Dear Commons Community,

The City University of New York Professional Staff Congress (PSC) which represents faculty and professional administrative staff reached agreement with  CUNY management regarding  personnel issues related to the coronavirus emergency.   In a letter sent out to the membership, PSC President Barbara Bowen oultined the details of the agreement.  In addition to CUNY readers of this blog who might not have received the letter, faculty and administrators at other colleges and universities might be interested in some of the details of this agreement as they move forward in their own institutions.  Given where the country is at with its battle against coronavirus, it is very possible that we will be teaching and working remotely into the Fall 2020 semester.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

J. David Goodman, a writer and reporter has a featured article in this morning’s New York Times, questioning whether New York City will be able to come back from the coronavirus pandemic. Entitled, ‘I Don’t Think the New York That We Left Will Be Back for Some Years’ takes a pessimistic position that it will be many years before the Big Apple comes back. Here is an excerpt:

“It took just a matter of days to shut down New York City, once the coronavirus took hold. Restarting it will take much, much longer.

The economic impact in the city from the global pandemic has been striking: Hundreds of thousands are already out of work; at least $7.4 billion in tax revenue is projected to be lost by the middle of next year.

And the changes will be felt long after New York begins to reopen its economy.

How New York City, the epicenter of the country’s outbreak, begins to recapture its vibrancy is a question consuming political, business and cultural leaders.

The very features that make New York attractive to businesses, workers and tourists — Broadway, the subway system, world-class restaurants and innumerable cultural institutions — were among the hardest-hit in the pandemic. And they will take the longest to come back.

Half of the hotels in the city are not operating, and with no reliable forecast for when tourists might return, many may stay shut. Nearly the same portion of the city’s smallest businesses — some 186,000 shops employing fewer than 10 people — could fail, city officials fear. Replacing them could take years.

The city’s real estate and construction industries, major drivers of the local economy, have all but stopped. Millions of renters are struggling to make monthly payments, fueling concern over a cascading crisis in the housing market if rent goes unpaid.

White-collar business and financial services companies, whose workers were mostly spared immediate layoffs in the shutdown, are forecast to see declining profits next year, and even losses. Some law firms have already pared down pay.

And with social distancing guidelines likely to be necessary for the foreseeable future, all facets of New York’s work life will take on new rules, routines and costs.

“I don’t think the New York that we left will be back for some years,” said Gregg Bishop, the commissioner of the city’s small businesses agency. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get it back.”

New York is not the only metropolis in the world struggling with how to safely reopen businesses and cultural centers in a dense urban settings, but no city has been more devastated by the pandemic.

The virus has claimed more than 13,000 lives in New York City, a figure that includes roughly 4,400 victims who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have died of it.

President Trump has sought swift reopenings across the United States. And on Monday, three Southern states moved toward doing so: South Carolina allowed retail shops to open with social distancing guidelines, and the governors of Georgia and Tennessee announced plans to soon ease restrictions on businesses.

But in New York City, interviews with more than two dozen business executives, city and state officials and industry groups revealed the depths of the difficulties in doing the same, especially when the coronavirus is still filling hospitals and hundreds are still dying each day.

The city’s Independent Budget Office forecast that 475,000 people would lose their jobs over the next year; other economists have put the job loss far higher: 1.2 million by the end of April, mostly in low-wage jobs in restaurants, retail or transportation.”

I have lived or worked in New York City through the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and the Great Recession of 2008-2009. It took the City a good fifteen years or more to come back from the fiscal crisis.   It took just a few years to come back from 9/11 and the Great Recession.  I don’t know what is going to happen.  Goodman makes some good points in his article but somehow I have faith in our City that it will recover.  The question surely is “when?” 

Goodman’s entire article is worth a read!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Trump tweeted (see above) yesterday that he would suspend all immigration into the United States for an undisclosed amount of time as the nation reels from the ongoing spread of COVID-19.

“In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!” 

More than 799,000 people have been infected with the coronavirus in the U.S. and more than 42,000 have died.

It’s unclear how wide-ranging the suspension would be, and the White House and Department of Homeland Security did not immediately reply to requests for clarification.

