Shala K. Howell's Blog, page 8

Wordless Wednesday: Donkeys need walks too

Spotted a couple of women out walking their donkeys on my walk this week.

[image error]Most California thing ever? (Photo: Shala Howell)

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What was Dr. Hess’s Poultry Panacea?

One of the side effects of having wildfires reach within a dozen miles of your home is that it tends to focus your mind on completing those projects you’ve been putting off while you putter away at things that feel more urgent.

For me, it’s the collection of old family journals from 1871-1952 that my grandparents gave me before they died. For nearly 20 years, I’ve been meaning to either transcribe them or scan them before sending them to their new and much more suitable home in the Town Archives of Victor, New York. (After all, if you believe a document has historical value, shouldn’t you stash it where historians will think to look for it?)

After our bug out bags were packed, I found myself unable to concentrate on much of anything in between bouts of doom-scrolling Twitter reports on the progress of the various wildfires in our area. So I spent a couple of days creating a digital archive of the journals.

Turns out, they have all sorts of interesting things tucked away inside them. Like this receipt, which doubled as an ad for Dr. Hess’s various stock food, poultry medications, and healing powders, which I found tucked between the entries for February 1 and 2, 1910.

[image error]Sales receipt from a purchase at E. D. Warren’s General Store with an advertisement for Dr. Hess’s Poultry Panacea on it. (Scan: Shala Howell)



What was Dr. Hess’s Poultry Panacea?

In case you, like me, are wondering what this Poultry Panacea could be, it sounds like it was a medicine to make hens lay more eggs. An online search turned up this clipping from the December 9, 1921 edition of the Haven Journal (Haven, Kansas).

[image error]Clipping from the December 9, 1921 edition of the Haven Journal via Newspapers.com.

When it came to wellness products for the dedicated American farmer, Dr. Hess didn’t put all his eggs in one basket. I found an old catalog of his for sale on ebay. It sounds like he had a complete line of wellness tonics for the farm, including:

his Poultry Panacea, “Moulting saps a hen’s vitality”an Instant Lice Killer for horses, poultry, and cattle which he claimed could also be used to kill bugs on cucumbers and other edible plants, “Get rid of the lice tax”Roup tablets to treat roup, a potentially fatal respiratory illness in chickens, to be used “when you hear the first chicken sneeze”White Diarrhea tablets, “Look out for chick diarrhea”a Healing Powder, “Heals everything it touches. For man and beast.”

Pretty sure this list only scratches the surface.

I wish I had more pictures of my great-grandfather’s farm. I would love to get a peek at his medicine cabinet.

So, how are you distracting yourself these days?

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Election 2020 is upon us. Do you have a plan to vote?

I promise not to make political posts a regular event on this blog, but in the United States, voting is a civic duty, not simply a political one. The pandemic has triggered several changes in how voting will happen across the U.S. this year. In this post, I'll tell you about some resources that can help you sort out your best strategy for voting this year.

Election 2020 is almost upon us.

Have you made your voting plan yet?

Depending on how the pandemic is doing where you are, your personal risk factors, and how long the lines are in your area in a normal election year, how you vote may need to look a little different this year.

For example, my 70+-year old father lives in a sleepy suburb in Texas. The voting lines in his area are never very long, even on Election Day, so his plan is to simply show up to vote in-person during early voting hours like he normally does. The main difference this year will be that when he goes, he’ll wear a mask, stand 6 feet apart from other voters and poll workers, touch as little as possible, and use hand sanitizer after.

My 70+-year old mother recently moved to a beach town in Florida. It’s her first election there, and the last time we talked, she didn’t really know what the lines would be like at her local polling place. In the past, she has typically voted in-person. But this year, given the pandemic and the potential for lines at her polling place, she’s planning to vote by mail. She’ll need to double-check her registration, request her absentee ballot by October 24, and mail it back no later than Tuesday, October 29. (Florida requires all absentee/vote-by-mail ballots to be received by November 3, and the USPS recommends that voters mail their ballots at least one week before their state’s deadline. But don’t worry if you miss that mailing deadline, Mom, because Florida will allow you to drop off your vote-by-mail ballot to your local elections office or early voting place instead. Don’t relax too much though, because early voting in Florida ends Saturday, October 31.)

When my husband and I lived in Massachusetts and later, Illinois, we also typically voted in person, generally on Election Day. But as registered voters in California, this year my husband and I will be automatically mailed a ballot about a month before the election. Given the delays the USPS has been experiencing in our area this summer, our plan is to fill out our ballots at home and take them to an official ballot drop box to deliver in person. (Like Florida, California allows us to either mail back our ballots or drop them off at our county’s elections office.)

