When I first read this tweet, it got my back up. "I know parents are having a hard time," I thought, "but what about teachers? Going to work puts their lives in danger! And schools are not a safe place for students right now. The cases need to come down." https://twitter.com/amydempsey/status/1381689691842433034">https://twitter.com/amydempse...
But it didn& #39;t take me long to realize that of course the concerns raised in that original tweet are valid. Closing schools puts a lot of parents in an impossible situation.
How do we deal with this conflict? How do we resolve the inherent contradiction between educators& #39; and students& #39; need to be kept safe from the virus, and parents& #39; and kids& #39; need for a safe place for kids to be during the day? It seems impossible.
It& #39;s easy to fall into this kind of thinking: Parents need one thing, school workers need another, those needs are in conflict, someone has to lose. It sucks, but what can you do?

This is wrong.
This is a false dichotomy, manufactured by our governments& #39; failure. Our provincial and federal governments have had a _year_, and every kind of warning, to prevent this crisis. They chose not to.
A year during which they could have kept restaurants and gyms closed and paid people to stay home. A year to suspend rent and mortgage payments. A year to implement and enforce covid safety requirements at truly necessary workplaces.
A year to invest in air filtration systems for classrooms, to find and rent unused office spaces, to hire additional staff and shrink class sizes.

A year to prevent this slow-motion disaster that every single expert saw coming.
I don& #39;t know how to end this thread. This is where we are, and it sucks. I& #39;m just doing my best to remember, as we try to navigate this current crisis, that it is manufactured. It didn& #39;t have to be like this, and we are being pitted against each other on purpose.
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