Friday, March 6, 2020.

Three years ago, today, Abrome broke for spring break not knowing if we would return when spring break was scheduled to end on March 23rd. News of a dangerous novel coronavirus left us debating what our options were given the responsibility we had to support the young people in our learning community, and the duty we had to protect them, their households, and the staff at Abrome. When it became clear that we would not be able to safely come back together, we extended spring break to three weeks. On March 30th we came back together remotely and stayed remote through the end of that first pandacademic year. 

It was a challenging time. We needed to find ways to get some Abromies reliable internet connections and devices to log in to our remote gatherings. And connecting with each other over video was difficult when we were used to meeting in person. We struggled financially because some families pulled their kids when we went remote. We worked hard to maintain a sense of calm assurance that we would all come through it together.

It was a scary time. There were people in our immediate community who were at high risk. There were elderly grandparents, two people living with cancer, multiple immunocompromised folks, uninsured people and others without access to quality health care, frontline essential workers, and members who were at risk of losing their homes if they could not work. We wanted to protect and support them, and while we could protect them in part by not meeting in person, could we really support them against the conditions of society that put them at increased risk?

It was also a hopeful time. We saw people staying home to protect others from disease. We saw people coming together to support one another through mutual aid efforts. Against the backdrop of illness and death, for a moment we saw people focused less on getting ahead by leaving others behind, and more on considering how they could help others survive. We saw people questioning the practices and structures of not only schooling, but of society, and some began to believe that they could alter or abolish those practices and structures. 

In that moment, when no one knew how the pandemic would play out, Abrome made a choice that was clear ethically, but murky from a business perspective. We reaffirmed our commitment to community care. Community care means centering the needs of those who would be most impacted by our decisions and actions, and leveraging our privilege to support them. It is easy to talk about centering the needs of others when the costs are low, or when it causes only a temporary inconvenience. It is another thing to do so when society demands that we turn away from those most impacted for our own benefit. Unfortunately, the moment of societal solidarity soon began to fall apart as the demands to turn away grew strong. We chose not to turn away. 

It is not preordained that “everyone will get it eventually.” We do not need to “learn to live with COVID.” Institutions are not powerless to stop the spread. We chose people over profits, and solidarity over enrollment. We chose to embrace a multi-layered approach to preventing the spread of COVID-19 that includes masking, physical distancing, filtration and ventilation, testing, and vaccination. Because of those efforts, and some luck, we have not had a single case of spread within our learning community. And our culture is stronger for it, even if our community is smaller—74% of lost enrollment since the pandemic began has due to our pandemic policies. 

Three years in, the pandemic continues. And we will continue to take it seriously because we are committed to community care.

—

Cover photo by Deborah Jackson from Pixabay

Will liberated youth choose to do nothing?

There is a belief among too many adults that young people, if given the opportunity to do nothing, will do nothing. It is based on an ageist, anti-youth, and often ableist mindset that children are flawed creatures and must be forced to work to overcome their inborn sloth. It is also untrue. No one is more eager to explore and learn than the youth.

A young Abromie facing away from the camera sits curled up on a yellow chair reading a graphic novel she checked out from the library. 

First, they are biologically wired to try to engage with the world and learn. The best thing adults can do is stop interfering in that natural inclination.

Two masked Abromies hanging out in the lounge playing a game of Uno. 

Second, they have less life experience so they are much more likely to find their experiences novel, and hence more likely to be excited to engage in it. Except when adults ruin it by mandating it, gamifying it, or testing it.

Third, to the extent that they do act “lazy” when given the freedom to play and learn, it is more often an inability of the adults to understand how young people learn outside of schools settings.

Finally, if they are truly slothful and want to do nothing, it is usually because they have expended too many cognitive resources performing for adults.

If adults want the young people to grow into grownups who are eager to engage with the world, to be lifelong learners, they would be wise to let the young people be free to play and learn, today.   

An Abromie, facing away, working with the Scratch programming platform for the first time.

