What possible excuse is there for not immediately taking your kids out of school when bird flu goes H2H?
Does anyone know of anyone who would not take their kids out of school in such circumstances; and why?
Bugger the economics, I say(it’s not the problem of the individual to think about)- we must save ourselves before we save our day jobs. Just save up to pay your bills(!which would take some thought!)- and find a new job if your old one isn’t there in the new world. SIMPLE, i’n’it?!?
The less people that die is the priority-I’N’IT?!?
it’s up to the school to decide whether they will close or not
People’s reactions will veer back and forth between panic and complacence. It will vary dramatically with severity and locality.
What would happen if large numbers of kids were hanging out together committing crimes? What if teachers refused to take the risk of coming to work. What if a large number of kids were killed by house fires caused by candles and gas heaters? What if most survived one viral wave just fine and they are told another is on the way, will they beleive that THIS wave is the real one? What if you’ve been off work, looking after your kids for four months and no one in your area has died, your boss is about to sack you? What if you only tolerate your kids and want them out from under your feet?
Nobody is able to say what will happen. Which is why, I think, people need to be told as many facts as possible and encouraged to do their own planning. But many people will still expect someone else to make the decisions for them.
uk bird - agreed! Plus we need to know what the facts are. We’re still learning many important things.
Children and school are the worst vectors for regular flu, as has been discussed before. You can count on the situation being worse if schools stay open. I think 99% of parents will be able to tolerate their children if the alternative is death.
Reader – at 07:10 I think 99% of parents will be able to tolerate their children if the alternative is death.
But for how long? 1 month, 1 year, 2 years? Kids still have to be educated. People still have to earn a living unless the state is going to support them (if it can).
And death isn’t the guaranteed alternative. Every parent will have a tipping point (both to take their kids from schools and to return them there again) it will vary depending upon education level, anxiety, financial circumstances, danger (real and imagined), marital status, responsibilities etc.
Many parents will want someone else to take the responsibility, in part so they have someone else to blame if it all goes wrong.
Governments tend to make the decision that will get them votes here and now. They’re not going to take a pre-emptive strike to close schools. What if it’s a false alarm? They’ll probably wait until parents act. That might be too late for parents who aren’t as well informed as the ones here. Or it might be the right decision, kids still need to be taught. Keeping them off school won’t necessarily slow the transmission, kids still die in large numbers in places where they don’t go to school. How many parents will keep their kids at home all of the time?
I’d be happier to know that my government is preparing plans for a worse pandemic than 1918. I’d like to know that they won’t be making snap decisions if the CFR is more than 2.5%. I’d also like to know that the public has also thought long and hard about it so they don’t panic at the last moment.
It depends, on your city and circumstances. 5 days absent without a doctors permission and they will haul the parents to court and possibly jail where I live. They have already tried that with me when my son was in third grade. He was sick all the time. The day before he was scheduled for surgery they made me meet with the truant officer. This was really just a vindictive principle because I was demanding special education services. He conviently forgot to tell the officer about the surgery. That made the officer mad and the case was dropped. I just had to agree to bring a doctors note. But that nasty incident has been in my son’s school history ever since. It is interesting now that my son is in high school, he has been the one to inform the teachers. He did a report on bird flu at the beginning of last year. After that the number of teachers that would talk to him about it grew steadily. I just had his IEP meeting last week. I actually brought up the bird flu, four of his new teachers instantly said that is really scary. My son says teachers he hasn’t even had will come up and talk to him about it. I think that he has put out the information that even if the school doesn’t close, enough teachers who know the facts will refuse to show up, and they will have to close.
MI has pretty easy to deal with laws regarding home school DebP.There was a thread about homeschool laws by state,maybe a linker could link.I am more of a lunker ;)
Parents who don’t know that there is H2H spread of a pandemic and who don’t know that there is such a thing as a pandemic will have no reason to take their kids out of school.
Depending on media coverage, there could be a lot of people who don’t know — until the pandemic starts affecting a lot of people in their own neighborhood, which could be a few days to a few weeks to a month or more, depending on where they live.
Parents who read the news but don’t believe it, rationalizing, “if the schools are open it must be OK.”
Parents who know there is a pandemic, but believe the risk is overblown, rationalizing, “if the schools are open, it must be OK.”
