I teach in Pinellas County.
In Florida, where we have a governor who's not bothered by a little death, or a
lot of it, as long as there are profits to be made. "Our hospitals are
open for business,” he declared, and indeed they are and with a line out the
door. No doubt our mostly for-profit hospitals in Florida are raking it in,
profits skyrocketing along with the COVID cases. And these aren't just any old
COVID cases, these are the real thing, the DELTA variant. You know, the one
that made such a mess over in India. Not enough ground to bury all the dead or
enough wood to burn all the bodies.
But here there are a lot of
people who think the virus is something you believe in, or don't. They don't
have their come to Jesus moment until they're on a ventilator
in an ICU and then it's too late. Natural selection I guess, but they're taking too many of our healthcare workers with
them.
I had a feeling it was going to
be bad when our Republican-majority school board voted to keep Governor
DeSantis happy and masks optional. That feeling was reinforced at my school's
Open House. Despite the raging pandemic with the Delta variant going viral more
than any Tik Tok video ever could, we held our Open House, in person. Only
about one in five parents, students, teachers, or staff wore a mask, even
though the CDC warned that with this variant even the vaccinated should be
masked up in indoor public settings.
Since school started three
weeks ago, according to the Pinellas County Schools website COVID database, the
county has had over 2500 confirmed positive cases. We also have so many
teachers out either sick with COVID or in quarantine, that the district is
looking to pull staff from the administration building to cover classes. They
don't have enough substitutes willing to torture themselves given the low pay
and high risk. But I'm not sure how that's going to work because even
people with degrees in education have a hard time with controlling classes
while working as a sub, and the administration building is crawling with COVID
too.
Now we have teachers out
temporarily and teachers out permanently, not exactly the greatest indicators
of a quality education. Not tallied on the district's website are the deaths,
but already at least one teacher working in Pinellas County schools has died from
COVID since school started. Maybe not vaccinated or maybe vaccinated but had underlying
conditions, but too bad, so sad, I guess. "We need our children to
breathe," our governor says but apparently, our teachers, not so much.