A masked Abromie standing at a whiteboard working through some multiplication problems. 

Two masked Abromies in the kitchen working some flour for a cooking creation. 

Two masked Abromies facing the camera after they created a new dessert together. 

Why families choose the schools they choose

Families who have the means to do so will choose where to send their kids to school (public or private) based on a variety of factors such as price, proximity to home, average class size, education philosophy, clubs and extracurricular activities, and the colleges the school’s graduates get into. Families rarely get everything they want out of a school because many of their wants cannot coexist in a school setting. So, families are forced to prioritize their wants.  

But there is more to the decision process than where various schools land on each of the preferred factors. There is the motive behind sending a child to school in the first place. And that motive, for the great majority of people, almost always revolves around, “what school is going to do to make my child ‘successful’?” And success as measured by schools means testing and academic performance and sometimes college placement; and by society it generally means the prestige of the colleges and jobs the students end up gaining access to, as well as their potential future earnings. 

And because most families are members of dominant society, and are enculturated by it, their motivations and prioritized wants become a response to their own anxieties and notions of scarcity. They think in individual rather than collective terms. They focus on the “best” schools for their kids, choosing security over liberation, and what helps their kids get ahead even if it is at the expense of other kids or society. And the schools give them the assurances they need to keep the kids enrolled. And then, too often, the families bemoan the state of society. The same society their kids will grow old in.

Our recommendation: be different. 

“Even our supposedly "best" schools—maybe especially these most resourced, largely white schools—fail to give young people a chance to teach and learn the meaning, the responsibilities, and the demands of freedom. Schools serving the wealthy do the most extraordinary job teaching children to define success in individual rather than collective terms—to get ahead rather than to struggle alongside, to step on rather than to lift up. On any serious measure of practicing freedom, these would be the "failing" schools.”
~ Carla Shalaby 

Is it too late to pull my kid out of high school?

A one-step guide for anxious parents and guardians. 

Every year, I hear from parents who are considering pulling their kids out of school because their children are not thriving. 

The best option for the vast majority of them, and the one that I encourage for most of them, is to focus less on changing their kids, and more on changing the context. For most of them, the first step is to withdraw the young person from a school setting that is not working for them.[1][2] And in the majority of those cases, the parents struggle with the idea of giving up midyear, and begin a drawn out process of kicking the can down the road. The delayed response to remove a child from a bad fit environment does not serve the young person, and guardians of school children of all ages do this. But the failure to act can be particularly damaging when the children are in high school—when there is the least time to take necessary action. This guide is intended to help accelerate the process of deciding how best to support a young person who is not doing well in school.

The only step: Identify what matters most 

When a child is not doing well, families should first ask, “what really matters most?” To do so they should list out what they would like for their child or their school. Then, they should begin striking everything that is secondary. What matters most is the one thing that you would want if everything else was stripped away; the one thing that remains after all items but one are taken off the list as nice-to-haves.  

For example, if the young person has attempted suicide, then what matters most could be (for the child) proactively reducing suicide risk factors and bolstering protective factors. In such a scenario, focusing on their chances of admission into Harvard University is a dangerous distraction.

Or, if the young person is being bullied at school, then what matters most could be (for the school) an environment that prioritizes inclusion and psychological safety. What probably does not matter most is whether the school has a robotics team, the number of AP courses available, or the manner in which GPA is calculated. 

What matters most does not have to be the elimination of a harmful condition or situation, although that is usually the case for those who are considering pulling their children out of high school mid-year. If what matters most can readily be accomplished within their current school environment, then pulling the child out of school is probably not necessary. However, if what matters most cannot readily be accomplished within their current school environment, then the child should be withdrawn from school as soon as possible. In that case, school is a barrier to what matters most.

In a future essay we will discuss some of the practical reasons why pulling kids out of a high school where they are not thriving should be the preferred option, not a last resort. We will also discuss considerations for the next steps.