Trump has been forced to rein in his sweeping proclamations related to the outbreak several times before. The president has touted what he called a total “ban” on travel from China as cases of the coronavirus began to soar in the United States, but the mandate had notable exceptions for residents of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and for U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Many flights continued to operate for weeks, ferrying nearly 40,000 people to America from China.

The White House also banned all travel from Europe only to announce that the United Kingdom was exempt, but then banned it once again days later.

The White House has already moved to enact some pillars of the president’s hard-line immigration policies during the pandemic. The U.S. has expelled more than 10,000 migrants to Mexico with minimal if any processing, citing the virus and saying doing so protects Americans’ health. Some of those people were asylum seekers looking for protection, according to reports.

“This is not about immigration,” Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said earlier this month, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Right now this is purely about infectious disease and public health.”

Human rights groups have decried the measures, calling them illegal and claiming the Trump administration is using the virus as a backdoor to enact the president’s priorities.

The Washington Post noted that if Trump’s immigration suspension order is signed, it would be a first in U.S. history, noting that even during the devastating Spanish flu outbreak in 1918, the U.S. let in tens of thousands of immigrants.

It will be interesting to see if Trump follows through on his tweet!

Tony

Workers preparing lunch bags at Sinclair Lane Elementary School in Baltimore

Dear Commons Community,

Many school cafeterias around the country are now operating more like community soup kitchens, even though the federal school meals program won’t reimburse districts for meals served to struggling adults.  The images of relief workers handing out bags of food remind me of those from the Great Depression.  The New York Times has a featured article this morning describing food relief efforts in various schools and cities such as Sinclair Elementary School in Baltimore, Maryland.

The entire article is below.

God bless these relief workers.  They are our heroes!

Tony

———————————————————————————————————–

New York Times

Schools Transform Into ‘Relief’ Kitchens, but Federal Aid Fails to Keep Up

By Erica L. Green and Lola Fadulu

April 19, 2020

BALTIMORE — On the first day of the coronavirus school closure at Sinclair Lane Elementary School, Janet Bailey, the cafeteria manager, showed up to the school’s kitchen like any other day, ready to do her job. She began fixing the favorites of the 250 or so children who relied on her to feed them daily — chicken patties, a fruit and vegetable, and flavored milk.

On the second day, Ms. Bailey realized that she had answered a calling. By the time the building in northeast Baltimore had opened at 10 a.m., there was a line. Among the first was a man who said he only had a half a loaf of bread in the refrigerator.

“I just packed him up, no questions asked,” said Ms. Bailey, one of dozens of food service workers who signed up to staff meal sites around the city. “I didn’t know his situation, if he had four kids at home or not, like he said. But I know he was hungry. We are supposed to be here to meet the needs of the community. How could I say no?”

After the coronavirus shut down America’s education system, districts fortified their school meals programs to ensure that their most needy students would stay fed. One month in, school leaders realize the federal programs set up to subsidize the meals of tens of millions of students cannot meet the demands of an emergency that has turned their cafeterias into food banks and community kitchens.

Several districts are now feeding adults and sending days’ worth of food home for entire families. And they are doing so at a cost that under federal rules they will not recoup, and at a rate that is financially unsustainable.

Under the child nutrition programs run by the Department of Agriculture, districts are partially reimbursed for each meal served to their poorest students. But districts are incurring costs that do not qualify, for adult meals, additional equipment and extra pay for food service workers who are risking their safety.

Image

“We are supposed to be here to meet the needs of the community,” said Janet Bailey, the cafeteria manager at Sinclair Lane.

The nation’s 12 largest school districts will spend $12 million to $19 million through June 30 to meet the demands of their pandemic meals operations, estimated Katie Wilson, executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, whose members include large urban districts in Los Angeles, Baltimore, New York and Chicago.

The organization is pleading for relief from Congress, the Agriculture Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Meantime, the organization has set a donation page to help districts cover costs.

“Every one of these schools that has their doors open are literally heroes on the front line,” Ms. Wilson said. “Food workers are now first responders.”

Collectively, the districts in the alliance serve 3.6 million students and 635 million meals annually. But in weekly calls since the pandemic started, the districts have reported that nothing had prepared them for the demand they have seen. Families are traveling to their meal sites from neighboring jurisdictions. Residents are showing up from senior living communities. Some families became known as “trick-or-treaters,” hitting up different sites throughout the district.

