{"id":824,"date":"2006-12-28T12:43:43","date_gmt":"2006-12-28T16:43:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=824"},"modified":"2006-12-28T12:43:43","modified_gmt":"2006-12-28T16:43:43","slug":"when-to-shut-down-a-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=824","title":{"rendered":"When to shut down a school"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You probably didn&#8217;t expect this subject from the title, but&nbsp;the entry today isn&#8217;t about accountability, it&#8217;s about public health. The Bloomberg news story today about this year&#8217;s&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601080&amp;sid=a_ax92NXZ59w&amp;refer=asia\">bird-flu cases<\/a> has an interesting school angle, as <a href=\"http:\/\/demfromct.dailykos.com\/\">DemFromCT<\/a> (on DailyKos) notes: one of the simplest <a title=\"Ben Schwarts (HHS) presentation on preventive measures at community level\" href=\"https:\/\/www.fsscc.org\/influenza\/community_interventions.pdf\">community interventions<\/a> to prevent the spread of a contagious is to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newfluwiki2.com\/upload\/stlph.jpg\">close the schools<\/a>&nbsp;(JPG comparing 1918 flu mortality in Philadelphia and St. Louis; St. Louis schools closed, while Philadelphia&#8217;s didn&#8217;t). <\/p>\n<p>One historical and one contemporary note about that: In 1918, the arguments over the right public-health measures were vigorous, and the actual practices varied widely. I suspect similar arguments will exist today in terms of whether it&#8217;s right to close schools for public-health purposes. The tiny Horseheads Central School District in New York is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stargazette.com\/apps\/pbcs.dll\/article?AID=\/20061220\/NEWS01\/612200323\/1001\/NEWS\">discussing that right now<\/a>. It may be at a state level: would a particular governor order schools closed for 2-4 months? <\/p>\n<p>Contemporary note: if you&#8217;re a parent, what would you do if the schools closed?&nbsp; The quality of the interregnum would depend on resources, as they currently do with summer vacation. Parents with internet access will probably be able to continue their children&#8217;s education, and states with &#8220;virtual&#8221; high schools will suddenly find the demand shooting up while bricks-and-mortar schools are closed. Academic teachers may find themselves working at home on some sort of electronic support for students, but the infrastructure doesn&#8217;t exist to do that for 50 million schoolchildren.&nbsp; It&#8217;ll be a mess, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You probably didn&#8217;t expect this subject from the title, but&nbsp;the entry today isn&#8217;t about accountability, it&#8217;s about public health. The Bloomberg news story today about this year&#8217;s&nbsp;bird-flu cases has an interesting school angle, as DemFromCT (on DailyKos) notes: one of the simplest community interventions to prevent the spread of a contagious is to close the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-di","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}