[1] Because schooling is often a source of harm, it makes sense that the immediate response would be to eliminate the harm. The second second step is often finding them therapeutic care, and with very rare exception, schools are not therapeutically oriented.

[2] School “not working” for the young person can range from very immediate threats to their physical, emotional, and psychological well-being (e.g., bullying, depression, internalized stigma) to being a waste of their time because they see it as nothing more than the place they are forced to be at for 15,000 hours of their life.

Image by tonodiaz on Freepik

A delicious mess

On Monday of last week, two of the younger Abromies who plan to open a bakery together someday decided that they wanted to experiment in the kitchen and make a new kind of dessert. They pulled out many of the standard ingredients such as flour, baking soda, sugar, and vanilla extract. They played around with the ratios based on the available amounts of each ingredient they had, but they felt the real opportunity was in the dessert syrup they could create.

During the excitement of the food making another young person asked if he could also participate. Together, the three of them created a new dish, and quite a mess. When the dessert was finished all the folks at Abrome were invited to taste the results, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. “This is actually really good!” “This is kinda delicious!”

The most challenging part of the day was the cleanup, everyone’s least favorite part. But it is our agreements (e.g., clean up after yourself and participate in end of day cleanup) and principles (e.g., take care of the space) that allow us to have the freedom to express ourselves without unduly burdening others in the community. At the end of the day reflection the question was posed, “what could make cleanup easier?” That question would be revisited later in the week.

Our AY 2022-23 pandemic plan

This is a brief overview of the layers of protection that we are applying at Abrome for the 2022-23 academic year. Abrome has been able to remain COVID free for the past three years of pandemic schooling.

The success we have had in protecting each other and local communities from the spread of COVID is something we are very proud of. We were only able to do that thanks to a collective commitment to community care, transparency, and candid and honest communication.

Community care means centering the needs of those who would be most impacted by our decisions and actions, and leveraging our privilege to support them. We must acknowledge three realities about the COVID pandemic (and likely Mpox, too):

1. COVID continues to fall heaviest on BIPOC communities, the immunocompromised, those without access to quality healthcare, essential workers, the unvaccinated, etc. All of our pandemic decisions must center those most impacted. Nothing we do impacts only those at Abrome.

2. All Facilitators and Learners go home to families, friends, and into other communities each day. If we were to spread COVID at Abrome, we’d spread it elsewhere, too.

3. There is no such thing as a harmless single case of COVID. Including cases that are “mild.” Each case has the potential to lead to long-term chronic health problems and disrupt quality of life, seed a superspreader event, and host a mutation that can become a new variant.

To limit the likelihood of infection and spread, we will use a multilayered approach to not bringing COVID into our education community, and not spreading COVID if it does find its way into the community. Please see our pandemic plan for greater detail.

Masking: Everyone will wear KF94s, KN95s, or N95s (or higher filtration masks or respirators) whenever we are indoors, and any time we are close to one another outdoors above the lowest risk level. All snacks and meals must be eaten outdoors.

Physical distancing: As cases rise we will reduce reduce density, cohort, and meet outdoors. Quarantine and isolation lasts 7 and 10 days, respectively, including a test out requirement. Abromies will receive remote support, and Facilitators receive paid sick time off.

Air quality: We will aggressively ventilate the space and monitor ventilation with CO2 monitors (800ppm max). Each room is also equipped with at least one HEPA purifier or Corsi-Rosenthal box, producing in excess of 12 air changes per hour (ACH) in filtration based on air volume.

Testing: Each morning every Learner and Facilitator completes a quick screening questionnaire before, each family submits a pooled household sample for LAMP surveillance testing, and we follow up with diagnostic testing based on results or stated concerns of exposure.

Vaccines: This year we also have a vaccination mandate except in very rare cases of medical necessity. Our definition of fully vaccinated includes being up-to-date on boosters.

Risk levels: We will use our updated COVID risk level system to determine when, where, and how we will gather. The five risk levels have cutoffs based on the average new cases per 100,000 and the test positivity rate, locally.

