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Fauquier Times | July 22, 2020
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Our national conversation about COVID-19 reads increasingly like a page taken from a Kafkaesque short story. The boundary between fact and fiction has become almost indistinguishable. Unfortunately, we cannot indulge fiction in the real world where illusion can be costly.
July 13’s school board meeting was a striking example of that challenging dialogue.
As we prepare to transition children and teachers back into a school setting, we need to recognize and come to terms with those realities. How we manage their re-entry should not be based on political persuasion, expediency, or the exigencies of partisan groups. It should not be based on fear or on the dangerous lack thereof.
We want our children back in school, but achieving that objective requires tremendous clarity and diligence as we attempt to understand real and evolving health risks.
As of July 15, more than 3 million people in the U.S. have tested positive for a virus that has no vaccine. That number is increasing at a rate of over 60,000 people a day. More than 140,000 people in the U.S. have died. Virginians account for more than 73,000 COVID-19 cases and nearly 2,000 related deaths (CDC, 2020). Numbers in most states are rising.
Though people 19 years and younger currently comprise a small portion of these infections, the median age of coronavirus patients has, in recent months, declined by 15 years. And while the elderly are more likely to die from the virus, they are not necessarily more likely to contract it (TIME, 2020). In some states, those between the ages of 20 and 44 account for nearly half of all COVID-19 cases (New York Times, 2020).
The arrow now pointing to younger populations is troubling.
Children do contract the virus and can suffer its most severe consequences. An overnight camp in rural southwestern Missouri closed down earlier this month when 82 children and counselors tested positive for COVID-19. The number of infected people jumped from 49 to over 80 in a single weekend. A similar spread of the virus occurred among children at overnight camps in various parts of Texas (New York Times, 2020).
Instances like these should not go unnoticed as we ease restrictions.
Could the slow rise in adolescent and childhood cases be a simple matter of exposure? How will school children respond once they have been with other children on a regular basis for extended periods each day? These are questions we should ask when considering the impact of a virus we know so little about.
Even more unsettling is mounting evidence that this particular virus can have disturbing residual effects. Johns Hopkins is currently researching the puzzling relationship between COVID-19 and heart failure, abnormal heart rates, heart attacks, and cardiogenic shock (Johns Hopkins, 2020).
In a recent New England Journal of Medicine review, intensive care doctor Julie Helms and her colleagues in France document the growing number of COVID-19 patients with neurological symptoms typical of brain damage: confusion, impaired cognition, seizures and strokes.
There are, in fact, more than 300 studies worldwide which reveal similar neurological responses in patients who have contracted the novel coronavirus (BBC, 2020).
Information should not incite fear; it should instead help us to make informed choices.
How do all of these unknowns factor into our decision to bring children back to school? Can we justify placing them in an environment that will increase their exposure to a virus we still know so little about? Physicians often address a risk-gain ratio when they recommend treatments to patients. What similar standard of care are we using to make decisions about children returning to school?
No single solution will alleviate the inevitable hardships incurred by particular stakeholders committed to getting children back into the classroom. This is because public education has become an integral cog in the machinery supporting social and economic stability. It provides working parents with childcare; it addresses food insecurity; it monitors the physical and emotional wellbeing of students -- all while providing an education.
But that precedence may have reached a tipping point. Are we justified in putting children at risk to sustain the balance? Can we find more creative ways to meet those needs? Ones that do not exact such a high price of our public schools and the children they service?
Clearly, these underlying issues need to be confronted when we are no longer in the midst of a health crisis. We are facing an existential threat that demands an informed response. It is not the time to rely on intuition, personal bias, or hearsay.
We need to get our children back to school. But asking them and their teachers to step into a viral vortex without doing everything possible to ensure their safety, without relying on the best and most complete knowledge at our disposal, or without waiting patiently until the time is right could be costly in ways we cannot fathom.
Nothing should unify us more as we confront the challenges at hand, or pursue the goals we hope to achieve, than safeguarding their welfare.
The real world demands nothing less.
CYNTHIA PRYOR
Parent/grandparent, FCPS teacher, caregiver, concerned citizen Warrenton
More time needed to review Warrenton’s comprehensive plan
On June 15, the Town of Warrenton released its draft 2040 Comprehensive Plan draft, all 437 pages of it.
The town council plans to hold its public hearing on Sept. 8, potentially adopting the plan that night. Our read on this important plan is that it outlines a new trajectory for the town, aspects of which are far too significant to be hastily decided.
The town seems to be in a rush to move the draft forward. When two planning commissioners on June 23 suggested taking more time for review, town staff discouraged delay, stating they “have a lot of people who are waiting on this document ... there will be zoning ordinance amendments that have to happen on the heels of this, depending on what’s decided.”
For this reason alone, the plan deserves ample time for review and scrutiny by the community members it will affect.
