Schools future Petri dishes for acceleration of virus infections

The government in SA reopened its schools while we were still climbing towards the peak of coronavirus infections and now the brown stuff has hit the fan.

It was a reckless decision from start to finish based on an overreliance on strippeddown statistical data and the complete neglect of the social science data on schools as organisations.

Economists and some epidemiologists made the claim that children are less likely to fall ill and die, and that the social costs of staying at home are higher than if children returned to school.

We are now paying a heavy price for this short-sighted decision made worse by the compulsion of bureaucrats to restore order, certainty and predictability in the administration of schools.

After all, there is a CAPS curriculum to cover, there are end-of-year exams that must be written, and the minister must deliver the triumphant matric results (this too is predictable) on schedule so that the president can echo the lies in the next Sona.

Makaula Senior Secondary School in KwaBhaca (formerly Mount Frere) saw more than 200 pupils and staff members testing positive for coronavirus infections.

More than 30 schools in the Buffalo City Metro shut down after 30 positive cases were identified.

More than 200 schools nationwide closed down at one stage.

Principals of disadvantaged schools on the Cape Flats, where infections are surging, have pleaded with government to postpone the reopening of schools. On the ground, there is chaos and distress.

“The anxiety is real ... it’s an abnormal situation,” the principal of Heathfield High School says in one media report.

We are now at the stage of the course of this disease that everybody knows someone who has been infected or even died.

Personally, I know principals of schools who are on ventilators and teachers who have died. It really is an eerie feeling when you realise that the one day you were interviewing a principal for a research project and a few weeks later the energetic young school leader is in hospital fighting for her life.

This is only the beginning as infections soar beyond 106,000 with more than 2,100 dead.

As other grades prepare to return to school, there is a coming carnage that is going to devastate the poorer schools in our country.

Many more teachers, principals and general staff will fall ill and die in crowded schools with inadequate infrastructures for managing the on-site spread of the pandemic.

Schools will become Petri dishes for the acceleration of coronavirus infections given one crucial variable that statisticians simply cannot see — the compactness of schools as organisations especially in working class and poor communities.

The coming carnage is not only predictable, it is avoidable if only we listened to parents and teachers.

I am impressed by the expanding support base of the active Facebook group “Parents Against the Opening of Schools” and the growing number of online platforms in which teachers and parents express their fears about the premature reopening of schools.

These are not wealthy or middle-class parents whose children are in elite schools and therefore insulated from the worst effects of the virus by what privilege can buy — such as small classes and other efficient risk-mitigating measures.

These activist parents are those for whom the risk exposure could be fatal; they work with the unusual wisdom of a Sadtu official cited elsewhere: “There is no second chance at life. You live once or you die.”

Inside schools, things are falling apart. I interviewed several Grade 7 teachers recently.

They are very scared: “I am so afraid but for the sake of my children, who are also scared, I just have to show up and pretend that I am fine.”

My heart broke when I heard this brilliant young teacher leader share her story during a Zoom conversation.

Not all grade 7 children showed up; parents are themselves unsure and often keep children at home for fear of infection and what they might bring home.

And when the children do come to school “they just sit there and stare ahead with their masks on saying nothing” said one of the teachers I talked to.

So what is going to happen next — between now and the end of the academic year?

Hundreds of schools will open, close, reopen and then close again as waves of infection sweep through the most vulnerable schools.

Fewer teachers will be available to teach and even fewer replaced. The school timetable will be a mess which means that the curriculum will be so disrupted that no meaningful education will happen inside these schools anyway.

In other words, the government might reopen schools, but the virus will close many of them down.