It seems that many areas around the country have ‘met’ the requirement to open schools but have not because ‘teachers and staff have not been vaccinated.’ This is so much gobbledygook. With the stroke of a pen, a governor, mayor, or other official could prioritize teachers and staff.
The point is that the number of new Covid cases is falling like a stone. We are down to 25 per hundred thousand in Los Angeles. What little crowding there were in hospital emergency rooms has dissipated in just a couple of weeks. Restaurants are opening up (outside at least). NOW is the time to get schools back open.
It’s the closed schools that have so greatly affected our economy and through it, the parking industry. Schools are closed so:
- Someone has to stay home with the kids.
- They can’t go out to work, shop, meet friends
- They can’t go for coffee or shop after dropping kids off
- The stores they would have visited suffer
- The shopping centers suffer
- The parking facilities that support those businesses suffer
- On street parking suffers
- City parking revenue suffers
- The parking facilities that support the businesses where the moms and dads forced to stay home with kids work suffer.
And it goes on and on.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District alone there are over three quarters of a million students and teachers. That doesn’t count another 100,000 staff. Consider the number of parents who cannot participate in the economy because the schools are closed. Certainly in LA alone its over half a million. One wonders what the economy would look like if that half a million could participate in it.
Let’s not forget the kids.
The harm that has been done to children by keeping them from school is incalculable. It’s not just the fact that they aren’t learning their reading, writing and arithmetic, but socially they are being allowed to atrophy to the point that their interpersonal skills are becoming nonexistent. They are simply an extension of their computer or smart phone. Kids not fortunate enough to have computers are missing class altogether. This has to stop.
I have a plan to get all teachers inoculated in a week. Set up a number of inoculation teams, enough to do 20% of the schools each day. (Each school probably already has part of a team in place, don’t they have school nurses anymore?) Have the teachers and staff report to the school and get their inoculations. Surely a team with the vaccine can inoculate all the staff of any school in one day. Then the team moves on to the next school. In one week all the teachers and staff will be vaccinated. I figure a week to set up the program, a week to inoculate, and we are in business.
No, wait. We can’t do that; we have to inoculate all the cannabis delivery drivers first.
JVH