[image error]“SF Fire Hydrant Vote for Equality” by Tony Fischer Photography is licensed under CC BY 2.0



No matter how you plan to vote, you’re going to need to do a few things to pull it off.



Register to vote.Check your registration. If you’ve already registered, it’s a good idea to check your registration at least once between now and Election Day to verify that you still appear on your state’s voting rolls. If you plan to vote in-person, find your local polling place and its operating hours for voting either early or on Election Day. If you plan to vote by mail, know your state’s deadlines and rules for ballot applications and returns. Per USPS, if you are planning to vote by mail, allow a week to receive your ballot and another week for it to arrive by Election Day.Vote (remember to double-check your ballot before returning it).



[image error]“Women in horse-drawn carriage and on foot march in street for voting rights carrying banners ‘Mothers Prepare the Children for the World…’ ‘Women Need Votes…’ and ‘Suffrage Pioneers…'” by Kheel Center, Cornell University Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0



Resources to get all this done



Your state or local election office website: Register to vote, check your registration, get the facts about election procedures, polling places, & times

Your local elections office is perhaps the most important resource you’ll have when it comes to voting this year. That’s the best place to learn about the election process in your state. Theoretically, their website will have the most up-to-date and accurate information about voter registration, deadlines and rules for requesting and returning absentee/vote-by-mail ballots, as well as directions and operating hours for your local polling places for in-person voting during early voting hours and on Election Day itself. (Find your state or local election office website.)

Some states also offer a method for voters to track whether or not their absentee ballot has been received. Figuring out whether your state is one of them can be as simple as a Google search. My search for “California ballot tracking” pulled up the “Where’s My Ballot?” webpage on the California Secretary of State’s website, where I can sign up for SMS alerts that will notify me when my vote-by-mail ballot is mailed, received, and counted. A second search for “New Mexico ballot tracking” led me to the Voter Information Portal on New Mexico Secretary of State website, where I can check my registration status, ballot, and find my local polling place.

Even if you are a seasoned voter, it’s a good idea to check your local government’s election site at least once between now and Election Day to see how/if the pandemic is affecting your state’s election process. Several states that require excuses to vote absentee/by-mail will allow voters to use the coronavirus pandemic as a reason to vote absentee. The vast majority of states allow registered voters to use the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to vote absentee. Only Texas, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina won’t.

In the hopes of safely boosting voter turnout during this pandemic, several other states, including California, New Jersey, Nevada, Utah, Hawaii, Vermont, and New Jersey, have opted to start mailing all active, registered voters a ballot in advance of the election. (Washington, Colorado, and Oregon already routinely mailed ballots to their registered voters before COVID.)

Vote.gov : Register to vote and connect to your local elections office

Vote.gov is an online voter information portal run by the U.S. government. On its home page, you will find a simple tool that will point you to your local government’s website or office so that you can register to vote in your state or territory, check your registration, or find a local polling place.

Vote.gov also provides general information about voting on Election Day, voter ID requirements, and other information about the election process. At its heart, though, Vote.gov is essentially a clearinghouse to connect voters with their local elections officials. It’s really quite convenient.

Want a shortcut? Find My State or Local Election Office Website via Vote.gov.



Vote.org: Register to vote, check your registration, find your local polling place, double-check your state’s deadlines, and more

Vote.org is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, non-governmental voting registration and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) organization. Rather than direct you to your local government office, Vote.org offers an online voter registration tool right on its website. It also provides information about vote-by-mail, an in-person polling place locator, the opportunity to sign up to serve as a poll worker, and a pointer to the U.S. 2020 Census website so that you can fill out your Census form, if you haven’t already. You can even sign up for election reminders to reduce the chance that you’ll forget to execute your voting plan.

Because Vote.org is not run by our federal or your local government, it’s a good idea to read their privacy policy before you share any personal information with them.

[image error]“Vote” by H2Woah! is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0



Other sources for general information on voting, voting on Election Day, and/or vote by mail

Consolidated 50-State Election Season Calendar: The New York Times has published a consolidated calendar of the upcoming Election 2020 season, including the Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates, as well as individual state deadlines for absentee voting and vote-by-mail.

USPS guidance for meeting vote-by-mail deadlines: You may have noticed that mail has slowed down a bit in your area this summer. Even in normal election years, simply following your state’s deadlines for vote-by-mail may not be enough to ensure that USPS delivers your ballot in time to be counted. In general, the USPS recommends that you mail your completed ballot at least seven days before your state’s deadline.

