What many are missing is that schools across the US—at every level—have done almost nothing to generate and publish reopening plans that'd pass muster with a group of professionals as highly educated and trained in critical thinking as teachers are. No plausible plan has emerged. https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/status/1283892919599063040

This is different from what our brave doctors/nurses encountered. They were at work doing their jobs as the pandemic hit. They kept working—and had no other options—as conditions deteriorated. Teachers are in summer, with the remote learning option yet to be superseded in safety.

This isn't a criticism of educators who are trying to develop reopening plans. This is a criticism of how realistic those plans are—and how realistic those well-intentioned educators are being. No one wants to accept that America simply doesn't have any plan to reopen safely yet.

I'll say that the somewhat derisive response from certain educators has been that teachers as a class are simply "scared" without basis, and there's a little bit of that insidious implication undergirding the framing of this Buzzfeed News article. And that I have no patience for.

No one's thinking about what happens if a teacher get ill. No one is thinking about if kids will keep masks on all day. No one is thinking sufficiently about ventilation or the difficulty of keeping kids distanced. No one accepts that if a kid gets sick the class must quarantine.

Some of the most basic questions teachers are asking about how reopenings will work are being met with shrugs and "we haven't gotten to that yet." Under those circumstances, what group of professionals *would* be sanguine about putting themselves and their students in harm's way?

The quickest way to get an administrator to pale and fall silent is to ask if their school district can conduct universal testing with quick results, immediately contact-trace any child who gets sick, and move to remote learning or quarantine entire classes on a moment's notice.