Parents who are metally challenged (retarded, mentally ill, to such a degree that they can’t process the information that they do get well enough to make a decision).
People who can’t read and don’t follow the news.
People who don’t speak English.
Oh, and of course, parents who WONDER is there’s a pandemic (along with the rest of the world) but aren’t sure. Is it pandemic flu? Is it seasonal flu?
Parents who have moved heaven and earth to get their kids into a magnet program in an otherwise crappy school district, and know if they remove their kid for any reason they will lose that slot for their kid and all the kids’ siblings; and these parents HAVEN’T been following fluwiki and the flu boards for 3 years, so they aren’t up on the implications of pandemic flu; they’ve just been told, we’ll have to treat kids at home and have 2 weeks of food on hand; and they expect there will be a vaccine. They probably will send their kids to school as long as school is open, especially if they have no one telling them not to.
ACM, you are right,the information needs to get out there to parents soon so that plans can be made well in advance if alternative care is needed once schools are closed.
Outreach programs need to be set up by schools to do this (possibly use school social workers, guidance counsellors and truant officers?) Closing schools early seems to be the most effective strategy. (Read Annon_22′s comments on the TLC and IOM threads).
My kids are grown now, but if if they were still in school I would have my homeschooling letters of intention ready to deliver once sustained H2H began anywhere in the world. I would take an emergency leave as well. This option should be made avaiable to everyone. IMO, parent’s need to be held personally responsible for their kids whereabouts and consequences put in place so that parents realize in advance that they can’t let them leave home once quarantine is in place. Yeah, it will be tough dealing with Teenagers but it will be a lot tougher watching them die.
Lots of laws need to be ready to put in place so that families have the financial security to stay home during a pandemic, with the exception of essential personnel. Education of parents to this possibility has been sadly lacking so far.
I think it is time to talk with your PTA reps and express your concerns.
Science Teacher at 20:21
This is one of the topic you will be discussing in depth when you attend the “Public Engagement Project on Community Control Measures” meeting.
I attended the Atlanta meeting today, and in our small group our concensus was that closing schools would be the most challenging containment measure - for many of the reasons stated in this thread and in other threads.
At the same time, over 80% of ALL the participants surveyed AFTER discussing the pros and cons agreed that option was still a *valid* control measure. In other words, the overwhelming majority was willing to do this in spite of the challenges.
CR
Average Concerned Mom - at 8:40
Your points are excellent, and I’ll be taking them with me when I speak to my school officials about planning, ahead of time, for school closure. For all the reasons you mention, planning ahead and anticipating needs the needs and problems that a school closure will engender is, as is clear from your post, absolutely the smartest way to proceed.
However, when the time comes, I will also take the directory for our small school here in hand and I will call every family on the list. I will explain my background and that I have watched H5N1 carefully for a long time, I will describe whatever the current situation is, I will make use of the science I have learned along this journey and explain the particulars to those who ask, I will lay out the hard facts and statistics, I will ask the hard questions, and I will tell them that I think it is time to pull their kids from school.
Ours is a small school. When I am done, I think there will be no reason left to keep it open.
My task finished there, I may find another school phone book and start over. This is what, in the end, it may take. We may need to take the decision out of the hands of those it is normally placed in. These will not be normal times.
And would I be embarassed or nervous to make these calls? No. I have been called up to six times a day recently by both people and machines working on behalf of candidates seeking election on Tues. They only want a vote. I want to save a kid’s life. If that is what it is going to take - a personal campaign - no problem.
Thanks for the info. CR. I am happy to hear that 80% felt that closing schhols was needed. I look forward to reading more when you get to it.
Pixie, I like your idea of a phone campaign a lot. I think it would really help and put the power back into the hands of the parents to make what could be a life or death choice for their kids.
Our 14 yo attends a private school. At this point, I don’t think we would hesitate to take her out of school. But I do think of the ramifications. I would like to think we and other parents will continue to pay tuition so the teachers can be paid. But, if things are so bad that we would pull our child from school, I probably would not continue to work to minimize the possibility of bringing the virus home to her. So, without my income we would have to cut our expenses and school tuition might be at the top of the list. We could pay it for awhile, but I don’t know for how long. It is troubling to think that doing what is best for you and your family could have an unintended negative affect on someone else.