“If people are in need, we’re going to address the need, end of discussion,” Austin Beutner, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said in an interview. “Our inclination is to do the right thing.”

Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school system, is serving between 400,000 and 500,000 meals a day since its schools closed, and will serve its 10 millionth meal this week. About 30 percent of those meals are going to family and community members, so they will not be reimbursed.

The nation’s 12 largest school districts will, according to one estimate, spend $12 million to $19 million through the end of June to meet the demands of their pandemic meals operations.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

The district has had to purchase 18 refrigerated trucks to store food and milk, which will cost more than $95,000 over the next three months.

“This is not a school meal program,” Mr. Beutner said. “It’s a relief effort.”

The nation’s largest school district, in New York City, will serve anyone who needs food, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced this month, a decision that drew some pushback from food service employees who lacked protective gear.

The New York City Department of Education said that it was serving about 250,000 meals a day, and had served about four million meals since its schools closed. Any student meals that are not partially reimbursed by the federal government will be funded by the city’s budget.

Since the shutdown, the Agriculture Department has loosened rules to allow schools to serve meals outside group settings, and states to serve after-school snacks and meals without an educational activity. It is also allowing parents to pick up meals without their children.

A spokeswoman for the Agriculture Department said it was aware that “some schools are opting to allow adults to buy meals for themselves or providing them with meals.” But she said those meals would not be reimbursed. Needy adults, she said, should be turning to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, which the administration has moved to cut with three separate rule changes.

“For schools that are closed, we are doing our very best to make sure kids are fed,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said. “Local school nutrition professionals know how best to feed their children, and we are working with them and their community partners.”

Regulatory hurdles persist. In areas where fewer than half the children were eligible for free or reduced-price meals, school meal providers at first were still having to verify that each child was low-income. The department has since relaxed its rules to allow states to serve students who may not qualify for the program during the school year. But state rules vary. In Mississippi, some school sites with fewer than 40 percent of students eligible for reduced price meals still must justify giving out food. Massachusetts got statewide approval to waive proof of income.

“We are hoping for a nationwide waiver because those waivers are not consistent across states,” said Crystal W. FitzSimons, the director of school programs at the Food Research and Action Center.

Arne Duncan, a former education secretary who has been helping school superintendents through the crisis, said any government response short of enabling schools to become full-blown food distribution centers was insufficient.

“We can’t be constrained by rules and regulations that make no sense now,” said Mr. Duncan, who is now a managing partner at the philanthropic organization Emerson Collective. “All we need is some compassion, common sense and flexibility.”

Some schools are partnering with community food banks — many of which are also struggling to keep up — Y.M.C.A.s, and Boys and Girls Clubs to get meals out. All the while, many school districts still lack essential personal protective equipment. In March, districts in California, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia had to suspend or adjust their meals program because employees contracted the coronavirus or feared they would. In early April, a food service worker in Clark County, Nev., the nation’s fifth-largest school district, died from Covid-19.

School districts are already beginning to talk about financial challenges for the next school year, said Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokeswoman for the School Nutrition Association. By then, many will have little inventory and insufficient revenue to purchase more.

“I’m not sure schools can sustain the same level of outreach,” said Lisa Davis, the senior vice president of the No Kid Hungry campaign at Share Our Strength, a nonprofit organization working to end childhood hunger.

Children picking up meals at Sinclair Lane

In Baltimore, the school district has served more than 25,000 meals to adults, at a cost of $85,000 and counting.

Ms. Bailey can rattle off her daily tallies as easily as her phone number. “688 today — 108 adults for breakfast, 108 adults for lunch,” she said with a tinge of disappointment. That was fewer than her average of 800, but thunderstorms had blown through that day.

Even though the site opens at 10 a.m., Ms. Bailey adjusted her staff’s schedules to prepare for those who show up as early as 9:30, and for the stragglers who run up with panicked looks a few minutes after it closes at 2 p.m.

She knows mothers and fathers by name, which children are lactose intolerant, and who among the vegetarians need peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She’s become resourceful: When the local food bank recently dropped off a box of 40 meals, she unpacked it and stretched them into 80.

