would disagree. To say the older staff were all but forced to leave the professional was an understatement. The few that could not leave the profession, were forced to wear masks and face shields to not die. I am not using the team "die" loosely.

I was there in the weeds, too, from early May 2020 on. You don't have a profile, but most here know that I am also an educator (I predate Janet, so I've been here a while). I will guess that we were back in school before you were--we went back in early May 2020, and were onsite through the start of July.

We did a really great job of tracking cases throughout the pandemic, and we had no evidence of any transmission in the school (student to student or student to teacher), in large part because we had really strict protocols (which were miserable, but that's another story).Those protocols included mandatory N95/FFP2 masks for everyone, classroom windows and doors to be wide open for 5 minutes every 15 minutes, and testing everyone in the building at least three times per week, on site, first thing in the morning.

We were also really lucky in that teachers who were deemed high risk due to age or other factors were allowed to re-structure their jobs to work from home until vaccines were widely available.

I obviously don't think that we should have just thrown the doors open in May 2020 and let 'er rip. But man, the amount of damage that we did to kids by keeping them away from each other was *massive*. Massive. I still see it, every day.

You did the correct, noble, and responsible thing, and deserve tremendous credit for it. What you did, and what my son's Catholic school teachers did in 2020, was nothing short of heroic because of the leadership it demonstrated.

But it misses the larger point being made... that policy makers this side of the pond were willingly ignoring the data you provided, other public health data re: Covid and the young, and later data provided the American Catholic Schools, just to placate special interests. They put politics above science, and hurt America's children in the process.

I don't think anybody is gloating. It was infuriating then and it is infuriating now, because as BI pointed out in the original post, nobody has been held to account... and this failure diminishes regard for our public institutions. Airborne is pissed, and rightfully so.

With that broad a brush. This is an interview with Ashish Jha who Biden put in charge of COVID policy for a while. He was pushing to be more aggressive on opening schools in fall of 2020 but doing it in an evidence based way.

Normally you'd have a competent executive response and public health would provide information to balance risks vs benefits and such. Instead you had the president reject basic scientific facts and push reopening with no adjustment to the reality on the ground. Fauci had to co traditional POTUS on live TV not over policy but basic science.

That led to a false dichotomy over 100% open vs 100% lock down. A lot of governors on the left defaulted to the maximal shutdown possible instead of balancing factors like reasonable governors (examples being Polis in Colorado and Dewine in Ohio).

I fear the next time we have a pandemic (and I expect another in my lifetime) our lesson will be we should have YOLO'd the last one.

• Click here for link at https://www.edweek.org/leadership/schools-need-to-be-bolder-