Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I dont have this dim of view

we will get over this and while some things will take time to return I feel the Austin music scene will be one of them

You misunderstood me. Its me currently being deprived of live music, not too worried about its future.

That's the hardest thing about this. With the exception of the special needs child, I feel like I'm the exact sort of parent that you would want to support distance learning. Obviously as an engineer I know and can explain math, but my own intellectual interests are wide-ranging enough that I feel like I could support everything they need regarding history, social studies, English/reading/writing, etc.

But I'm juggling a half-dozen email threads, phone calls, meetings, and then when I finally get a quiet moment I need to spend it doing real work. By the end of the work day I'm mentally spent. I can manage the kids while working from home, because they're at ages where they don't need constant supervision to not kill themselves. But I can't manage their education too.

Unsurprisingly, this describes my situation exactly, as well. I can manage the kids, but I can't manage their education.

A friend of mine, my age, with children the same age as mine (early 20's) has had two of his 3 children infected with COVID.  His son lives in his house as does my daughter.

when his daughter tested positive he and his wife were tested.  Tests came back negative in 10 days.  When his son was positive yesterday, he decided not to be tested again, just quarantine for 2 weeks.  Father and mother have no symptoms.

If I was older or was unhealthy, this would be a bigger issue.

but, Obviously I could become very sick from COVID.

I could distance myself from my children, but chose not to.

Unfortunately, many grandparents and others at risk probably chose not to distance from young people in their 20s.

My sobering takeaway from all of this is that "we" seem not to have the tools to learn quickly some key details of a pandemic, including the items noted above.  We get scattered studies that often conflict and don't know what to believe.

So, going back a bit, I rely on @Cincydawg and @bwarbiany to find the studies that I miss, and I'm wondering if either of you have seen anything recent, and helpful, regarding risk of transmission from child-to-child, and child-to-teacher/child-to-parent?

A couple of months ago, I recall two conflicting reports.  One said risk of transmission from children to adults was quite low, citing the relatively low intensity/quantity of the viral load from children as a potential factor in that.  And another said that it was not low at all and evidence showed that it can and does spread.

At this point, various countries around the world have taken such different approaches, that I feel like we should have some reasonable amount of data to work with.  Some countries never shut down schools, some shut them down then reopened a couple of months later, and some (like the US) pretty much shut them down and have not reopened.

I just really think that we should have enough data to support some reasonable hypotheses by now.  But I'm not seeing anything rigorous out there, or at least I haven't been able to find it myself.

MSN just took some heat for having a number of doctors on one of their shows talking about how hard it is for child to pass the virus onto adults and then have them all say they would send their children school. 

One said "The younger you are, probably the less likely you are to be able to transmit the disease," he said. "Once you get to high school age, you're going to be a little bit more concerned, [and] once you're in college age, you're going to be a lot concerned."

Dr. Shilpa Patel, a New Jersey-based pediatrician, said it's challenging to make predictions because scientists are still learning about the virus. But she said she has no hesitations about letting her kids return to school this fall.

I've seen very little so far on recent effects, largely because when it hit most schools closed. And then those which reopened often did so in countries with MUCH lower new infection rates than we have in the US.

I'm a little concerned by the reports of some kids infected with COVID manifesting symptoms similar to Kawasaki disease, but that seems few and far between so far.

That said, I haven't seen any studies that show that the risk of transmission among kids or the risk of serious complications among kids is significant enough to warrant limiting their educations as badly as I expect will happen with 100% distance learning.

But I could be wrong... And it's entirely possible that society will take the choice out of my hands, particularly here in CA. At this point Los Angeles County and San Diego County have announced that they do not plan to open school campuses in the fall and plan to start with 100% distance learning.

Up until just this week, our school district was planning on offering a choice between online, or in-person.  Their surveys showed them that enough people would choose the online-only option, that social distancing within the classrooms would be possible.

Now it seems that they're headed the other way, and are likely to go 100% online.

I honestly think the damage caused by that, would be worse than not going to school at all-- at least for my 12yo 7th grader.

She's a straight-A+ student and born teacher-pleaser, but absolutely needs the direct face-to-face contact with her teachers, as well as the social interaction in classes, and maybe most importantly the structured environment, that can only be found in in-person school.  She suffered tremendously, stopped turning in all of her assignments for a month, descended from a bubbly, upbeat, smart pre-teen to a sullen, isolated, unhappy tweenager, in the span of 2 months.  Her teachers started calling me directly, and asking me what was wrong, because it was just so completely unlike her.

I won't be doing that again.  If we're not in-person in school, then we're dropping out for a year until they can figure out a way to make it work. 

And what I have yet to see, is for any administrators to provide me evidence of the risks of child-to-child transmission, and child-to-adult transmission, to warrant keeping the schools shut-down.  If the mantra of the "Careful" in this pandemic has been to "follow the science" then where is that science???  Show me.  Prove to me one way or the other.

Because I will not ever, EVER allow my child's future and education to be put at risk again, the way it was last Spring. 

I wouldn't take the example of last spring as the best we can do with "distant learning."  It was certainly a worthless exercise for many/most in Oklahoma, as the guidance from the State Department of Education was to hold the students harmless for work assigned after the post-Spring Break on-line schooling.  The kids did enough to get their grades where they wanted them to be, and for the most part that was it.
Even with AP students.  My AP U.S. History students on average did about 10% of the work I assigned them to do, and I did not assign an onerous volume of work.
But we can do better than that if it comes down to it.

It was more than just the work itself, which wasn't particularly challenging, engaging, or worthwhile.  It was also my daughter's reaction to the online environment.  

I could see college and even some high school students being able to manage it.  But middle school and elementary school students just don't have the tools to be able to do it, even with considerable influence and input from parents like me.