I arrived at school and promptly went to study hall. Today there were fourteen absent teachers because of Covid-19 during first period.
Second period I had another absent teacher. It was around this time that 25 percent of kids, including myself, realized that there were no rules being enforced outside of attendance at the start of the period, and that cutting class was ridiculously easy. We left—there was functionally no learning occurring within study hall, and health conditions were safer outside of the auditorium. It was well beyond max capacity.
Third period I had a normal class period. Hooray! First thing the teacher did was pass out Covid tests because we had all been close contacts to a Covid-positive student in our class. Four more teachers would pass out Covid tests throughout the day, which were to be taken at home. The school started running low on tests, and rules had to be refined to ration.
“To be taken at home.” Ya…students don’t listen. Ninety percent of the bathrooms were full of students swabbing their noses and taking their tests. I had one kid ask me—with his mask down, by the way—whether a “faint line was positive,” proceeding to show me his positive Covid test. I told him to go to the nurse. One student tested positive IN THE AUDITORIUM, and a few students started screaming and ran away from him.
I should note that in study hall and with subs we literally learn nothing. I spent about three hours sitting around today doing nothing.
Ninety percent of the conversations spoken by students concern Covid. It has completely taken over any function of daily school life.
One teacher flat out left his class five minutes into the lesson and didn’t return because he was developing symptoms and didn’t believe it safe to spread to his class.
From a Reddit post on r/nyc. New York City public schools had fully reopened by September 2021; the city’s Omicron surge started in December and peaked in January of this year. An anonymous high school student wrote this post on January 6, calling for “a temporary return to remote learning” even though it had been “absolutely detrimental to the mental health of myself, my friends, and my peers.” In an interview with Slate, the student explained that “with the sheer volume of cases, it makes it impossible for there to be actual learning conditions at school.”
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