U.S. News’s Guide to Voting by Mail in 2020: A summary of the various state rules and deadlines governing vote-by-mail in 2020.

So, what’s your plan for voting?



[image error]“Vote for Nacho” by rikkis_refuge is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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Wordless Wednesday: The curious incident of the squirrel in the night-time

Good morning. I woke up today to find this on my back deck. I’m going to need more coffee before I go out to see what else has happened in my little container garden overnight.

[image error]Photo: Shala Howell

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Wordless Wednesday: Behold the fierce predator

My cat’s (planned and much needed) weight loss appears to have stalled so this week I tried to add morning exercise into the mix.

You can see how well that’s going.

[image error]Canelo is annoyed. If looks could stare a mouse away… (Photo: Shala Howell)

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What a difference air quality makes

The wildfires in Northern California got pretty close to us this past week. At one point the evacuation zone for the CZU Lightning Complex reached within 5 miles of our house.

We were lucky. CAL FIRE has contained the portion of the fire that threatened us, so barring unforeseen complications, we should be ok. Others are definitely not as fortunate.

Turns out there are a lot of scams that happen around wildfires, so if you wish to help out, play it safe and reserve your assistance for vetted organizations and people you know personally. The County of San Mateo published an update on Monday August 24 that includes several donation/volunteer opportunities. I like this list because it tells you exactly what would be helpful and provides contact information for vetted organizations ready and able to put your donations to work.

We’re fine, but we’ve gotten a ton of smoke

I was talking to my uncle the other day trying to explain how weird the light has been the past few days as a result of all that smoke and I found myself using words like “sepia-toned” and “looking at the world through a filter.”

This morning I remembered that I’ve been talking pictures of my garden all summer. It’s just so shocking to me that I’d actually be able to grow anything that I end up taking a picture of one plant or another nearly every day.

So I decided to flip through all those photos and see if I could find a set that would do a better job of capturing the change in the light from all the smoke in the air. Turns out I had a couple I had taken of the same group of flowers before and after the fires started.

The first picture I took at 9:32 a.m. on August 8, before the lightning storm that triggered the current crop of fires. It’s not a great picture, and I normally wouldn’t have posted it on the blog for obvious reasons. But since I have, please notice how grey our concrete deck is. The Air Quality Index (AQI) that day was 42 (good).

[image error]Photo: Shala Howell

The next picture is from 11:32 a.m. on Sunday August 23. The AQI that day was 138 (unhealthy for sensitive groups, but an improvement over what we had been seeing). The photo shows the same set of flowers, albeit from a different angle. I did not use a filter on this photo, nor did I secretly take it at sunset. I took it at lunchtime, when you’d expect the day to be at its brightest. That warm orange tone in the formerly grey concrete is the result of the light being filtered through the smoke in the air.

[image error]Photo: Shala Howell



Bonus: The natural disaster season is still young. Prepare your family now.

I’ve spent much of the last week prepping our family to evacuate. Yes, we have kept a set of emergency bags packed since 2013, but our daughter keeps growing and supplies get old.

With wildfires just a dozen miles away, it seemed like a good time to recheck those bags. In case you would like to do the same, CAL FIRE’s Ready for Wildfire website is super helpful.

Be well. Stay safe. And if you are in the path of Hurricane Laura, evacuate now. Don’t wait. The National Weather Service doesn’t use words like “unsurvivable storm surge” lightly. See Ready.gov’s hurricane preparedness page here.

Thanks for reading Caterpickles.

Related Links:

“We just got here, Mommyo. Why are you packing all those bags?” (Caterpickles)CAL Fire’s Wildfire Preparedness website (Readyforwildfire.org)Department of Homeland Security’s Disaster Preparedness Website with instructions for prepping for hurricanes, wildfires, pandemics, extreme heat, and flooding (Ready.gov)

Wordless Wednesday: The best part of remote learning is getting to have lunch with your cat

The Thirteen-Year-Old’s first day of school was last Monday. It wasn’t without its share of excitement. The Sunday before school started Comcast had a major service outage in our area, which was still going strong on Sunday night.

My daughter was pretty calm about it though. When I asked over dinner what we would do if we still didn’t have Internet access in the morning, my daughter piped up. “Oh, I’ll just use my phone to create a hot spot and log in that way.”

Which is exactly what she did. Comcast didn’t fix its outage until 30 minutes after school started on Monday.

[image error]Canelo listens intently as The Thirteen-Year-Old tells him all about her first day back at school during her lunch break. (Photo: Shala Howell)

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Pandemic Diary 17 August 2020: My Shelter-in-Place Birthday

We have had a few birthdays since shelter-in-place began. Mine was especially fun.