Gathering guidelines: Risk determines where we gather, how big our cells can be, whether we must mask (always indoors), when we will conduct LAMP testing (whenever in-person), and how close we can be from each other to include when eating (always outdoors).

Some say that we need kids back in schools even without sufficient measures to protect them from COVID infection because of learning loss, socialization, or other racist and classist assumptions. We believe such claims are not only false, they are ethically and morally repugnant.

Here is the Abrome pandemic plan for the coming academic year. Cannot wait to see you all on September 6th.

Covid: three pandemic years in—looking back

Most schools in central Texas reopen this week, and the overwhelming majority of them will have no meaningful COVID protections in place, much less a multilayered approach that would drastically reduce the risk of spread of COVID within their school communities. Needless to say, they will have no meaningful Monkeypox protections in place, either. 

At Abrome, we still have three weeks until the first day of our 2022-2023 academic year, and have yet to put out our finalized pandemic plan for the coming year. We expect to do so in the next ten days, and expect it to be similar to our plan for the past year. Our last academic year wrapped up only five and a half weeks ago, on Friday, July 9th, and we finished our third pandacademic year without a single known case of COVID in the space. The following day I posted a twitter thread that briefly touched upon the multilayered approach we took to stop the spread of the disease. In the hopes of encouraging school leaders, teachers, staff, parents, and students who believe there is nothing they can do to protect each other from COVID in the current political and social environment, I am including the full text of that thread, and where appropriate I expound on what we did and how these practices can be implemented in their schools. I will also address some of the criticisms that many people brought forth. Disclaimer: snark.

Our 2021-22 academic year just ended yesterday.

We just finished our 3rd year without a single case of COVID-19 in the space. That means not a single person was exposed “at school.” Doubly impressive given the transmissibility of the current variants.

How did we do it?

— Abrome (@AbromeEd) July 9, 2022

Our 2021-22 academic year just ended yesterday. 

We just finished our 3rd year without a single case of COVID-19 in the space. That means not a single person was exposed “at school.” Doubly impressive given the transmissibility of the current variants.

How did we do it?

First, we prioritized community care over white, upper middle class, reactionary insecurity. We recognized early on that COVID was falling heaviest on BIPOC communities, the immunocompromised, those without access to quality healthcare, etc. All our decisions centered them. 

[This really bothered a lot of folks. A quick check of those who complained showed they were disproportionately COVID deniers, anti-maskers, and anti-vaxxers. Yes, I know that those terms are politically charged and may be viewed as pejoratives but in this case it is simply a statement of reality. Surprisingly a select group of COVID minimizers, advocates of only vaccinating people, advocates of only mandating masks, and blue check influencers (official accounts with large audiences) glossed over this and later claimed that our practices that centered BIPOC communities somehow harmed Black students because they were not stuck in school. Note: learning loss is not a thing. And even if it was, it would not be a sufficient excuse to risk exposing kids to COVID, or their parens, guardians, or caregivers.]

Second, we acknowledged that nothing we do impacts only those at Abrome. All Facilitators (“teachers”) and young people (“students”) go home to families, friends, and into other communities each day. If we were to spread COVID at Abrome, we’d spread it elsewhere, too. 

[Some OPEN SCHOOLS NOW people (who argue that we just have to get kids back in schools [as if they haven’t been back in schools] and who are overwhelmingly middle class and upper middle class white people) and COVID minimizers argued that kids were more likely to catch it at home than they were at school. True, because at home you are breathing in each other’s air over extended periods of time, without protection measures. And the parents are bringing the disease home most often from work (schools happen to be workplaces for teachers and staff) or other settings where people come together, usually indoors, usually without masking, and usually without other forms of protections—like schools. And it is a foolish argument against preventing spread at school because when a kid brings the disease home from school then everyone in their family becomes at risk of being infected. The disease does not magically not spread when a kid brings it home.]

