This Friday, January 7th, MCPS relayed a new update to its students and teachers following the rapidly rising Covid cases in the school system due to the new Omicron variant. However, upon closer inspection we students quickly realized that this update was not anything new after all, but yet another instance of the school system’s favorite, oft-repeated statement as of late: “We have no plans to close.”
MCPS, it seems, has few plans for anything at all. They have no plans for dealing with unreported cases and their effects on the county’s own data, nor any plans for the collection of this data itself. They also have no plans to inform anyone of their school’s relevant data, no plans for the completely improbable scenario in which a student, parent, teacher, or administrator attempts to find such information, and no plans if, God forbid, anyone were to use the county’s own website to do so (said website has, thus far, crashed nearly every time it was used for its intended purpose).
And, of course, there are absolutely no plans should the school system actually decide to suspend in-person learning due to Covid concerns. There are no plans for schedules. There are no plans for grading systems. There are no plans for access to technology. There are no plans for assessments or make-ups. There aren’t even plans for the length of time this shutdown might last. There is a “plan” to continue athletics with the added safety precaution of COVID-19 testing for athletes, but of course this means that there is no plan for how to actually obtain these tests, should they for any (completely undetectable) reason be in short supply.
The school system’s one plan, to discuss closing schools when 5% of the school’s population contracts COVID-19, turned out to be, quite unfortunately, a false front. Since the release of this plan, MCPS has made it clear that they have no actual plan, should more than 11 schools in their county actually reach this 5% threshold. Certainly, were a meeting necessary to make this extremely important decision regarding the education of hundreds of thousands of students, it should be carried out with extreme haste, given the, well, viral growth in COVID-19 cases throughout the county. Unfortunately, these meetings have been delayed due to a lack of necessary advance planning, leaving students and teachers alike in a kind of limbo of uncertainty.
“I guess I could say I’m surprised,” says one B-CC student upon interview, “I mean, before all this, I just assumed the adults with power over my life and education would know what they were doing. But I mean, it wasn’t like they had any plans to close last time.”
A spokesperson for the MCPS Board of Education made a similar comparison in a Snitch interview, after we asked for clarification on the Board’s actual plans, “Frankly, it’s a little unreasonable for students to expect us to be everywhere at once. It’s just like March 2020! I don’t understand what happened to all of the sympathy and patience we were receiving nearly two years ago.” Unfortunately, this interview was cut short because the spokesperson had not correctly planned their time, and so only had the chance to add, “After all, these are unprecedented times for us all, having lived in a state of global crisis for almost two full school years! I don’t know what they expect us to—--” before rushing off to be late to their next appointment.
We reached out for a follow-up interview, but the representatives of the school system were unable to plan a time for one.
