Do The Right Thing School Boards: Quarantines Must Go
As new school boards take office this month, an opportunity to eradicate bad public health policy
Next week is a pivotal week in school districts all over Chicagoland and the state of Illinois.
Boards of education—Illinois’ most powerful educational governing body—are turned over. Elections took place in April and committees have already been formed. But next week and this month is when thousands in the class of ‘21 participate in their first official public meetings as newly constituted boards.
There is much business to debate and discuss as the 2020-21 school year winds down and plans for 2021-22 begin taking shape.
I’ll provide an agenda recommendation for new board members and layovers not up for re-election this past April—vote to eliminate the close contact quarantine guideline. And do it immediately.
Earlier this week, District 115 (Lake Forest High School) held its first public meeting with its reshuffled board. They beat most boards to the punch as May 17 appears to be a more popular meeting night this month.
The virtual meeting provided insight on what boards are prioritizing as it pertains to Covid and what they continue to glaringly overlook, either with intention or ineptitude.
One graphic presented at the D115 meeting revealed quarantine statistics at the school. The stats are also found on the LFHS’s “COVID Dashboard” page. This is rare, as data on quarantines is hard to find and often not published as part of the standard “COVID-19 Metrics” pages found on most school websites.
(For example, D113, which encompasses Deerfield and Highland Park, has a “COVID-19 Info” sublink on each school’s homepage. But all the page contains is recycled, blurry info from the Illinois Department of Public Health. If in need of information on SHIELD testing and vaccinations? Updated and very detailed. We know where the leadership’s priorities in that district lie.)
Back to Lake Forest, where a graphic with this quarantine data (since January) was shown during the May 10 meeting:
Grade 9 Grade 10 Grade 11 Grade 12
In Quarantine 6-10 11-15 0 1-5
Total Quarantine 166-170. 181-185. 131-135. 46-50
Active Known COVID Cases 1-5. 1-5. 0. 0
Total Known COVID Cases 6-10. 21-25. 11-15. 16-20
Extrapolating from this data, I present an equation:
Total Quarantines divided by Total Known COVID Cases
(I couldn’t locate a division number on my keyboard so have to spell it out…sorry)
The answer comes to a little over 10 (10.2 to be exact when the splitting the difference between the numerical range given under each grade category.)
So in conclusion, since January, for each positive COVID case in D115, 10 students are quarantined.
That’s right. 10 to 1.
Is it fair to say that is an imbalanced outcome?
No members of the board commented or brought up anything having to do with quarantines during the public portion of the meeting. Not a peep.
I don’t want to single out LFHS because they were first to hold a meeting but this same scene is likely to play out next week at school board meetings all over Chicagoland and the state.
No recognition of the misalignment between innocuous Covid positives (kids 12-17 are more likely to die driving to school than of Covid) and the destructive public health policy such innocuous positive tests activate.
Twitter can be a scary place to be at times, but for reporters, it can provide valuable streams of information.
A few days ago, a follower of The Kerr Report asked a series of pertinent questions:
The second and third questions asked in the above tweet I don’t have answers for.
But wouldn’t data on her questions be relevant to determining if quarantine guidelines are actually having an impact on Covid spread in the general population?
(There a district in Indiana, Tippicanoe School Corporation in West Lafayette, that opted out of contact tracing for the second semester because first semester data revealed that the amount of time, effort and expense undertaken for contact tracing served no public health benefit. Read the copy on the district’s health services page. Careful, rational, self-reliant. A stark difference with the disingenuous, angst-ridden tone on the Covid informational pages of Chicago area school districts.)
In Illinois, the data gap is expansive. On a regular basis, it continues to be filled with fear-laced, anecdote-driven language from those in charge.
At the May 10 District 115 Board of Education meeting, interim superintendent Dr. Constance Collins presented a Q&A session where she sourced two members of the Lake County Department of Public Health.
One question presented was this:
Why are we still doing this? Kids don’t even get serious cases of COVID-19. Isn’t it more like the flu for them?
The answer attributed to two members of LCDH:
Absolutely not. Students are still a concern. The age 0-20 was ranked fourth as the fastest-growing COVID-19 population, but has now moved up to second place.
Right after reading the above answer, Collins decided to stoke the fire of fear by sharing the recent death of a 15-year-old from Bolingbrook who according to Collins, “died with Covid…”
Then Collins went on to say this:
It doesn’t impact everybody in the same way….whether people receive vaccines for other conditions still we respond differently and it may be easier for one group of people but very difficult for another.
What the hell is she talking about?
(I will give Dr. Collins credit for deftly pulling off the rare virtue signal double take…jacking up Covid fear and advocating for the vaccine, all in the same sentence. Bravo!)