Third, there is no such thing as a harmless single case of COVID that someone with “a healthy immune system” can overcome. Each case has the potential to seed a superspreader event. Each case has the potential to host a mutation that can become a new variant. 

So we focused on two things.

1) not bringing COVID into our education community.

2) not spreading COVID if it did find its way into the community. 

To not bring it in we started with going remote during periods of very high spread. This was easy in the spring of 2020 when all schools chose to do the same. It got much harder in 2021 & 2022 when society bought into the argument that kids and teachers should accept infection. 

[See screenshot of daily spread calculation instructions.]

We also had each family conduct a daily COVID screening. If someone showed up having not completed it we did it with them in-person before allowing them to enter the space / join the group. 

It worked. During every wave we had some students or staff get infected outside of Abrome, but because of our practices none brought it into the community (which would have then spread out beyond the community). 

[See screenshot of screening checklist. We will be updating the screening for the coming year.]

To not spread it if it snuck into the community we acknowledged that #COVIDisAirborne. We mandated masks whenever indoors. KF94, KN95, N95, or better. Zero indoor “mask breaks.” And folks had to go outdoors to eat.

Outdoors they had to wear masks when close to each other. 

And we went outdoors for the entirety of the 2020-2021 academic year! In the Texas heat! This year we had at least one cell of people outdoors pretty much each day except when we went remote during Delta and Omicron. During very high levels of spread, everyone went outdoors. 

[One OPEN SCHOOLS NOW and blue check influencer accused us of being remote most of the time, while wealthy schools “used their resources to keep kids safer in person.” Well, we are not a wealthy school, so we didn’t have those resources (assuming they meant money), and they conveniently glossed over the fact that we were not largely remote.]

We also filtered our indoor air. Each room was equipped with HEPA filtration systems or Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, each with a CADR that would deliver at least 6 ACH per room based on room volume, and 8 ACH in bathrooms. That also required calculating the volume of each room. See, maybe you will use need to know that math in the future!

“Sure, but you can only do that because you’re a well-funded private school!!”

Wrong. We are not a rich private school. Our sliding scale tuition give us only 40% of the tuition per student that the local public schools receive. We just prioritize community care! 

[And that tweet was prescient as that same OPEN SCHOOLS NOW and blue check influencer attacked our plan because "MAKING ACTUAL SCHOOLS SAFER REQUIRES INVESTMENT” while completely ignoring that we did on the cheap what schools with an annual budgets that ran into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars refused to do anything to clean their air.] 

On top of filtering the air we ventilated the indoor space. We opened windows and created lots of cross flow. We used CO2 monitors as a proxy measure for ventilation. When the readings went above 650 we cranked the AC and opened the windows further, if it hit 800 we vacated. 

We implemented capacity limits indoors, for each room and for the total number who could be indoors at any given time.

We also broke our community up into smaller and smaller groups/cells as cases rose. And pushed them outdoors. It is safer outdoors. 

If someone would have inadvertently come into the space / group infected, the smaller cells limited the pool of people who could be exposed.

No one came in infected (as much luck as it was preventative policies) but even if they did the number they could infect was capped. 

[Some critics pointed out that we were lucky and that we could not attribute no one bringing COVID into Abrome or spreading it within the community to our practices. As if we did not acknowledge that luck most certainly played a part. But luck does often favor those who prepare.]

When the CDC catered to politicians and corporations and said that local spread should not be the driver of how we choose to meet, we ignored them. When the CDC said that we could drastically shorten quarantine and isolation periods, or not require testing out, we ignored them. 

[Sorry for also ignoring you, the OPEN SCHOOLS NOW blue check influencers who insist upon a one-size fits all solution that requires multi-billions of dollars of investment from the same government that is actively trying to convince us that we should just live with COVID.] 

Next year we will also have a vaccine mandate except in very rare cases of medical necessity (everyone in our community is vaccinated already). 

[This only got push back from anti-vaxxers. The vaccinate only crowd only took issue with everything else we wrote.]