“You hear the stories about the health care workers — well, we’re on the front lines, too,” she said. “We’re on our feet from the time we come in the door to the time we leave. We’re doing something that’s bigger than what we can imagine right now.”

The district recently switched to cold meals in April to make it easier and safer for families to “grab ’n’ go.” On a recent sunny Tuesday, city residents walked up in their house slippers and drove up in luxury S.U.V.s. There were unaccompanied children, and older residents with handicap parking placards.

The only question asked was, “Chicken salad or deli?”

“I always tell them, thank you for your service because it’s well appreciated,” said Al Peterson, 62, who picked up meals for three children and two adults. “I get an extra one to take to my homeless guy down the street, too.”

Tia Gardner, the owner of My Village Learning Center, a day care in northeast Baltimore, said the free meals were allowing her to stay open. She is taking care of 24 children, all of essential employees, like health care workers. That is down from 62.

“Food is one of our biggest budget items,” Ms. Gardner said. “If I’m able to stay open, it eases the minds of parents who still have to go to work.”

On Friday, Sinclair Lane Elementary closed out its busiest week to date — 4,056 meals served, 1,307 of them to adults. Ms. Bailey said she hoped that the federal government would step up, but regardless, “as long as the people are coming,” she said, “we’ll be serving.”

Anti-Lockdown Protesters in St. Paul, Minnesota

Protesters in Columbus, Ohio

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump on Friday encouraged an anti-lockdown group that protested in Minnesota against stay-at-home orders to prevent the spread of coronavirus and he appeared to back such efforts in other states, arguing that “elements” of some state regulations were “just too tough.”

“I think elements of what they’ve done are just too tough,” Trump said at the daily White House press briefing Friday evening when asked about a tweet — “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” — that he posted earlier in the day.

Trump told reporters that he felt “very comfortable” with his tweet, adding that “these are people expressing their views” and “they seem to be very responsible people to me, you know, they’ve been treated a little bit rough.”

“What they’ve done is very powerful,” he said. “You can get the same result by doing a little bit less.”

“If we see something happening bad that we think is wrong, we’re going to come down strong on them,” Trump said about states. “The federal government has a lot to say.”

Governors across the country yesterday criticized President Donald Trump’s expression of solidarity with those protesting various state-issued stay-at-home orders, saying his comments are “dangerous” and “don’t make any sense.”

“I don’t know any other way to characterize it, when we have an order from governors, both Republicans and Democrats, that basically are designed to protect people’s health, literally their lives, to have a president of the United States basically encourage insubordination, to encourage illegal activity,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, told ABC’s “This Week,” adding, “To have an American president to encourage people to violate the law, I can’t remember any time during my time in America where we have seen such a thing.”

Inslee said Trump’s comments were “dangerous” because they “can inspire people to ignore things that actually can save their lives.” Trump’s promotion of the protesters was “hobbling our national efforts to protect people from this terrible virus.”

“And it is doubly frustrating to us governors because this is such a schizophrenia, because the president basically is asking people: Please ignore Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. Please ignore my own guidelines that I set forth, because those guidelines made very clear, if you read them — and I don’t know if the president did or not — but, if you read them, it made very clear that you cannot open up Michigan today or Virginia,” Inslee said. “Under those guidelines, you need to see a decline in the infections and fatalities. And that simply has not happened yet.”

The past week saw an increasing number of protests across the country where demonstrators railed against the coronavirus restrictions that health experts say are necessary to curtail the spread of the virus.

The protesters have said they believe the shutdowns, which have harmed business and stunted leisure activity, have gone too far, especially in areas that haven’t seen major outbreaks like those in New York and New Jersey. But health experts have warned it won’t take much for a relatively unaffected place to become a hot spot, as just one infected person is able to spread the virus to several others.

The protests, which have been promoted in large Facebook groups with names such as “Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine” and “ReOpen NC,” have seen a large pro-Trump contingency, with demonstrators wearing and waving Make America Great Again gear, as well as “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. Protests, like “Operation Gridlock” in Michigan, the largest of the demonstrations so far, have been organized and promoted by leading conservatives. Some have even been seen waving Confederate flags at the rallies.

