School’s In Session: More Counties Moving to In-Person Instruction

RALEIGH – Wake County Board of Education is meeting Tuesday to discuss their plans, for making plans, for returning kids to school after weeks of virtual-only instruction. Buncombe County, Henderson County, and, now, Haywood County, are all making similar moves.

This comes as parents across the state, on both sides of the political aisle, are fed up and speaking up about the wholly insufficient education their children are receiving via virtual instruction. Parents in Mecklenburg County are suing their school board to open up for students. Wake County groups are leading a publicity campaign to call on their school board to open up for students.

Parents in Buncombe County have had enough, too, imploring the school board to ‘Bring Kids Back,’ and it seems to be working.

From the Asheville Citizen-Times:

“The sign Ben Whitmire carried into his local school board meeting displayed a simple message: Bring Kids Back.

The three words encapsulated the views of a dozen parents and teachers who stepped to the podium at the Buncombe County Schools board meeting Thursday and implored district leaders return students to in-person instruction.

“These kids need the interaction with their teachers, mentors, friends and other classmates,” said Whitmire, whose daughter is in 12th grade and whose wife teaches in the district.

Whitmire may have opened the meeting’s public comment section, but his views weren’t the first time Buncombe board members have heard parents demand classroom lessons following weeks of distance lessons.

“We’ve been bombarded with phone calls and emails,” said Donna Pate, a BCS board member. “Hundreds, hundreds of emails.” In a 5 to 2 vote, BCS voted to resume classroom instruction, under a hybrid Plan B model.

Having now experienced virtual learning for a month, many North Carolina parents argue the risks of keeping children away from schools outweigh the risks of bring them back during the COVID-19 pandemic. […]”

When Governor Roy Cooper announced his long-delayed parameters for school reopening, he gave counties a choice between 100 percent virtual instruction, or a blend of in-person and virtual education in which only half of students could be in school at any one time.

This, despite the mountain of evidence (you know, the ‘science and data’ Cooper says they rely on to make decisions) that indicates children are at extraordinarily low risk of suffering from the coronavirus. That’s not to say they cannot contract it — news media is feverishly reporting any ‘cluster’ or outbreaks at schools that have in-person classes — but the reporting usually leaves out that the ‘cases’ are not really cases at all.

Beyond that, parents are learning what many already sensed long ago. Our kids NEED the environments schools provide for so many reasons. School closures, combined with sports cancellations, eliminating playdates in favor of social distancing, and every other isolation tactic fueled by Pandemic Panic, is hindering and hurting a great many of our children.

That’s not to mention the impact on families when they must juggle remote learning from home, but also hold down a job. A job that is all too precious after the mandated recession of 2020.

Let us remember that many of the decisions to select 100 percent virtual instruction were made after pressure from overly political teachers associations with an interest in stoking the fires of fear. Those groups are STILL working against reopening schools before the election.

If you needed any more evidence that the wannabe teachers unions, and their parent organization the NCAE, are more about a particular political agenda than the sound education of children, here it is.