There were signs

The Thirteen-Year-Old conspired with the cat to hang up birthday signs all over the house. This one, which she hung on the inside of my bedroom door the night before while I was sleeping, was my favorite.

[image error]Birthday sign has Canelo’s paw stamp of approval and reads: “Mrowww, mew meow!”, which the sign helpfully informs me means “Happy birthday! I love you!” in cat. (Photo: Shala Howell, Sign: The Thirteen-Year-Old Howell)

That sign is super cute, but what was really great was every single time I opened my bedroom door I found this guy waiting for me behind it.

[image error]My cat, Canelo, waiting for me outside the door with the orange sign. (Photo: Shala Howell)

I honestly don’t know how The Thirteen-Year-Old managed it. I suspect it involved a lot of hurried cat transport up and down stairs. And treats. Canelo has gained half a pound since last month’s weigh-in, so I can’t rule out treats. Still, it was clearly a birthday-only thing, because it hasn’t happened since.

There were surprise visitors

My sister and brother-in-law stopped by for a driveway chat. Since they normally live in Texas, this was kind of a big deal. Thanks, y’all.

[image error]My brother-in-law. (Photo: Shala Howell, Signs: Meg Brown)



There was an impromptu birthday experiment, because science

My brother Paul and I have been playing backgammon over video calls this summer. I’m surprised how well it works, actually. He sets up a board on his end, I set up my board on mine. We train our web cams on our respective boards and then mirror each other’s moves.

For folks who don’t play backgammon, the object of the game is to take all of your pieces safely off the board before your opponent. Doing so requires a mix of good luck (getting good rolls of the dice) and strategy in making the most of whatever dice roll you actually end up with.

Since our birthdays are close together, we decided to do a little experiment to see whether birthday luck is a factor in backgammon. To test it, we played a couple of games on his birthday, and a couple of games on mine.

Verdict: More testing required

Paul won both games on his birthday, but that’s par for the course for him. It’s hard to say whether birthday luck was a factor or not.

I won one of the two games on my birthday, but it was a gammon, which I don’t do very often. (When someone gammons, that means they’ve gotten all of their pieces safely off before their opponent manages to get even one of theirs off. Gammons are worth two points, instead of the usual one.)

Birthday luck may have been a factor for me. Not a very powerful one, though, because Paul promptly won the next game.

[image error]My birthday game in process. I played the beige checkers, Paul played the dark brown ones. (Photo: Shala Howell)



There was some crafting

Crafting then broke out for a while, while Michael took care of all of the things that keep our house running smoothly on a daily basis (kitchen cleaning, tweenage entertainment, cooking, cleaning up presents from the cat who may or may not have been struggling to digest all those treats, etc.).

As you know, one of my pandemic goals has been to use up all the random yarn I have lying around the house. I wanted an afternoon-sized project, so I made a bunny.

[image error]Bunny. (Crafter/Photo: Shala Howell, Pattern: Emma the Bunny by Kerry Lord, Kit: Toft)



And of course, there was food

Remember that bit about my husband cooking? While I was crafting, Michael made me a lovely birthday dinner, complete with a from-scratch chocolate cake, all of which was ravaged before I remembered to take a picture of it.

Fortunately, a day or so later, a friend of mine dropped off a belated, but delicious blueberry birthday cake, which I did remember to take a picture of.

[image error](Photo: Shala Howell, Cake: Kristen Lee)

Clearly, I do not have a future in Instagram Food Photography. Still the cake was perfect, even if my picture of it isn’t.

My birthday looked pretty different this year, but I still loved every minute of it

Drive-by visits, video calls, and having friends drop off food rather than staying to help me eat it, felt weird and wonderful at the same time. This year is so very different, but it has its good parts nonetheless.

Home. Food. Friends and Family. This year, those feel especially important and not at all guaranteed. I’m grateful for every phone call, video visit, email, text, drive-by visit, and birthday card from family and friends scattered across the nation. Thank you all. It’s always such a joy to hear from you, but it was especially meaningful this year.

I hope any shelter-in-place birthdays you have this year are also filled with lots of love and your favorite shelter-in-place type things, whatever they may be.

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What are we going to do about school?

Hello! Sorry for the radio silence. We have been hanging in there, and I hope you are too.

Like many of you, my energy lately has been focused on figuring out how to manage my daughter’s education during the 2020-2021 school year. I have learned the hard way that while I am happy to supplement my daughter’s education in various ways, I am not particularly suited to assuming full-time responsibility for it. I much prefer my daughter to be taught by trained teachers, so I have been following the recent debate around schools pretty intensely.