The rallies have led to crowds gathering in close proximity, with many participants forgoing masks and violating social distancing guidelines that have been put in place.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, told CNN’s “State of the Union” his state is “doing everything we possibly can to reopen in a safe manner,” but “I don’t think it’s helpful to encourage demonstrations and encourage people to go against the president’s own policy.”

“The president’s policy says you can’t start to reopen under his plan until you have declining numbers for 14 days, which those states and my state do not have,” he said. “So then to go encourage people to go protest the plan you just made recommendations on Thursday — it just doesn’t make any sense. We’re sending completely conflicting messages out to the governors and to the people as if we should ignore federal policy and federal recommendations.”

Speaking with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said he’s asked protesters to “observe social distancing” and “we’re all big believers in the First Amendment.”

“They were protesting against me yesterday and that’s just fine,” he said. “They have every right to do that. We’re going to do what we think is right, what I think is right, which is try to open this economy but do it very, very carefully so we don’t get a lot of people killed. But we have to come back and we’re aiming to do that May 1. It’s very consistent … with the very thoughtful plan the president laid out.”

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, told CNN that Trump was focusing on protests after being “unable to deliver on tests.”

“And this is not the time for protest,” Northam said after Trump encouraged gun rights activists in his state. “This is not the time for divisiveness. This is time for leadership that will stand up and provide empathy, that will understand what’s going on in this country of ours with this pandemic. It’s the time for truth. And it’s the time to bring people together.”

A new NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll conducted just before the announcement of the administration’s new reopening guidelines showed that 58 percent of registered voters are more concerned that America will “move too quickly in loosening restrictions” and cost more lives than they are about the country taking too long to loosen the orders. Meanwhile, earlier last week, Trump said he was “not going to put pressure on any governor to open.”

Speaking with “Fox News Sunday,” Vice President Mike Pence addressed Trump’s encouragement of the protests, saying “no one in America wants to reopen this country more than” Trump, and that “when the president speaks about re-opening America it’s all about encouraging governors, as soon as they determine as most proper and most appropriate to be able to do that and do that quickly.”

Pence told “Meet the Press” that the U.S. has “to make sure the cure isn’t worse than the disease,” and that there are “real costs” to staying shut down, pointing to business closures and health risks tied to isolation.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has instituted one of the most restrictive stay-at-home orders as her state deals with one of the worst outbreaks in the U.S., told “Meet the Press” on Sunday she stood by the measure.

“Michigan right now has the third-highest number of death from COVID-19, and yet we’re the 10th largest state,” she said. “We have a disproportionate problem in the state of Michigan. And so we could take the same action that other states have, but it doesn’t rise to the challenge we’re confronting. And that’s precisely why we have to take a more aggressive stand.”

The governors have this right.  Trump’s support of the protesters is dangerous and ill-conceived!

Tony

Neptune Beach Outside of Jacksonville, Florida

Dear Commons Community,

The state of Florida passed two milestones in the coronavirus pandemic this week: its deadliest day yet, and the reopening of several public beaches. People in Florida are flocking to several beaches as they reopened after being closed because of the coronavirus outbreak, despite the state’s death toll climbing to 726.  As reported by several news media.

When police removed barriers from one of these beaches on Friday, crowds cheered, CNN reported.

The Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who was widely criticized for moving slowly to contain the outbreak, permitted some reopenings.

DeSantis said some cities should feel free to reopen beaches and parks if doing so could be done safely, and with social-distancing restrictions. “Do it in a good way,” DeSantis told reporters, saying people needed fresh air. “Do it in a safe way.”

The areas that reopened were in north Florida, including stretches of sand in Jacksonville Beach, Neptune Beach, and Atlantic Beach, local TV reported.

The “essential activities” permitted at Jacksonville Beach include “recreational activities consistent with social distancing guidelines such as walking, biking, hiking, fishing, running, swimming, taking care of pets and surfing”.

“This beach will be open from 6am to 11am, and from 5pm to 8pm each evening,” local station WJAX said.

Sunbathing is not permitted. Other restrictions include prohibitions on towels and blankets, coolers and grills, and beach chairs, as well as “lingering on the beach without moving”, and gatherings exceeding 10 people.

“Folks, this could be the beginning of the pathway back to normal life, but please respect and follow these limitations,” said the Jacksonville mayor, Lenny Curry. “We’ll get back to life as we know it but we must be patient.”

