Why we just can’t reopen our schools.

Every time I drive past a KFC I get the urge to hit the indicator and then hit the drive-thru. 

I can justify it as well.

I’ve been pretty good today, even went to the gym this morning. Actually, I deserve this. Who the hell does that doctor think she is telling me to reduce my fat intake? That crackpot wouldn’t know a what it’s like for people in the real world. Maybe just a small value meal with a diet soft drink. Yeah. Yum.

I really want that KFC when I see those red neon signs and that grinning colonel. But that doesn’t mean that it’s good for me. Further, it’s in the way of my biggest goals.

For this reason, we may really want schools to re-open in full for the looming semester – but that deep, burning desire doesn’t make it a good idea.

Our goals are clear here. We need to eliminate this current Covid-19 threat and we need everyone to play their part. That includes our kids. 

Yes, we’re greedy. We’d also like our kids at school, learning and collaborating. They’d like to be there too. But for the moment, choosing that option is in the way of our biggest goal. Any decision to prioritise education above public health at the moment is a choice to compromise our biggest goals.

As a lifelong educator, it pains me to write this – but the best thing our kids can do for us and themselves right now is to stay home, to stay away from each other, to stay away from their teachers and to do the best they can with the devices they’ve got.

Any decision, including that made by the Victorian Government to return our Year 11 and 12 students along with Special Education students, is a compromise of our big goal. It’s ordering a Pepsi Max with my KFC Family Feast and calling it a sensible, healthy choice.

Respected epidemiologist Dr Zoe Hyde says “Ideally, I think schools should stay closed in Victoria until there is no community transmission. At that point, schools could reopen with suitable precautions in place.”

Those precautions are simply a matter of learning lessons from the rest of the world. In South Korea, where they also endured an unexpected spike resulting in a second round of school closures, students returning there are temperature tested on arrival and departure. They wear masks. They eat and they study in their own cubicles. Their floors are marked to promote social distancing. Professional cleaning occurs as a matter of routine.

While we suspected that schools were safe in the early Coronavirus days, we’ve since learned that this simply isn’t the case. Without firstly keeping our kids at home and then returning only under the strictest of protocols, we risk disaster.

Israel lazily returned their students to school under roughly pre-Covid conditions and is paying an exorbitant price. Schools are now thought to be chiefly responsible for their second wave and further rounds of school closures are spreading like wildfire.

Student-to-student infections have abounded, as have infections amongst staff members and between students and staff. A single Israeli school encountered 130 individual infections before authorities could even blink, let alone act to contain.

If it’s good enough for us to learn that private security companies taking sole responsibility for hotel quarantine was a bad idea, then we can learn the lessons from both our own and the world’s attempts to simultaneously prioritise education and flattening the curve.

That lesson is that it doesn’t work.

In the coming days, we’ll see countless messages about how important education is – and it is. But those messages will become exaggerations in a heartbeat and then they are nothing more than self-serving soundbites to politicians.

So, allow me to be clear on a few things.

If Victorian kids miss a few more weeks of face-to-face school learning they will not be wildly disadvantaged, by comparison with other states, for the rest of their lives. We are not conceding to a generation of stupid young Victorians.

Victorian Principals and teachers, genuinely concerned and grappling with the right thing to do, are not happy about this extra week of holidays. They are, right now, fervently working to make this work for our kids – yet again. Their unions are not holding the progress of the state to ransom either.

Priorities are only priorities if we refuse to compromise them. The current priority is defeating this virus. The time to prioritise education will come. And our teachers will be ready.

And eating popcorn chicken, however scrumptious those morsels might be, isn’t evidence that I’m serious about my own health priorities either. Keep driving.