Let’s fact check two statements given by Collins. First the claim the 0-20 age range is the second-fastest COVID growing population and that the young lady from Bolingbrook died “with Covid.”
The 0-20 age range is misleading as only two states—Tennessee and South Carolina—bundle the 0-20 age range for statistical purposes. The majority of states, including Illinois, bundle 0-19 and classify the age group as “Child Age Range.” Other states use 0-14, 0-17, and 0-18 as age ranges for statistical analysis.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “children” (a classification using combined data from each state’s child age ranges) accounted for 24% of all new COVID-19 cases from April 29-May 6. Over two weeks, 4/22-5/6, there was a 4% increase in the cumulated number of child cases.
Here’s the obstacle in verifying or disputing Collins’s claim—it’s impossible to compare that statistic with another age group because there is no central “age group” classification when it comes to Covid. According to the latest CDC data through May 5, the 18-24 age group saw the highest number of cases, with the 14-17 age range being second.
Not necessarily bullshit but not provable either.
As we know throughout Covid, any institution can frame data to fit the narrative they want to spin.
And schools want to continue to spin how the virus is dangerous to children.
Only it’s not.
Let’s address her second statement.
Collins’s reference to the Bolingbrook teenager who died “with Covid” is at best deceptive, or likely, flat out false.
According to news reports, the young lady died two days after testing positive for COVID-19. The positive test came from a rapid antigen test, known to produce a high volume of false positives. The fact no one else in her family whom she lived with tested positive for COVID-19 lends credence to the possibility her positive test was in fact, a false positive.
The death of this teenage girl is tragic. But the facts are we don’t know how she died. All we know is she tested positive for COVID a few days before her death. Saying she died “with Covid” is misleading and inaccurate, another example of a school leader spreading legacy media headline fallacies to gin up fear over Covid to the general population.
Here are the leading causes of death in teenagers (according to the CDC):
*Accidents (unintentional injuries)
*Homicide
*Suicide
*Cancer
*Heart Disease
At the Monday D115 meeting, I didn’t hear any “concerns” verbalized about texting and driving or about the mental health of hundreds of young people isolated at home due to bad public policy. The facts say students are more at risk of accidents and suicide than of a virus 277 children between the ages of 0-17 since January 2020 have died with and has an infection fatality rate of .0001%.
This was a tweet I sent out Monday night referring to the terrible death of the teenage girl in Bolingbrook:
Nope. School leaders remain hung up on fear-mongering talking points, mindless group think and justifying expensive testing regimens and coercing families into taking a non-FDA approved vaccine to consider actual facts.
But reason for hope, albeit fleeting.
New school boards take office this month. This present opportunities for change.
The first significant change would be to eliminate the close contact quarantine guidelines as presently constructed by state public health. It would require backbone—defying current public health guidelines from the counties, state and CDC. But there is precedence.
Earlier this month, the School District of Waukesha, by a 5-4 vote, eliminated quarantine requirements for students and staff who come into close contact with people who have tested positive for the virus.
School leaders looked at the disparity between the number of students quarantined (8,300), the number of students who ultimately tested positive while in quarantine (two percent. Out of that two percent, 0.7 percent was traced back to the school) and saw a bogus rule.
So they changed it.
One school board member said this to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
It (quarantines) did stop very, very few cases but at too high of a cost for the other students who missed a few thousand hours or more of instruction. Throughout the year, we learned not only by the disclosure of the grades of the students for first quarter in hybrid that it was terrible. In-person is preferred. So if the quarantines would have continued, it would have just been a continuation of terrible performance and not delivering the best educational model for the students
Another school board member said this to JS Online:
We have to weigh the probability and risk of secondary COVID infection against the losses of student development and academic progress due to quarantines. It's time to move forward and do what's best for our kids
How enlightening is it to read remarks from someone interested in “best educational models” and “what’s best for kids” and not say a damn thing about Covid?
It’s called fact-based leadership. It also took plenty of hutzpah and courage from those five school board members to resist the public health bureaucrats and likely social media blowback from the double-masking, virus variant seekers of the world (all of whom are on Twitter.)
Guess what happened a few days after the vote?
The Waukesha County Heath Department relaxed its quarantine guidelines. This is important because it provided governmental backing for the school district. It also showed how school boards can lead by example.
(I hear a lot of absolute language from school officials about how public health protocols are a “uniform set of procedures” and “cannot be changed.” Really? Has anyone bothered to challenge that claim? I realize Illinois is not Wisconsin but the unwillingness to confront authority continues to be a stain on this state’s citizenry.)
Next week, thousands of board of education members across Chicagoland and the state meet for the first time publicly as newly installed boards. I ask them to consider the rational, common sense decision made by the Waukesha School District board.
No one is saying it will be easy. But it’s the right thing to do.
Vote to abolish quarantines.