By Juneau School District Board of Education
We all ran for the School Board out of a genuine desire to help improve public education, recognizing the crucial role our schools play in Juneau’s economic, social and cultural well-being. None of us envisioned this would include dealing with a pandemic, forcing us to confront awful tradeoffs involving the health of our students, our staff, their families and economic consequences that fall very unevenly among families and businesses. We are writing now because, residents of Juneau, we urgently need your help.
As elsewhere, the pandemic triggered a communitywide shutdown here that caused enormous disruption and economic loss. Back in March, Superintendent BridgetWeiss and her entire district staff responded heroically, creating an unprecedented districtwide distance delivery program in record time, for which we are deeply grateful. But while we know our distance delivery will now be much improved, it is just no substitute for in-person, in-classroom education.
For a while, it looked like we had managed to “flatten the curve” here in Juneau. New resident cases dropped from 13 during the third week of March to just 5 over the entire month of May, one of the lowest rates in the nation. This raised hopes that we could start the coming school year with limited in-class instruction, and Superintendent Weiss and her team put a great deal of thought, time and effort into crafting a blended instructional model that allowed most students to attend school at least two days a week as a starting point.
[Health officials say wear a mask ]
But then cases increased in June, and our first “superspreader” event contributed to 43 new resident cases in July. This increase mirrors Anchorage and the rest of Alaska. This amounts to a “stress test” of our capacity to identify cases and trace their contacts. The results so far are not encouraging. Higher case rates mean longer delays in getting test results, allowing infections to spread more widely before detection, increasing our risk of uncontrollable community spread. We therefore support the Superintendent’s decision to begin the coming school year with distance delivery, at least until the rate of new cases declines to a more manageable level.
We are acutely aware of the costs — educationally, socially and economically — that the distance-learning model imposes. Limited access to often unaffordable child care will force many parents to choose between their jobs and looking after their children, depriving their families economically, their children educationally and the businesses that need them as employees and customers to stay open. Conversely, we are increasingly uncomfortable asking our teachers and staff — many of whom themselves, or their immediate family members — are at higher risk of serious illness or death because of their age or medical condition, to risk getting the disease through protracted contact with possibly infected but asymptomatic students.
We need your help.
Suppressing this disease to a manageable level is not something the school board or district can do alone. The reason we had a superspreader event is because it has been too easy for this disease to spread in our community. But other states and countries have shown that if we all closely adhere to simple public health measures, including wearing a mask that covers the nose as well as the mouth around other people in public and at work, maintaining social distance and avoiding prolonged association with groups inside enclosed spaces — measures we currently expect of city and district employees — we may reasonably anticipate our new case rate to decline to a manageable level within weeks. We may expect this even if infected people come to Juneau from elsewhere in the state, provided they adhere to these simple measures. This will allow us to move toward in-class learning again, as well as open our economy more.
We can do this. We just have to pull together and recognize that each of us has a role to play. Wearing a mask, properly, greatly reduces the risk of spreading the disease, and all of us are at risk of becoming infected and then unknowingly infectious. If we all do our part, it will spare us from inestimable losses, from our children’s education to our own health and pocketbooks.
Juneau, let’s do this for our kids.
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