Omicron Tsunami Hits the Schools

By the National Public Education Committee of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America

The US system of public education is foundering and reeling under the greatest wave of COVID yet, the Omicron variant. We are now in the first simultaneous global surge since the pandemic began.

Even if it were right to force children back into schools, the school system in each city faces huge numbers of folks who test positive and quarantined – a constantly changing number of drivers, office workers, staff, students, and teachers. Teachers are leaving the profession by the thousands. The system doesn’t provide solutions because it has not been designed to provide solutions.

With teachers and staff missing, students are herded into auditoriums, to work all day on their chrome books. This is not education. (Though it is not too different from the education that is often delivered in normal times!)

“We don’t feel safe!” students are declaring across the country. Students in New York, Boston, Chicago, Oakland, and many other cities are beginning walkouts and other forms of protests. They are demanding more than schools should be listening to students. They are asserting their right to be part of the decision-making.

Commodifying COVID

It is truly stunning that we are still debating the well-established basics of public health now as we begin the third year of COVID with no end in sight. This is an ongoing disaster.

The government is completely mishandling this crisis by every measure. First, Trump denied all responsibility, refused to implement basic common-sense public health measures, and refused to develop a unified national plan to address the pandemic. Then he put the market in charge and put the power in the hands of profit-making corporations.

Trump’s taskforce head, Dr. Deborah Dix called for “unleashing the power of the private sector”

The ruling class crows that markets are the most efficient way to bring the right goods to the right people at the right time.

Letting the market control the COVID response was supposed to reduce costs, improve quality, enforced efficiency, and distributed to everybody, instead, we got jacked up prices, poor distribution and inaccurate tests, “fraudulent tests flooded the market”; startups were responsible to self-regulate and certify their own quality. Such problems are always systemic with privatization. The public loses control. And the results were predictable: COVID deaths in the richest, most powerful country in the world were the highest in the world, now pushing one million.

Until we de-commodify health care, we will be unable to deal with pandemics.

In the first COVID school year – Spring 2020 and 2021/2022 – public schools generally closed and went to distance-learning. Behind the scenes, government at every level agreed that public schools must open up, regardless of health concerns. This was the demand of the market and deliberate government policies that left people with little support. Without fanfare, school districts destroyed the distance-learning infrastructure that they had built up the year before. The goal was to stampede people back into re-opening.

The lie is that “COVID is something we are going to have to live with.” All science shows that this a choice made by a system that prioritizes private property and private profits over the needs of the public. Instead, government keeps telling us that COVID is about to end, over and over. Their goal is to normalize COVID.

Without distance-learning infrastructure they had put in place, there was no choice but to re-open. The Governor of California even made it illegal for a school district to close down and not offer in-present learning. Even though everyone knew that new COVID waves were coming, no real preparations were made.

Sure – school districts were flooded with commodities – masks, air filters, PPEs, chrome books, etc. Biden kept the market in charge. This is what the market offers. But the preparation schools and organization of communities were essentially ignored. Poor schools, both rural and urban, often with heavily BIPOC populations, still do not have sufficient basic resources to open safely.

Once again, governments prove the scientific fact that a system of private property and private profit cannot suppress this pandemic. The reason is that market-based solutions push individual solutions and individual responsibility, instead of social solutions and social responsibility. Individual solutions simply cannot handle a pandemic that includes all of us. Touting commodities as the solution, and coupling this with individual actions while ignoring safe social practices, will always fail. This is the opposite of what is needed.

Serious public health has always understood that disease-control always requires the socialization of the problem: massively involving the community in their own health. But a country that refuses to offer free health care cannot go this way. It dares not go this way. So it preaches individual responsibility while undercutting and denying government social responsibility.

Omicron Hits!

Public schools re-opened after the Winter break. Public schools became disasters. Omicron cases are suddenly surging among young people, even those who have been vaccinated. And public schools are remaining open, even as government withdraws the few public health supports that it provided a year ago: the federal government covering the costs of COVID treatment, no evictions, etc. Now suddenly government declares that nurses and teachers, who are positive, but not transmissible, can return to work!

Small wonder that by the second week of school, students are regularly walking out of schools across the country. Chicago teachers voted to provide online education. Then Mayor Lightfoot, who constantly preaches that students should be in schools, shut down online and closed the schools. All the Chicago teachers were asking was that Chicago Public Schools offer the same protections that are common in private schools, elite schools, suburban schools, and charter schools. The pandemic shines a light on every aspect of inequality in this racialized system of private profit.

On January 14, the Chicago Public Schools Radical Student Alliance (Chi-RADS) lead a student walkout and wrote a public letter to the Mayor:

We as young people of the Chicago Public Schooling system have officially allied ourselves across a multitude of this cities public high schools. We have established a coalition that will organize, execute, and define the reimagination of our education.