The plan increases residential housing in Warrenton by shifting nearly all areas currently zoned for industrial and commercial use to by-right mixed-use zoning, which allows an unknown combination of residential, commercial and/or industrial development and eliminates Warrenton residents’ right to weigh in on development proposals within those zones. Therefore, it is paramount that residents know more about these by-right mixed-use areas before the plan and associated ordinances are adopted.
Language in the 437-page draft is ambiguous, and at times contradictory, about the types of housing the town intends. The plan expresses a need to increase affordable housing, and yet, it emphasizes that 60% of the new residential areas are slated for market-rate housing and lacks any specifics on retaining or setting aside affordable units.
The plan acknowledges a 0.39% annual population growth projection in Warrenton, yet it proposes
Children need to be in school
I was born in 1939, and I began kindergarten in South Bend, Indiana, in September 1944. My neighborhood school was six blocks from my home. My mother arranged for me to walk to school with three older neighbor children. World War II was raging; we had blackouts and rationing. My father, a physician, was serving far away in the U.S. Army.
We children went to school. Five days a week. There were no vaccines for influenza and a variety of childhood diseases: measles, chicken pox, mumps and whooping cough. During my grade-school years, I had all of them. And I recovered.
Polio was every mother’s nightmare. There was no vaccine, and the disease was crippling and life-threatening.
Sadly, some children who contracted these diseases died. Vital statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control in 1948, when the U.S. population was 146.6 million, reflect the following deaths nationally: scarlet fever, 68; whooping cough, 1,146; measles, 888, poliomyelitis and polio encephalitis, 1,895. (Table 6- Deaths from selected causes (exclusive of stillbirths or deaths among armed forces). Nevertheless, children went to school.
If our parents were afraid for us, or for themselves, they never said so. Despite the disruptions and fears caused by the world war, families on the home front carried on, quietly and with patience. And after watching their elders, so did children.
Today, as school boards cower and citizens fret, wear their masks, and anxiously endure or avoid social contact, I wonder what has happened to my country.
For many reasons, children need to be in school. We are learning that children have a very low infection rate and do not appear to be transmitters of COVID-19. The odds are with them. The virus, we are told, attacks old people like me.
More important than our own
Summer school 2020 included more than 1,000 students
Remote teaching techniques informed by lessons learned since March
By Angela Roberts Special to the Fauquier Time
When Fauquier County Public Schools opened up summer school registration to all students a few weeks ago, more than 1,100 middle and high school students signed up.
Normally, summer school is only available to middle- and high-schoolers who need to retake a course in order to graduate. The usual number of summer school students is about 35.
“Everybody was very worried about students not having been in school since March,” said Blaire Conner, assistant principal of summer school. “It’s not that our students are behind ... but it’s that we wanted them to have the opportunity to continue learning in this current unique situation [caused by COVID-19].” Summer school 2020 started on July 6 and will end July 23.
To meet the demand for the summer program, the county hired 81 staff members instead of the four or so it typically brings on. To accommodate students with no or poor internet access, the district gave out 300 electronic devices and 200 internet hotspots so students could connect to the internet; those numbers were enough to serve every student who requested the equipment, said Conner.
School buses with hotspots continue to be parked throughout the county as well, and Hodge says the bandwidth of Wi-Fi at schools has been expanded so that students can access the internet from their parking lots.
The federal CARES Act, enacted to stimulate an economy brutalized by the coronavirus pandemic, has helped the school district cover the cost of the hiring blitz, as well as the hotspot devices.
Learning how to teach remotely
All instruction this summer is happening remotely for the first time. The result is a large, living laboratory for teachers and administrators to discover what works and what doesn’t as they finalize logistics for the coming school year.
Allyson Martin’s kindergarten class is one such laboratory, with a jam-packed hour of education four days a week via computer. Since the Teacher Allyson Martin works with kindergarteners remotely.
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second week of July, the class has talked about shapes and patterns and learned the spelling of different words, with lessons on manners and patience thrown in, too.
“They’re so cute to see on the screen,” said Martin, who teaches second grade at James G. Brumfield Elementary School in Warrenton. “Oh my gosh, it makes my teacher heart so happy.”
Summer school has been more rigorous than the instruction that happened virtually from March through May, Martin said. She expects her first-graders and kindergarteners to pay attention. She’s also introducing concepts that may be new to them.
When schools went online in the spring, the school district made assignments and expectations flexible to avoid adding more stress to the already disrupted lives of families. It distributed “choice boards” to families — a tic-tac-toe-like listing of educational activities to keep students busy. Martin said she taught a few “mini lessons” via video, but she mainly concentrated on reviewing basic concepts.
Brittany Hundley, who will be teaching third grade at Greenville Elementary School in Nokesville in the fall, agreed that the summer school experience is more demanding.