The pandemic has really tested our community. Centering community care has put a big dent in our enrollment. But we understand our obligations toward our families, our community, and our society. 

And that was the thread.

The COVID minimizers, OPEN SCHOOLS NOW people, and blue check influencers also came out in force to attack us for being too small to take seriously.  Side note, the COVID minimizers, the vaccinate-only, the masking-only, and blue check influencers do seem to be causing much more harm than the COVID deniers these days. This was our response to them:

So the fact that we are a very small education community seems to really gall some people, convincing them to shout that our approach to Covid is irrelevant because of our size. Because if we don't have at least 100 enrolled there is nothing to learn from our efforts.

We are a Self-Directed Education community that rejects the practices and structures of schooling and instead focus on centering community care and honoring the autonomy of young people. We will never become a large school because we are not what most parents want. 👍

We consider ourselves to be a liberation project, acting prefiguratively to serve as a model for others to learn from and to replicate if it speaks to them. We strive to be an anti-oppressive space, and one of "a million experiments." Let those experiments propagate!

It is that mindset that allows us to center community care over white, upper middle class, reactionary insecurity. It is precisely because we are not a conventional school that we were able to focus on limiting the risk of exposure and spread through layered mitigations.

Some say that what we do cannot work for everyone because we go outdoors and then go remote when there is uncontrolled community spread. Or because we start at 10a. Or because we charge tuition.

True.

We cannot be all things to all people. We don't try to be.

We are one experiment. Ideally there would be many schools taking Covid seriously so that there were many more options for families. Even amongst district public schools. But we don't get public funding, so blaming us for not being free and available 24/7 is weird.

They angrily argue that what we do cannot be scaled up to all public school systems.

Yes. And no.

Yes, public schools, just like conventional private schools, serve power and the status quo. Even where communities overwhelmingly demand safer schools, most schools cannot even mandate masking. Our approach cannot be easily scaled up because it doesn't serve power.

But no, what we do can be scaled up to all schools because the measures are readily accessible to all who have the courage to push back against politicians and corporations, even if they have to do so in a renegade fashion. Investment is not the problem, priorities are.

The most closeminded position of all is that because of our small size that nothing we do is relevant, or somehow scaling up is not possible. What do people think schools are? Are they not large buildings, that are broken down into grades and classrooms?

Everything we do could be scaled. Mandated masking, monitoring air quality, ventilation, CR boxes or HEPA filters in classrooms, cohorting, daily screenings, quarantines & isolation that is not truncated and requires a test out, going outdoors, going remote.

Are they really arguing that layered mitigation measures are not feasible? Or are they saying that schools with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in annual budgets cannot afford it? Or are they just telling you to get vaccinated and look away?

We'll still be here.

Cover image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

Pandemic plan update for AY 2021-2022

Rejecting normal

Society is burnt out and eager to regain a sense of normalcy after two years of the pandemic. At least that is the message we are fed each day by the media, government agencies, politicians, and opportunists. And their proposed solution is to move on from the pandemic and “return to normal,” operating as if it were 2019 again. 

There are many problems with the proposed solution that we are being offered. First and foremost is that the pandemic is not over, and we cannot simply make it go away by acting as if it is no longer an existential threat to many millions of people who are at risk, unvaccinated, or members of vulnerable populations. Secondly, the crushing exhaustion many people feel is not solely a response to Covid-19 safety protocols, but to much more concerning factors such as: mass disability and death, and being told that disability and death should be deemed acceptable while protocols to prevent such harm should be seen as a burden; a heightened state of white nationalism coupled with state violence directed at historically marginalized and oppressed groups (e.g., BIPOC, trans youth, houseless); economic uncertainty; political instability; and a loss of a sense of connection and community in a fractured culture. Third, and particularly relevant to Abrome, normal was never good enough. 