Young people are becoming clear: they do not have to put up with this crisis that staggers on and on. Nor does anyone else. The system itself is the problem along with the power of corporate dictatorship that puts it in place.

Adding to this disaster is the over-reliance on cheap, unreliable take-home testing and the rise of the test-to-stay regime. Supposedly students will test themselves at home and then quarantine if they are positive. Once again, it’s all individual responsibility. But students are very clear that they can bring the virus home with them, so they test themselves in the halls, in the bathrooms, on the street.

The basics of public health require both testing and tracing. Testing without follow-up is walking on one leg. Home testing trashes the data we all need to measure Omicron because it is up to individuals to report it. In Fall, 2021, the popular demand to test every adult and child at every school site was a demand on government to guarantee this. It was not calling for government to implement more profit-making policies. The scale of social control necessary is way beyond what the market can deliver.

Secondly, it is criminal to delude people into thinking that the only protection their child needs to return to schools during this pandemic is to have a negative test. Public health requires systematic testing, quarantining, tracing, and vaccinating. The fundamental principle is that public health must be taken to the people. You don’t wait for individuals to come to you. This is the approach that reduced cigarettes, lead to seat belts, and stamped our polio in the United States and smallpox worldwide.

So how effective is the isolated testing approach? Chicago Public Schools itself reported last week (the first week of school) that out of 150,000 COVID-19 testing kits sent to families, 35,223 (less than 25 percent) were completed over the past week, with 24,836 found to be invalid and 18 percent of results positive. The Chicago Teachers Union reported that nearly 28 percent of 1,000 respondents indicated they had tested positive for COVID-19 within the past week.

Then San Francisco Unified Schools partnered with a new start-up, SafeTogether.Org, to do the testing. This outfit demands that parents waive “considerable legal rights” in order to have their children tested! SafeTogether does not list its donors or who is on its Board of Directors, but it sure is intent in harvesting children’s information.

In sum, government at every level has knowingly and deliberately ignored sensible public health approaches for a system of consumer-based commodity supply. Those who reject the necessity of public health are really proposing that individual measures against the disease are better and more important than collective measures taken at the public level. Individual solutions trump the collective approach. Yet controlling infectious diseases through private choice simply cannot work. And governments know this.

Normalizing COVID

Their bottom line has always been to normalize COVID and keep the hospitals from collapsing. This step is based on declaring an “acceptable level” of infections and death, rather than stamping out the disease.

Such governmental neglect of the proper way to address the challenges of COVID rises parallel with Disaster Capitalism’s seizure of the delivery of education in general. Even before the pandemic began in March 2020, corporate forces, digital platforms, and their government allies were seriously working towards breaking up the system of public schools into pieces that corporations could privatize and devour. Privatization is a political program for shifting power from the public to corporations, which intends to turn public schools into a privatized, profit-making system like health care. Without any public accountability. Since the pandemic took off, these efforts only increased, as corporations swooped in to provide distance learning.

The basics of providing education during a pandemic are well understood, but like all public health measures, they must be socialized and implemented broadly. In fact, they are already being implemented in elite schools, which have the resources to do so. Break the students into small cohorts or learning hubs; keep them together all day; disperse these groups outdoors; link them together with computers, provide students and families with all the resources they need to thrive. But governments who preach Austerity refuse to fund the people resources that make this possible.

Putting the market in charge meant that the 750 billionaires in the United States saw their combined wealth soar by $1 trillion in 2021 alone, a 25% jump over their 2020 pandemic profiteering.

Use this money to transform the current public schools into the community centers we know they are!

Use this money to transform the public schools into a system that uses education to build the leaders the world so desperately needs today!

Public education in this country has always been tainted by our history of slavery. Funding public education, based on local property taxes, is an antiquated system that evolved from the white supremacist demand for state’s rights. Omicron teaches us that public education should be federally funded with serious money to build the educational infrastructure that works for all. The federal government must also fund broad-band internet to make access a human right. There are many things that benefit people that only the federal government can do.

Now that the Omicron Tsunami hitting, choices that should have been made at the federal level are being forced onto school districts which then forces them onto individual schools. Fine.

As long as schools are public, parents, teachers, the community – in fact, all adults – and students can form public safety committees at each school that can begin to take control of the situation locally by compelling adequate testing, tracing, and other public health practices. We need no government proclamations to guarantee real community schools that recognize schools as the foundation of the community and offer 360^o student services.

Are we going to repeat this fiasco next time, when the next variant appears?

Or are we going to follow the lead of Chi-RADS, and students and people around the country:

We believe in the reimagination of our education – to make sure it is not the condition of what learning should look like in the eyes of American capitalists. Our education and the process of educating young people should be among effectiveness, radiating, loving, caring, and liberating, not just in the binary of what we are conditioned to believe.

(Letter of Declaration from newly formed, Chicago Public Schools Radical Youth Alliance. (Chi-RADS))