“I honestly thought it was phenomenal,” Jacksonville resident Amanda Campos told First Coast News. “It gives people fresh air. They can go for a walk. It’s nothing crazy. We’re not saying the clubs are opening and it’s not a closed space.”

Some were worried, however.

Deborah Melvin, a Jacksonville resident who said she had lost family and friends to Covid-19 said: “This is really a crazy bad idea.”

“I’m afraid. I’m afraid for myself. I’m afraid for my family. Everybody should use their common sense,” she added.

DeSantis issued a statewide stay-at-home order on 1 April, much later than many states and one month after Florida marked its first confirmed Covid-19 cases. He drew significant criticism for not closing beaches during the earlier college spring break, which draws hundreds of thousands to the state annually, when beaches were packed and some dismissed the dangers of the virus.

I am not sure that opening beaches is such a good idea.

Tony

Sandra Santos-Vizcaino, Teacher at PS 9 in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, New York Died of Coronavirus

Dear Commons Community,

There have been many heart-wrenching stories of people who have passed away after contracting the coronavirus.  Especially sad are when loved ones cannot be with those who have died  for fear of catching and then spreading the virus.  In an article entitled,  Grieving At Home, Kids Face Their Teachers’ Deaths, Rebecca Klein considers that with widespread school closures, children have been left to grieve in isolation, sometimes experiencing the tragedy of death for the first time when a teacher passes away.  Below is the entire article.  It is touching!

Tony

—————————————————————————————————

The Huffington Post

Grieving at Home, Kids Face Their Teachers’ Deaths

By Rebecca Klein

April 18, 2020

Eighth grader Kiara Dokes in Detroit never knew her father, and she usually has a hard time getting along with adult men, her mom said. But at the beginning of the school year, Kiara met Thomas Fields, the culture facilitator at her school. He became “like another father to me,” Kiara said.

Hundreds of miles away, in New Jersey, high school senior Que’jon Malawo has spent years turning to case manager Javiera Rodriguez for help. They first met his freshman year, and since then, she’s become his “go-to” person for all things academic and personal, her office a haven of warmth and safety. “She was like a second mother to me,” he said.

Fields and Rodriguez both passed away in recent weeks, falling victim to the coronavirus. There is no official number on how many teachers and school staff members have passed. The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union, has lost at least 65 of its educators and 10 retirees, a spokesperson told HuffPost. In New York City, the American epicenter of the outbreak, at least 50 school staff members have passed away, according to the New York City Department of Education.

When teachers and school staff members die, they leave behind friends, family, colleagues. They also leave behind hundreds of children and teenagers whom they see nearly everyday. With widespread school closures, children have been left to grieve in isolation, sometimes experiencing the tragedy of death for the first time.

Schools have been offering counseling and holding online vigils. But without face-to-face interaction, it’s hard to know which students are struggling.

“We worry constantly that a student is going to be in need and we wouldn’t know it,” said Todd Minichello, the school counseling coordinator for Rockwood School District in Missouri. The district recently lost guidance counselor Sandy Kearney, who worked in its schools for over 30 years.

The current crisis has only further illuminated the role that schools play in neighborhoods: They feed hungry children, they provide medical and mental health care. Vigilant educators and staff members make sure that children are clean, clothed and safe. Schools are mini-universes, with classrooms providing the structure of artificial families.

When schools reopen, students’ returns may be marked by the gaping holes they find at the center of their school communities, their second mothers and fathers gone.

Tokens Of Grief

HuffPost spoke with 15 students, parents and school employees around the country about how these losses are impacting their school communities. Sometimes, parents have been the ones to tell their kids that their favorite teacher passed. Sometimes kids have found out on social media.

Kiara Dokes was with a friend when her mom called to tell her about the passing of Fields, a 32-year-old who worked at Paul Robeson Malcolm X Academy. But Kiara already knew. Word spreads fast among kids. Both mother and daughter had difficulty finding the words. It took them two days to talk without crying.

Fields attended Paul Robeson Malcolm X Academy as a kid. He went to college and served in the Navy before returning to work at his alma mater at the beginning of this school year. He quickly became a community staple.

