Kindergarten Graduation

Yesterday my six-year-old son graduated from kindergarten during the Age of SARS-CoV-2. Oh, man, what a school year. I can’t believe we made it through unscathed and evaded the virus practically everyone pretends doesn’t exist or affect us anymore.

Back in August 2022, the day he was supposed to start at a public elementary school my wife had worked hard to get him enrolled into, I called their office to remove him from the school. The day before, his school had held an open house for incoming kindergarten students and their families. The school’s two kindergarten teachers were unmasked the entire time. In my son’s prospective classroom, none of the cheap air purifiers the school had purchased were turned on while 40-50 parents and children piled into the kindergarten classroom as though it was a royal rumble wrestling match. The classroom had ample windows they could have opened and not a single one had been opened. (The only mitigation tactic they employed was keeping the front and back doors open.) In a short period of time, it was abundantly clear that the school and my son’s prospective kindergarten teacher either had no idea how a highly-infectious airborne virus like SARS-CoV-2 readily transmits, and/or they had no interest in doing everything they could to prevent students and staff from getting infected. I knew if we kept our son in that school that he would get infected. To date, with absolutely no effective treatments for Long COVID, getting infected even once a year is not sustainable.

Though I knew it would be hard, I was ready to pivot and tag-team homeschooling with my wife whilst keeping our full-time remote jobs. But then she scoped out a local Montessori school that at the time was conducting temperature checks of anyone who set foot into their school. Their school also had a mask mandate for all students. Their classrooms had air purifiers that they were actually using. The school also used an app for parents to sign their students in and out every school day, which allowed staff to screen students for any symptoms or recent exposures to people infected with COVID-19. The classroom teachers were vigilant about calling parents to pick up their kids if they displayed any symptoms of illness. To boot, the kindergarten teachers for my son’s classroom were both masking, and the school’s staff were also masking. From a safety standpoint, which was—as far as I’m concerned—the most critical aspect of an elementary school for my son, this school was a vast improvement over the public elementary school whose kindergarten classrooms were bound to become viral petri dishes.

Not even a full week after our son started attending this private school, we received an exposure notice from the school that an individual in his classroom had tested positive for COVID-19, or was in isolation due to experiencing symptoms of COVID-19. From other parents, I had heard of these exposure notices, but it didn’t prepare my wife and I for how on edge it put us. Then, weeks after the school year started, the school removed its mask mandate in accordance with Alameda County mask mandate orders. 🙃

I was ready to pull our son out of this school, but my wife was reluctant. Our seven-year-old niece had masked and made it through two school years without getting infected.

Back in September 2022, after the school’s mask mandate was dropped, roughly half of the children and parents of this Montessori school in the San Francisco Bay Area were masking. And then, ten months later and at least six absence periods due to illness later (including one really bad illness that my wife and I suspect was RSV), my son graduated from his kindergarten class and he’s damn near the only motherfucker in the entire school—including staff—who is regularly masking. Even with my cynical nature, I could’ve never anticipated this would happen when my son first start at this school. Modern pandemic time is like early child development time: there’s so many changes in short periods of time.

Our son is actually looking forward to his new Montessori school where he’ll attend school five days a week instead of three days a week for only three hours. Believe me, this is a certifiable evolution from ten months ago when we dropped him off at school to be cared for by people who were not family for the first time in his entire life. But like so many others nowadays, the school’s Director of Mental Health refers to the pandemic in the past tense (“Even after COVID,” she said to my wife and I during an introductory meeting with school staff). My wife and I also toured the school earlier this year and consistently saw that staff never opened windows throughout the school to promote more fresh air despite the pleasant spring weather.

It's 2023.

Everything continues to fall apart at a seemingly accelerated rate.

I still don’t know what the fuck we’re doing sending our only child to a school.