The Gwinnett County School Board meeting was a mess. Certainly made it seem like the real reason they don't want to go digital is they're not even tech savvy enough to live stream the meeting. Work on your shit and protect lives.

The people who called or came in to speak (teachers, parents, a student, etc) almost uniformly asked that schools not reopen.

Everton Blair, Jr was the only board member in support of not reopening for in-person instruction. The others cited the mental health of the students and the health of the economy as more important than the lives of teachers and students.

One board member spoke of kindergarteners just starting school and how ineffective digital learning would be for that group. But how effective would in-person learning be, when the teacher will primarily be focused on keeping them from touching each other?

There's so much talk about how they need the socialization of school for their mental health, but in-person socialization at school will NOT be the same while the pandemic is still raging.

One board member even said that a teacher "may" become sick, and that they will deal with that then. It's not a maybe. Teachers will become sick, and they will die. As will students, albeit in smaller numbers.

Even with some percentage of students online (40% was the estimate given in the meeting), that leaves THOUSANDS of people in a Gwinnett County high school.

High schools face an additional problem in that students move from class to class, meaning each student and teacher in-person would be interacting with, say, a hundred people a day, who are in turn interacting with a hundred people a day.

In between classes in a high school, there's fewer than ten minutes for a teacher to potentially sanitize their classroom for the next group of students. Setting aside the fact that they likely will not be given the cleaning products (they aren't normally), this is not feasible.

One board member (Boyce) said how much they love their teachers "oh golly" do they, and yet somehow she had nothing to say about their safety or how quarantine would affect sick/personal days.

I'm hopeful that GCPS will go with the tide of many other metro Atlanta counties and go to a fully digital opening in a month, because I doubt they'll want to be the sole bastion of this doomed in-person opening plan.

The one encouraging factor was that the superintendent refused to state his views at the end of the meeting on whether schools should open for in-person instruction, even when prompted by Blair. He waffled through all his comments, which seems to suggest he sees the tide turning.

Of course, he clearly doesn't agree with all-digital learning. And, obviously, GCPS will suffer by the delay in shifting to that plan, assuming they do, because so much prepping time will have been wasted.

I'm also very glad that I helped vote Radloff out of her board seat in the recently past election. No doubt she did great things for education in Georgia during her almost 40 years on the board, but it's time for new ideas.

Then again Radloff muttered something to Wilbanks (superintendent) after abruptly ending the meeting because she didn't want to respond to Blair. I couldn't make it out, but what I'm hearing is it was deeply offensive and unacceptable.

Really hoping that makes the transcript or is in the video they post so she can be held accountable if she indeed did say what I've heard she said. I will not add it to this thread since I didn't actually hear the words, but by context it was clear she was pissed at Blair.

2020 is spending the evening watching a school board meeting and then ranting about it on Twitter. Local politics matter, guys. Vote for EVERYTHING. Research before you do it. Local races really do matter.