I’ve read countless communications issued by our governor, our town, school district superintendent, our county’s public health department, and my daughter’s school. I’ve listened to multiple interviews of public health experts, education officials, and politicians about what it will take to reopen our schools. I’ve taken every opportunity I can to talk with teachers, parents, caregivers, and kids to get a better sense of how they are thinking through the issue and what the school districts in their area are planning so far. And of course, I’ve been monitoring the news, the school-based angst playing out on Twitter, and participating in discussions in various parenting groups on Facebook.

In the process, I came across several helpful resources. I thought I’d share some of them with you today, in case you were also trying to figure out how your family will navigate the 2020-21 school year.

Note: This post is link-heavy, so instead of providing all the links in one clump at the end of the post like I normally do, I’m going to provide the links for each section at the end of that section.

But first, I’d like to acknowledge how much about this year feels like it’s simply out of our hands

There are as many opinions on when and how to reopen schools as there are people in the discussion. Frankly, that’s hardly surprising, as personal risk assessments are just that — personal. Every family is subject to a unique set of financial, emotional, educational, and social pressures, all of which play into that family’s requirements when it comes to getting the best possible education for their child.

Unfortunately, much about this school year feels like it’s simply out of our hands.

For example, here in California, Governor Newsom recently announced that no public or private schools in any of the counties on the state watch list would be allowed to open for in-person education until they had been off the watch list for at least two weeks. Our county is currently on the watch list, which is why our school district announced this week that all of its schools would only offer remote learning through mid-October. There’s nothing our family can do about that, except to do everything in our power to get local transmission rates down (wear our masks; stay home as much as possible, but especially when we’re sick; wash our hands obsessively; yada yada yada).

Other school districts across the nation are starting the year with at least some in-person classes, but it’s extremely possible that those schools (or segments of those schools) could be forced to close on short notice as COVID-19 cases pop up. At the very least, students in affected classes and cohorts may be required go into quarantine at very short notice.

We’re already seeing this in places like Cherokee County, Georgia, where a local elementary school was able to stay open for all of one day before a second grader tested positive for coronavirus. The second grader, their teacher, and classmates are all in quarantine now. My heart goes out to all of those parents who were counting on sending their kids to school, but now have a child at home whom they are anxiously monitoring for symptoms.

Another school in Hancock County, Indiana had to send part of their student body (and at least one teacher) into quarantine after parents sent a child to school who was later found to have tested positive for COVID-19. This case worries me a bit more. After all, although the child had been given a COVID-19 test, the parents sent that child to school before the test results came back. This is both anxiety-provoking and unsurprising, because our country uses school as a proxy for daytime childcare and because wait times for COVID-19 test results are unpredictable and can be quite long — anywhere from same-day to a couple of weeks.

Those parents may have needed their child back in school because they had no other reliable child care options. If that’s your situation, your child isn’t showing symptoms, you don’t know how long it will take to get the test results back, and you don’t know if your child was ever actually exposed to COVID-19, then it could easily seem like a reasonable choice to send your apparently healthy child back to school while you wait on the test results.

My point is, these parents won’t be the only parents in the U.S. to do the math about their situation and come up with that answer. In the context of widespread community illness, this sort of thing is both absolutely predictable and probably unpreventable without systemic societal changes.

After all, as Nancy Gibbs points out in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post on July 28, pulling kids out of school is simply not an option for many parents.

“But pulling kids out is a luxury many people, especially single parents, don’t have. And even those who have the margin to manage remote learning still have their nightmares. Let your kid fall even further behind in math … or risk losing some lung capacity. Dip into the depleted college fund to hire a private tutor? Whom should you trust in your parent pod, if you share supervision so that at least some of you can work on some days, praying the other families are as stringent about safety as you are? Do you include any families of essential workers, who need the support most? This is advanced math, layered with fear and shot through with questions of fairness.”

Nancy Gibbs, “Why parents now face an impossible choice“, Washington Post Opinion Page, July 28, 2020

For parents of college-age kids, all of this must feel even harder. After all, the decision about whether or not to go back to school in the fall may not even be theirs to make, as Melody Warnick points out in a recent essay published in the Washington Post. If the student in question is over 18 and the school being evaluated is an undergraduate or graduate institution, their kids may very well take the decision right out of their hands — if the university hasn’t done so first. Having a strong opinion about the most appropriate action but having to sit back while your child makes a different choice is one of the most excruciating aspects of parenting for me, even in non-pandemic times.