He greeted children every morning by the door. Parents described him as a gentle giant, and his smiling face at the entrance of the building grew to symbolize safety. As the school culture facilitator, he was firm, but always kind. His expectations were clear, but he laughed easily. Parents had voted him employee of the month in February, just a few weeks before he died. He didn’t live long enough to receive the plaque.

His face is now the screensaver of Kiara’s phone. She’s keeping it there for motivation. When she gets upset, her mom says to look at his picture and imagine what he would do in the situation.

“He just loved Paul Robeson Malcolm X Academy. And we loved him just as much as he loved us,” said Katherine Dokes, Kiara’s mom, who works as a lunch aide at the school and is active in the PTA.

Another parent, Melissa Redmond, is fashioning her 13-year-old son a tag to wear around his neck with Fields’ face on it, so that he’ll remember Fields as an angel watching over him. When her son found out from social media that Fields had died, he couldn’t believe it and started lashing out in anger.

“I had to sit him down and tell him that God wanted [Fields] more than we did,” said Redmond, speaking through tears. “I try to tell him [Fields] is a light now. He’s always going to shine down on you.”

Fields used to play basketball with Redmond’s son. Sometimes Fields would drive him home. They would talk about grades and girls and college. If her son got in trouble, Fields would push him to do better. For Fields, discipline was about figuring out what else could be going on in students’ lives that might be causing the behavior. He was always trying to better someone, said Redmond.

Next year, returning to school without Fields, is “going to be a struggle. The children feel like they were stripped of him. And a lot of them don’t understand,” Redmond said.

Saying Goodbye To Second Families

In New Jersey, school was never easy for Becton Regional High School senior Que’jon Malawo. The teen, at times, found himself on the edge of expulsion. But Javiera Rodriguez, a case manager on the school’s child study team, “broke her back” toiling late into the night to make sure it never happened.

The 43-year-old advocated for Malawo. She helped him find a job. She worked with him on his relationship with his father.

She was a “second mother,” a confidant, an “inspiration.”

“She taught me how to be strong,” said Malawo.

The best way Malawo can think to honor Rodriguez is to refuse to let this grief define his future decisions; to live up to the example she set; to make the woman who he said had a contagious smile proud from her resting place.

“I’m going to be thinking about her every time I’m doing something right. How she helped me get there,” said Malawo, who is set to graduate this year. “I’m going to keep going for her.”

Rodriguez started working in the district 10 years ago and counseled students with special needs or who were struggling in school. Her students and peers call her bright, strong, charismatic and tireless, possessing a unique ability to light up any room. She had a gift for connecting students and colleagues alike with the resources they needed and making them feel like part of a close-knit family.

Tenth grader Leyna Ventoso recalls a time when Rodriguez called her into her office to discuss her grades. Ventoso was on the edge of failing. She thought Rodriguez was calling to yell at her, but it was the opposite. Rodriguez was calling to offer a hand. Together, they went to Ventoso’s teachers to work through the issues she was having.

“She was always there for everyone,” Ventoso said.

Ventoso spent nearly every lunch period in Rodriguez’s office with a group of about eight other students. Rodriguez would serve students tea; they would play board games and relax. It became a safe space amid the organized chaos of high school.

It’s hard to imagine what school will be like when it reopens without Rodriguez’s magnetic presence, said Ventoso.

“It’s been horrible. She had an influence on the school … There’s going to be someone missing.”

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press has an article this morning on the underreporting of coronavirus deaths from around the world.  The basic message is that because of poor testing we really don’t know how many victims the pandemic has claimed.  Here is an excerpt from the article.

“China acknowledged that the coronavirus death toll in the one-time epicenter city of Wuhan was nearly 50% higher than reported, underscoring just how seriously the official numbers of infections and deaths around the world may be understating the dimensions of the disaster.

In Italy, Spain, Britain, the United States and elsewhere, similar doubts emerged as governments revised their death tolls or openly questioned the accuracy of them.

“We are probably only seeing the tip of the iceberg,” said Barcelona University epidemiologist Antoni Trilla, who heads the Spanish government’s expert panel on the crisis.

Worldwide, the outbreak has infected more than 2.1 million people and killed over 145,000, according to a Johns Hopkins University tally based on figures supplied by government health authorities around the globe. The death toll in the U.S. topped 33,000, with more than 670,000 confirmed infections.