NFW, that is a very sensitive comment and you must be a caring person.
There are so many people in many different jobs that may lose their livlihood and have great difficulty making ends meet. I hope the government is planning for this aspect. Single parents will face the hardest challenge, I think.
Two parent households may differ on their readiness to take their kids out of school, there are other threads discussing differences of opinion within households with regard to prepping. In that respect, single parents at least don’t have to argue about it with their spouse. Having to come to agreement could slow down the decision making process.
Reason number 4534789 to homeschool. I don’t have to worry about when to bring the kids home. whew!
The other thing to remember is that the flu is unlikely to be equally spread throughout all geographical areas at the same time.
Will the schools in Florida close if there are few to no pandemic flu cases in the state, even if there are cases in New York? I can see it if there are cases in Georgia, but not California or New York.
And what happens between “waves” if the virus behaves in that way? Conceivably we could be talking about nearly 2 years of waves.
There may also be a significant group of school aged children that lose their adult(s). These children will have to be housed and educated as well … there won’t be “homeschool” options for them. Most states, actually I think all of them, require the home education program to be headed by a parent. Not even all legal guardians qualify … most foster children cannot be homeschooled. In some states, until an adoption is legally finalized and recorded here in the US the adopting parent cannot homeschool the child.
I am a strong believe and proponent for homeschooling, but I do realize it is not the panacea for all situations.
We need to be coming up with realistic alternatives and responses now rather than trying to wing it when an emergency does hit.
There is one category that Average Concerned Mom didn’t mention, those who don’t watch or care about the news at all. My ex never watched the news, and the only part of the paper he ever read was the sports page. His reasoning was that “you can’t believe the crap that these idiots write.” To him, you could never believe what you read or even what doctors would tell him, because “they only want to get more money our of me” in his words. I can’t believe I ever even thought of marrying someone so stupid, my only defense was that I was very young at the time.
There are plenty of people like him though, who think that most news is all hype and can’t be trusted, or that it is all just too depressing to see so they just avoid it entirely. When it actually happens to them is when they will believe it and not before. Sadly, they will have kids who will pay the price for their beliefs.
Deborah at 16:43
I don’t think you need to worry much about it. I believe that if h5n1 breaks wide open, the news will be everywhere. Scrolling at the bottom of tv show’s…the cancellation of large gatherings like sports events might be another tip off. Think 9/11…can you think of anyone who didn’t get the news pdq??
I think they will be furious that they weren’t wacked over the head with a 2″x4″ and told to prepare.
I haven’t seen anything to think it isn’t expected to be in many places simultaneously, and then consider; different strains/waves may overlap…there are already more than one clade -what if each eventually goes pandemic, and has its own waves? (at least at first, when people are still trying to travel and fuel holds out, people will be moving virus great distances.) 9/11 was sort of a freeze-frame of travel; how many states/nations were your local people stuck when flights were grounded? How many people do we contact in a day or two before falling ill? I do not see there only being cases in one state, (unless reporting of them stops); people travel for business, vacation, military, nat’l guard,ect, every day.
The points from the recent conferences, about, cases double every 2 days, means there is little time to recognize what is happening and act, at the start of pandemic, and, if for some reason the wave seems to be ending locally, I don’t see any way to know when the next wave was about to arrive. If even a 2% cfr means we’d lose the young people normally lost to all other causes combined over two deacdes, surviving kids and adults are going to be very leery of chancing death after experiencing the first swath. Especially if they feel the govt was keeping them in the dark to start with; who’s going to believe an “all-clear now; get back to school and go to work”? During SARS in Canada tptb tried to say it was over too soon, and, we recall the air quality at ground zero after 9/11, too…
I do think communities should be planning now what to do with unattended minors (and grieving parents) but, hard to do that when there’s no public discussion “to avoid panic” of impacts of a pandemic influenza year. Even the Nov. 3rd 12-week prep recommendation to Americans in HK got pulled back to 2 weeks. (Wish they’d instead sent the mainland Americans a news flash that we were supposed to be prepping for at least 12 weeks…) and schooling needs to be discussed, but, schools need healthy kids.