Related Links:

“Elementary student tests positive for COVID-19 in Cherokee County” (CBS46)“Georgia second grader tests positive for coronavirus after first day of school, forcing class into quarantine” (CBS News)“Students at Indiana school back on campus after classmate sent home with positive COVID-19 test” (CNN)COVID-19 has given parents a series of impossible choices, but sometimes they are not our choices to make (Washington Post)“Why parents now face an impossible choice” (Washington Post)



Wait, what is a parent pod?

In our area, and perhaps in yours, cohorts of parents dissatisfied with the quality of distance learning they experienced last spring are pooling resources to open pod schools. A typical pod, whether overseen by an independent educational institution or an ad-hoc collection of parents, consists of 3 to 10 children, usually in the same grade, who meet for several hours a day in-person to be taught by a hired teacher. The hope is that these pods will provide the benefits of in-person education, while reducing the risk of COVID-19 transmission and mitigating the emotional effects of social isolation. Done right, these pods could well be amazing, but they can also be expensive. A K-4 pod overseen by a teacher from the Hudson Lab School in Hastings, New York will cost $125,000 per year or $68,750 for a five-month commitment. For a five-child pod, that’s $13,750 – $25,000 per child.

In my school district at least, there is clearly concern that the formation of these pods will contribute to community spread. Although my local school district doesn’t have an official position on pods, in his latest parent town hall, our district superintendent pleaded with parents to ensure that their pods followed all of the same COVID-19 precautions that the schools themselves would have to upon reopening. Otherwise, he said, “You’ll just keep all of us out of school that much longer.”

“Advanced math, layered with fear and shot through with questions of fairness,” indeed.

Related Links:

1/3 of Parents in 3 States May Not Send Children to School Because of COVID-19 (Michigan Health Lab)$25,000 Pod Schools: How Well-to-do Children Will Weather the Pandemic (New York Times)



So what can we as parents do?

As smarter people have pointed out, we face an impossible choice. But I refuse to believe that we are helpless. At some point, my school is going to start offering in-person education. As a parent, I’m going to want to be able to evaluate their current plans based on available data about how the pandemic is doing in our area, guidelines for re-opening from trusted experts, and my own family situation. And if I don’t think my local school is doing enough to protect kids and their teachers, then I want to have some data to back that assertion up — not just fear.

In this section, I’ll tell you about some resources that can help you do exactly that.

1) How can parents tell how the pandemic doing in their area?

In the interest of bringing some data into the discussions around school re-openings, Harvard Global Health Institute released this COVID-19 dashboard, which tracks daily COVID risk levels for the U.S. at state and county levels, so you can see exactly how your county and/or state is currently doing. Here’s a screenshot of what that map looked like on August 9, 2020.

[image error]Harvard Global Health Institute online dashboard for August 9, 2020. As of August 9, 2020, there are more than 5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and more than 161,000 deaths. (Source: Harvard Global Health Institute)

Now, there are lots of dashboards you could use to monitor the pandemic, including the COVID-19 map maintained by Johns Hopkins.

As far as I know, however, Harvard’s site is the only one that has linked the color-coded risk levels in its dashboard to a specific set of reopening guidelines in its publication, “The Path to Zero and Schools: Achieving Pandemic Resilient Teaching and Learning Spaces.” There’s even a handy chart to show administrators and parents how the public health experts at Harvard would prioritize various services in higher risk areas. All of which will come in handy for parents trying to assess whether their local school is doing enough to try to protect students as schools reopen, given the conditions in their area.

Related Links:

The Path to Zero and Schools: Achieving Pandemic Resilient Teaching and Learning Spaces (Harvard Global Health Institute)How severe is the pandemic where you live? Browse our Covid Risk Levels Dashboard (Harvard Global Health Institute)



2) How can parents use the Harvard dashboard to tell whether their local school’s plans for reopening are potentially adequate?

I say “potentially adequate” here, because all things considered, there’s a lot about this disease we still don’t know. This is our first full school year in a world with COVID-19, and we’re all bound to get some things wrong. Experiences with reopening schools in Europe and Israel have already made it clear how important things like PPE (masks and shields), physical distancing, limits on crowd sizes, easy access to hand sanitizer and hand washing stations, testing, contact tracing, and adequate ventilation are for reopening schools safely.

The Harvard Global Health Institute’s guidelines for reopening schools open with this stark reminder:

“The single best policy to support school re-opening prior to the development of a vaccine or treatment is suppression of COVID to near zero case incidence. This can be achieved via universal mask wearing, rigorous social distancing, reduction or elimination of indoor congregant settings, and Testing, Tracing and Supported Isolation (TTSI).”