She and another Greenville teacher are sharing responsibility for a group of 85 students between kindergarten and fifth grade who are able to work more independently than Martin’s students. Hundley and her colleague mainly interact with their students over Google Classrooms rather than over video chat.
“It’s been really, really cool to see what the kids are creating and how they’re taking ownership and they’re learning and showcasing their strengths,” she said.
Hundley also helped create the curriculum for this year’s summer school program. Starting in the spring, a committee composed of teachers and administrators planned how the virtual program should be run, incorporating lessons learned from what didn’t work online between March and May.
For instance, summer school principal Michael Hodge said the biggest concern the school system heard from families was that there was too much variation in the way lessons were taught across the district. During summer school, he said, the school district has been trying to establish a common way of teaching across all grades.
Summer school teachers have also used their virtual teaching experience from the spring to make improvements, said Hodge, assistant principal for Southeastern Alternative School in Midland.
“Having that experience in their back pocket, and using that experience — along with feedback that they had been given at their own schools and by their own students — helped them to [decide] … how they would set up their virtual learning experience during the summertime,” he said.
Last week, the Fauquier County School Board approved a plan for the fall that will allow students to attend school in person two days per week and learn from home the other three, but Martin pointed out that much of the future remains unknown. What if there’s another surge of the coronavirus? What if Virginia’s governor shuts down schools again?
If this happens, Martin says her experience teaching summer school has prepared her to teach her students remotely.
“If a kindergartner or first-grader can sit for an hour, I know my second-graders can sit for an hour,” she said. “I can still do things I did in the regular classroom with them over the computer.”
At last week’s meeting, school Superintendent David Jeck said any schoolwork assigned on days students aren’t in the classroom, they will be able to be complete “with or without technology support” — a recognition of the spotty nature of internet access in the county.
Martin has learned to handle the county’s glitchy internet. When one of her student’s video connection would drop, Martin and her class just waited for the student to come back online.
Martin promised parents she will do whatever it takes to help her students, even if that means delivering lessons by phone.
“I’m not gonna leave a kid who doesn’t have access out just because they’re not there,” she said. “I will go beyond for any of my kids — no matter what.”
COMP PLAN, from page 6 costly water and wastewater expansions to accommodate a 2.3% annual growth rate. The mismatch suggests an intention to recruit new populations from surrounding jurisdictions to achieve a growth rate well above the town’s projected growth.
Furthermore, rather than do the difficult work of recycling failed strip mall development along U.S. 29, the plan proposes a bypass, through conserved land, around the western side of Warrenton by building out the Timber Fence Parkway and acquiring land for a new “Southern Parkway” from Va. 211 down to U.S. 29. The town seems to want residential growth without regard to the consequences in costs for services. And, if its ambitious growth goals are not realized, after investing in water and
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
wastewater expansions and a new bypass, existing taxpayers will be burdened with those costs.
These are some of the bigger issues in the plan that deserve thoughtful and transparent discussion.
The Piedmont Environmental Council calls on the town to slow down this process and consider that this major planning decision is being made during a pandemic. Times like these require the town to actively pursue public input, which takes additional time and effort. Doing so will not only increase community buy-in, but will also ensure the plan truly reflects the community's desires. The plan will be improved through the process, and Warrenton will be better for it.
JULIE BOLTHOUSE
Piedmont Environmental Council Warrenton SCHOOL, from page 6
anxieties are our obligations to the children -- who are watching us and looking to their elders for reassurance.
We know that many children who don’t go to school and learn in a classroom will suffer intellectual, physical and emotional hardship. Online learning doesn’t work with young children. They need in-person interaction with their teachers and their classmates. If this doesn’t occur, they will be denied an opportunity to grow and fulfill their God-given potential.
Letters to the Editor
The Fauquier Times welcomes letters to the editor from its readers as a forum for discussion of local public affairs subjects. WRITE: Letters to the Editor 41 Culpeper Street Warrenton, VA 20188 FAX: Editor 540-349-8676 EMAIL: news@fauquier.com
I am grateful for the devotion and care provided to all of us in this time by our health professionals, first responders and law enforcement officers. I am also so very grateful to the many brave essential workers who are transporting food and other necessaries and stocking and staffing our grocery stores and pharmacies. Teachers should also be considered essential workers. I hope they will find a way to continue our children’s education, full time and in person.
JOAN CATON ANTHONY
Warrenton
Letters must be signed by the writer. Messages sent via email must say “Letter to the Editor” to distinguish them from other messages not meant for publication. Include address and phone for verification (Not to be published.) Letters are subject to editing for clarity and length. Personal attacks will not be published. Long letters from those with special authority on a current issue may be treated as a guest column (with photo requested). Due to volume, letters cannot be acknowledged. All letters are appreciated. Letters must be received by 5 p.m. Monday to be considered for Wednesday publication.
