiated a daily “QuaranTime” livestream (8am PST) that will make all of us (aged 7-12+++; I am learning a lot) smarter and happier.

And Yet, There Are Collateral Benefits

It’s not what you’d wish on your worst enemy, but all the same, there are bright spots amidst the coronavirus (CV) landscape.

On a brief (auto) trip to the bakery this weekend I passed through numerous residential neighborhoods, every one of which sported people outside, recreating. On bikes, with basketballs in hand, walking dogs, planting trees, shouting socially-distanced pleasantries – it was absolutely plain as could be that people everywhere were plonked back to the future in slower, simpler pleasures like gallomph-jogging side-by-side, challenging each other in bicycling-pairs to summit a hill, corralling the kids to participate in household chores and pet-care.

Who knew that contentious traffic calming measures of late would suddenly be rendered moot, casualties of the CV pandemic that has parked us all in our neighborhoods, not somewhere else. Maybe all we’ve really been needing was relief from the tyranny of scheduled events and organized activities.

Why It Might Matter To Close Your School

It’s understandable to look at the fatality and even incidence rate of Covid-19 here in Los Angeles and think:

“Huh? Why the panic; far, far more people die of the flu annually, and we’re all healthy here. A little cold’s no big deal, most people will survive, particularly kids, and besides, I have no way to care for (or feed) the kids during the daytime.”

There are a lot of issues in there to unpack, but most importantly, the considerations surrounding school closure are not about individual risk or anyone’s personal chance of survival. At issue is a sensible, effective public health response to a local health emergency and a global pandemic.

The concern is that those who do suffer adverse effects from the novel coronavirus will need access to hospitals, hospital beds, ventilators and a sizable medical staff. With huge estimates of the ultimately infected population, if transmission happens too rapidly, the health infrastructure could be overrun and vital care unavailable when a lot of people need it.

Coronavirus Front And Center

It’s hard to concentrate on mundane daily life when a novel virus is spreading inexorably through interconnected human communities across the globe. Best to muster authoritative information close:

- The CDC on handwashing, why and how.
- Superintendent Beutner’s version of same.
- On “preparations”, why slowing disease matters.
- CV daily reports from California’s Public health department.
- Latest news from LAUSD.
- Agenda for Tuesday afternoon’s Special LAUSD Board Meeting “Declaring Emergency Conditions Exist at Los Angeles Unified School District Schools and Offices and Authorization to Take Any and All Necessary Actions to Prepare and Respond Effectively to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19).”
- California Department of Public Health guidance for schools and other guidance bulletins.
- California Department of Public Health news releases.
- Approval of CA State request to allow meal service during school closures.

Updated 3/10/20 at 1:30pm to reflect ADA impact:

• Symptomatic children are being asked to stay, and are being sent, home.

• “Los Angeles Unified has asked the state to reconsider the existing ADA policies given the COVID-19 situation”.