– Harvard Global Health Institute, “The Path to Zero and Schools: Achieving Pandemic Resilient Teaching and Learning Spaces”

However, because the public health experts at Harvard recognize that we must work with the pandemic we have, and not the one we wish we had, the guidelines also include a set of clear parameters to help local officials, parents, and students decide what to do about the schools in their area based on their community’s COVID risk level.

[image error]Chart linking the color-coded risk levels in Harvard Global Health Institute’s school reopening guidelines to the COVID case count in local areas. (Source: Harvard Global Health Institute)

At the time the school district announced it was pursuing a remote-only option, my county, Santa Clara County in California, was listed as an orange zone, with 12.4 new daily cases per 100,000 people. Hearing that my daughter would be spending a good chunk of her 8th grade year at home made me sad, until I checked Harvard’s dashboard, read the reopening guidelines for schools in orange zones (basically keep everything closed unless you can provide pandemic resilient learning spaces at scale), realized they would be extremely hard to implement at my daughter’s middle school, and saw what happened in districts that didn’t follow Harvard’s guidelines.

Every time I see a headline about another school closing, I’ve started looking up that district on the Harvard Global Health Institute’s dashboard. That elementary school in Georgia that had to close after one day? It’s located in Cherokee County, which at the time I wrote this blog post, was listed on the Harvard Global Health Institute as an orange zone, with a 7-day average of 21.9 new cases per day per 100,000 people. In hindsight, opening without a mask mandate in that situation seems super optimistic. Hopefully, either the administrators in Cherokee County will rethink that, or enough parents in that area will make enough noise to force them to rethink that.

That school in Hancock, Indiana where the parents accidentally exposed an entire class to COVID-19 by sending their child to school before their test results were in? As of August 6, Hancock County was a yellow zone on the Harvard scale, with a 7-day moving average of 9 new cases per day per 100,000 people. Even in yellow zones, apparently, accidental exposures can happen.

On the other hand, smaller schools that do follow the guidelines might be fine, assuming they can convince parents to keep kids who have been exposed to COVID-19 or who feel sick at home. That’s the bet First Baptist Academy of Dallas is taking. With small class sizes (10-15 students), a spacious campus that allows for adequate physical distancing, plexiglass shields on students’ desks, a mask mandate, and temperature checks at the door, school administrators certainly seem to be doing almost everything the Harvard Global Health Institute’s reopening plan would recommend.

Honestly, I hope the First Baptist Academy model works, not only because I don’t want anyone else to get sick, but also because it would give the nation a template for resuming face-to-face instruction even in the absence of controlled community spread and an effective vaccine. (As of August 9, Dallas County, where First Baptist Academy is located, was listed on the Harvard site as an orange zone with a 7-day average of 20.9 new cases per 100,000 people.)

Related Links:

“Elementary student tests positive for COVID-19 in Cherokee County” (CBS46)“Georgia second grader tests positive for coronavirus after first day of school, forcing class into quarantine” (CBS News)“Students at Indiana school back on campus after classmate sent home with positive COVID-19 test” (CNN)Some North Texas religious private schools prepare to reopen during pandemic (CBS News)



3) A pros and cons list to help you evaluate your family’s situation

Because our school district has announced that it plans to resume in-person education once the county manages to get off and stay off the state watchlist, at some point, we will likely have to decide for ourselves whether the precautions our local school is taking are good enough.

How can my family decide whether it’s better to risk sending The Thirteen-Year-Old for in-person learning or to keep her at home for the rest of the year, even if that means taking another stab at Mommyo Homeschool?

Enter my favorite decision-making tool: The pros and cons list.

Jessica Lahey, veteran educator, and her husband Tim Lahey, an infectious disease doctor, recently published an article in the Washington Post summarizing the various issues churning through educators and parents’ mind as they weigh how to continue their children’s education this fall. After surveying the complex web of social, emotional, financial, and educational roles school plays in American society, the Laheys offer a checklist to help parents balance those factors against the reality of the pandemic in their area. As Tim Lahey pointed out in his Twitter thread summarizing the article, there is no one size fits all answer for families.

“Every family is different. We need to respect each other’s decisions.”

Tim Lahey, @TimLaheyMD, Twitter, 6:48 a.m. August 5, 2020

Their hope is that families will be able to use their pros and cons checklist in conjunction with local public health guidance in order to make the best possible decision for their unique situation. They also urge parents to pressure their local school boards and administrators to follow the science and implement measures proven to mitigate the risk of COVID-19 transmission in in-person education settings.

[image error]Back-to-school checklist from Jessica and Tim Lahey. Find the original on Twitter here.