Authorities say infections and deaths have been under-reported almost everywhere. Thousands have died with COVID-19 symptoms — many in nursing homes, which have been ravaged by a disease that hits the elderly the hardest — without being tested. Four months into the outbreak, nations are still struggling to increase their testing capacity, and many are still far from their goal.

In Italy, officials have acknowledged that the country’s official death toll of more than 22,000 understates the true number, primarily because it doesn’t include those who died in nursing homes and were not tested.

A government survey released Friday of about one-third of Italy’s nursing homes found more than 6,000 residents have died since Feb. 1. It was unclear how many were a result of COVID-19.

In Britain, the official death toll of about 14,600 has come under increasing scrutiny because it likewise does not include any deaths at home or in nursing homes. The country’s statistics agency has said the actual number of dead could be around 15% higher; others think it will be far more.

And in Spain, the country’s 17 autonomous regions were ordered to adopt uniform criteria on counting the dead. The country has recorded more than 19,000 deaths, but the system leaves out patients who had symptoms but were not tested before they died.

“There is a general feeling that the epidemiologists don’t have a clue of what’s going on, that experts know even less and that governments are concealing information, but I don’t think that’s true,” said Hermelinda Vanaclocha, an epidemiologist on Spain’s top virus advisory panel. “It’s simply not easy.”

China raised its overall death toll to over 4,600 after Wuhan, where the outbreak first took hold, added nearly 1,300 deaths. Questions have long swirled around the accuracy of China’s case reporting, with critics saying officials sought to minimize the outbreak that began in December.

That has been a struggle around the world, though. The official death toll in New York City soared by more than half earlier this week when health authorities began including people who probably had COVID-19 but died without being tested. Nearly 3,800 deaths were added to the city’s count.

Such figures can have a huge influence on governments’ actions, as medical staffs struggle to figure out how to cope with surges of sick people and officials make crucial decisions about where to devote resources and how to begin easing lockdowns to resuscitate their economies.”

I am no expert but I am fearful that we have a long way to go to figure this out. President Trump’s recent call for opening up the country has been questioned by governors for the same reasons as mentioned in the article, that is, we do not have a handle on coronavirus testing and without it we need to be cautious in order not to worsen the situation.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, another 5.2 million Americans filed initial unemployment claims in the week ending April 11. That brings the total unemployment claims over the past four weeks to 22 million,  nearly wiping out all the job gains since the Great Recession.

The total weekly claims fell close to 1.4 million from last week’s 6.6 million initial unemployment claims. Economists had been expecting the report to show the ranks of jobless Americans increasing by 5.5 million.

Regardless these claims are still staggering: The one-week record—before the current streak of multi-million claims—was 695,000 in October 1982.  As reported by CNBC News.

“As we fully know the current state of the labor market with mass waves of layoffs, the key question turns to how many of these people will be rehired when the economy starts to reopen,” said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at the Bleakley Group. “We can assume it will take a long time for that to happen but hopefully we’re getting closer to at least getting started.”

…Stock market futures actually gained on the news and pointed to a slight gain at the market open.

There was some good news in the data when looking at the numbers not adjusted for seasonal factors, which some economists say is unnecessary given the current unusual conditions.

The unadjusted total was 4.97 million, actually representing a plunge of 20% or more than 1.2 million from the previous week. Seasonal factors actually should have reflected about a 1% gain, according to the Labor Department. A comparable week in 2019 would have shown just 196,364 claims.

Most of the big states showed declines from the previous week in benefit applications, according to unadjusted numbers.

Pennsylvania posted a drop of 39,283, California was down by 257,848 and Michigan fell by 169,234. New York, which has lagged some of the larger states in terms of filings, saw a gain of 51,498 to 395,949…

…The total claims of 22.03 million filed since social distancing measures took effect reflects a 13.5% drop in household employment, according to Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics. Ashworth said he expects the April jobless rate to be 15%-20%.

“Nevertheless, we do still expect the unemployment rate to come down much more quickly than during a normal economic recovery, as temporary layoffs return to work once the lockdowns are lifted, so we still wouldn’t characterize this as a depression-type event,” he said.

I hope he is right!

Tony