I have an urgent request for you today. Would you please consider adding your name to a letter to President Trump and Vice President Pence asking for the CDC to revise and redraft the guidelines for opening schools? In Georgia and other states in the southeast, school usually starts the first week in August. School boards are already meeting to figure out how to reopen. It is time-sensitive for these school boards to have updated guidance. The text of the letter is below my signature. This letter will be a letter from physicians, teachers, group leaders, parents, grandparents, activists, and others.

 

If you are willing to sign the letter to the President asking the CDC to revise the school reopening guidelines, please use this form to sign the letter.

 

Additionally, please forward this email to anyone you think would want to sign the letter and copy and paste the email and letter along with the link to sign it on social media. The letter is from physicians, teachers, group leaders, parents, grandparents, activists, and others.

 

If you haven’t seen the CDC guidelines for reopening schools, you can view them on the CDC website.

 

Thank you!

 

Jenny Beth Martin

LETTER TO PRESIDENT TRUMP AND VICE PRESIDENT PENCE

On May 19, the CDC issued a new document, “Considerations for Schools,” offering what it calls “considerations for ways in which schools can help protect students, teachers, administrators, and staff and slow the spread of COVID-19.” We have reviewed these “considerations,” and find them wholly out of touch with the way people live in the real world that is America in 2020. They are totally unworkable, and we urge senior officials to review and revise these new CDC “considerations” to bring them into line with how real people live.

 

To begin, acknowledge that schools are one of the fundamental bedrocks of our society. They educate our next generation, not just on the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but on the shared values that inhere in our culture. They prepare our next generation to be productive members of society – a society that will not always allow for social distancing, staggered scheduling, herding into small groups, and the like. The real world can be a rough place, and we do our children a disservice if we fail to properly prepare them for it.

 

Moreover, for most working parents with children in school, school is not just about education. Having children in school means a parent can go to work secure in the knowledge that his or her child or children are in a safe place, overseen by responsible adults, while they’re at work. And for some, it even means the knowledge that their child or children will be eating well, thanks to our school nutrition programs.

 

Consequently, keeping schools closed is simply not an option. Schools must reopen in the fall – and they must reopen in a manner that acknowledges all we’ve learned about COVID-19. That means taking into account what is reasonable to expect of children of school age, and not assuming it is in their nature to behave in as regimented a manner as the authors of the CDC “considerations” seem to think possible.

 

In fact, the CDC “considerations” seem so strange, it’s as if they were written by a technocrat in Washington, DC who’s never seen children in a school setting before. You’re going to enforce social distancing on a playground or in gym class? Impossible. You’re going to order children not to use the jungle gyms, the slides, the horizontal ladders, and the carousels, because they cannot be disinfected between each use? And we are expected to believe this will succeed without the use of force? Try telling a nine-year-old he can’t climb on the horizontal ladders, or a five-year-old she can’t use the slide. Good luck with that.

 

The CDC’s guidelines stipulate reconfiguring classrooms so each child faces forward, eliminating most face-to-face contact. This mandate is straight out of a dystopian science fiction novel. In fact, one doctor has commented to that effect. Dr. Jane Hughes in San Antonio, Texas, believes the CDC recommendations create a “dystopian environment for our children,” far more devastating than the low risk posed by COVID-19 to young people. (youtu.be/dIcrmYdwn8A and youtu.be/tMpOv9LAq3E)

 

Speaking of that low risk to young people, what is most troubling is that the “considerations” are not anchored in science. They seem not have considered that the virus simply is not very much of a threat to young people under the age of 25, and certainly not a threat to children under the age of 15.

 

Further, we find it disturbing that at a time of budget shortfalls at the state and local levels, implementing the CDC “considerations” would require significant new and additional spending. We’ve already significantly increased government spending – and the concomitant burden on taxpayers – beyond reason as a function of governments’ lockdown responses and the resulting shock to our economy.

 

Perhaps most disturbingly, the CDC “considerations” do not acknowledge the CDC’s own updated findings that say the virus spreads mainly from person to person, rather than from contaminated surfaces. Does the CDC even read its own ever-changing guidelines and findings? If the CDC isn’t paying attention to what it releases to the public, why should we?

 

The CDC considerations further demonstrate a lack of real-world understanding in the section on masks. “Teach and reinforce use of cloth face coverings. … Face coverings should be worn by staff and students (particularly older students) as feasible, and are most essential in times when physical distancing is difficult. Individuals should be frequently reminded not to touch the face covering and to wash their hands frequently. Information should be provided to staff, students, and students’ families on proper use, removal, and washing of cloth face coverings.”

 

This insistence on masks flies in the face of data, science, and common sense. A study that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine on May 21st reports that masks provide “little, if any, protection from infection.” Furthermore, the possibility of “catching COVID-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal.” So, why the insistence on masks? The article provides this explanation: “In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.”¹

 

So, to be clear: We are asking that our children be forced to cover their faces for up to eight hours a day simply because the CDC has so frightened us that there is now a prevalent and “reflexive reaction to anxiety” during this time? Surely our children deserve better than anxiety-induced reflexive, rather than thoughtful, reactions.

 

At this point, the United States is far behind our European counterparts. Not only did our children here have to forego classroom instruction for the last three months of the school year and skip graduation ceremonies, but we hear from school districts across the nation that, guided by the CDC’s unrealistic guidelines, they are not even sure schools can resume in the fall. This is nonsense, and Europe proves it. Schools will not only be open in Europe in the fall, but, recognizing that school attendance is foundational to a functioning society, many European countries reopened their schools.² Given what we know about the low infection rates among children, it is hardly surprising that these countries have found zero increase in the spread of infection as a result of the schools being reopened.

 

Doctors have spoken out on the dangers of the extended lockdowns, and, in particular, their effect on children of school age. Said Dr. Jeffrey Kornitzer a pediatric neurologist from New Jersey, “Just today, I saw a child paralyzed with fear because he couldn’t figure out if he should wear his mask because his mother kept saying, ‘Well, if you don’t wear the mask, you’re going to catch coronavirus and you’re gonna die,’ and at the same time the kid has sensory issues, every time he put it on he wanted to crawl out of his skin.” (youtu.be/usRD4QIjSNM)

 

And Dr. Mark McDonald, a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist in Los Angeles, says, “The risk of death in children from flu, from seasonal flu, is 20 to 30 times higher than that of the coronavirus, and yet we have never closed schools, we have never asked children or teachers to wear masks, to play separately, to eat separately, to arrive and leave separately from schools because of the flu. And now we’re doing that for the coronavirus, which, essentially, does not affect children … In my opinion, this is child abuse. I am absolutely appalled, and I think it makes no scientific or rational sense whatsoever.” (youtu.be/tTi8Wn_NiOg)

 

We agree. The CDC “considerations” are entirely inappropriate, and must be rewritten from top to bottom.

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