Abrome is a liberation project. We aim to support young people by honoring the exercise of their autonomy within a context of co-creating a compassionate community with an understanding of our shared responsibilities toward one another. In order to do that, we must reject the notion that it is sensible to focus on what is best for us while turning a blind eye to the ills of society, as well as the ways in which we may be contributing to the harm of others.        

Thanks in large part to recently updated CDC guidelines, schools and other institutions are fast tracking their “return to normal.” We are likely the only remaining education community in Central Texas that still goes remote during periods of uncontrolled community spread, and we may also be the only one that has not gone mask optional. We have been put in the position of having to choose between what makes good business sense and what allows us to continue to center the needs of those most impacted by our decisions. We still choose the latter. 

Moving forward

This updated version of our pandemic plan was released on March 15, 2022. Since the original version of the AY21-22 pandemic plan was released, those ages 5 and above have gained access to vaccines, and we came back indoors for the first time since March 2020. We have also observed how much of society has been lulled into believing that we should not protect ourselves and one another through readily accessible mitigation and safety practices such as masking, staying home when sick or after having been exposed, and vaccination. Finally, we have watched in disappointment as schools and public health organizations have folded to public pressure to abdicate their responsibility to help protect the most vulnerable members of our communities. 

We are still masking whenever we are indoors, as well as when near one another outdoors. We may still go remote during the worst periods of spread, but we may be outdoors depending on local hospital capacity. We still have vaccine qualifiers to go indoors. The most meaningful changes to this updated pandemic plan include new triggers for when we enter into different risk levels; altered protocols for where, when, and how we meet; and adjusted isolation and quarantine protocols. We based the changes on a deeper understanding of the risks of spread in a variety of contexts (e.g., indoor/outdoor, KN95/surgical/cloth masks); renewed humility driven by the diversity of outcomes of recent variants; observing the measures of air quality at the Abrome facility since returning indoors; and improved studies of incubation and infectious periods. All changes were made with a deep concern for how we could best serve the Abromies without leaving others behind. This update also serves as a bridge between the original AY21-22 pandemic plan and the forthcoming AY22-23 pandemic plan. Thank you for continuing on this journey with us.

A remote start to AY 2021-22

Today is the first day of the 2021-22 academic year at Abrome.

Due to uncontrolled community spread of Covid-19 in Central Texas, we will start our year fully remote. Given the elevated number of cases at this time, bringing people together in-person poses too great a risk of exposing Learners and Facilitators to the disease, which they could then take home and into the broader community. By refusing to 'return to normal’ we inconvenience ourselves to protect each other, particularly those who are most vulnerable to the disease.

At Abrome we will continue to center the needs of those most impacted by the pandemic in our approach to the year, and we call on all education communities to do the same. If we as a society rallied in support of one another and engaged in reasonable safety practices, cases would plummet and we could enjoy being together while also having the peace of mind that comes with knowing that we are not needlessly endangering the welfare of others.

It is not too late for education communities to choose an approach that prioritizes public health. We encourage all communities to adapt, copy, or steal our pandemic plan.

First day of school for local kids (not at Abrome)

Today tens of thousands of students in Central Texas will be returning to school, joining the scores of thousands who returned to school yesterday.

While there is palpable excitement for many students who want to be around large groups of peers again, many other students feel like hostages, knowing full well that they are entering into buildings where their safety is not being taken seriously. This latter group understand that bringing large amounts of people together indoors for hours at a time greatly increases the risk of spread, even with masks. They understand that because their school populations are majority unvaccinated that the risk is amplified, and that some of them, their peers, or the teachers and staff are going to get seriously ill or die. They understand that people who get infected are going to bring the disease home to their families and their local neighborhoods. Yet they have been told they have no choice—schools will not push back the reopening dates, schools will not go remote, many schools won’t even enforce masking requirements. They are told that they must risk their safety and the safety of their community because the schooling machine requires their participation to operate. Some of them will recognize that they do not have participate. Some teachers and staff members will realize the same.

Solidarity to all the students, teachers, and staff who refuse to participate in indoor schooling at this time.