In our case, if we aren’t happy with the school’s plans, we may well decide to keep our daughter at home. The Thirteen-Year-Old is responding well to remote learning so far and we are able to support her continued education from home. Keeping our daughter home would be an inconvenience for us and have real consequences for my personal productivity, but it would also make in-person education that much safer for my neighbors who really don’t have any other option.

Related Links:

Tim Lahey’s August 5, 2020 Twitter ThreadBack to School in a Pandemic (Washington Post, paywall, sadly)



Other resources for thinking through this

This post is already pretty long, so I’ll just quickly tell you about two more resources that helped shape my thinking about this.

Podcast: In the Bubble with Andy Slavitt



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Andy Slavitt, who served as Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from 2015 to January 2017, has launched a podcast with his son Zach to cover various aspects of living in a pandemic. Each week on their In the Bubble podcast, Andy and his son interview scientists, cultural icons, and political leaders in an effort to get critical information about this pandemic out to the public in real-time.

Their June 10 episode, “Back to School“, was fairly typical. In it, Slavitt interviews former Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan; Sonal Gerten, a parent of two public school kids; and his own son, Zach, who will be a freshman in college this fall. Other episodes have assessed what we know about treatment options, progress on a vaccine, whether Americans can still trust the CDC, and the role of tech companies in a pandemic.

Enlightening, fact-filled, and ultimately hopeful, this podcast has been a lifeline for me these past few weeks.

YouTube interview: Sal Khan interviews Dr. Anthony Fauci

On Friday, July 24, Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci about the prospects for a vaccine and reopening schools this fall as part of his ongoing HomeRoom with Sal YouTube series. Part of the vaccine conversation directly addresses the question of whether we can trust the science behind a vaccine developed relatively quickly under such stressful conditions. It’s worth a listen, in my opinion, for that discussion alone.

Note: Although the conversation is free to watch for the public, since Khan Academy is a non-profit education company whose resources have been taxed by overwhelming demand during this time of worldwide school closures, there is a very brief fundraising pitch at the beginning of the interview.

Related Links:

In the Bubble with Andy Slavitt (Podcast)HomeRoom with Sal: Interview with Dr. Fauci (YouTube)



How about you?

Have you found any real-time, trustworthy sources for information about navigating this pandemic? Leave a comment and let me know.

Until we chat again, be well, wash your hands, practice physical distancing, and wear a mask whenever you are out and about or with people who aren’t part of your own household. And if you live in a yellow, orange, or red zone, do your fellow parents a solid, and stay home as much as you can so that we can fully reopen our schools (and local economies) as quickly and as safely as possible.

Thanks.

Garden Update: A too-early sunflower harvest

That giant sunflower I posted about a couple of weeks ago has lost all its flower petals and is starting to look a little ratty, so I decided to try harvesting some seeds this morning.

That giant stalk had seven flowers on it. To my inexperienced eye, the top five seemed like they might be ready for harvest, so I snipped them off and left the bottom two in place.

Whoops.

After scraping off the flower fuzz covering the seeds, I discovered that sadly I have harvested them too early. While there are some lovely plump black seeds there, there are also a lot of paler seeds that frankly could have used some more time. Oh well.

[image error]I’m pretty sure I harvested these too early, but I’m going to hang them for a while so I can see what happens when they dry out. (Photo: Shala Howell)

File that away as a lesson for next year. It’s not enough to simply wait for the petals to wilt and fall off. I also need to wait for the leaves and stalk around the flower heads to turn yellow.

Fortunately I have two heads still on the plant to practice patience with.

In the meantime, what can I do with my too-early sunflower harvest?

My basic gardening strategy this year is to try growing a lot of different things, make a ton of mistakes while doing it, and do a better job next year. When it comes to sunflowers, that means taking my too-early harvest and try drying it anyway to see what happens.

So, I’ve placed my crop of sunflowers in a paper bag, and have hung them upside down to dry out for a few weeks. Sometime in early August, I’ll take them out of the bag and pry the seeds off the flower heads to see what I’ve got. Hopefully there will be enough seeds in good condition to store some to plant next year. The rest I’ll feed to the birds (and squirrels) this winter. That is, if they will eat them.

Why not roast them for us to eat?

The Thirteen-Year-Old is lobbying hard for me to learn how to roast at least some of them. I’m resisting though, because this sunflower grew out of a random mix of “Save the bees” flower seeds. The seed packet just says “Sunflower”, so I don’t actually know if the sunflower I grew is one of the edible kinds. This article seems to imply that not all sunflowers produce edible seeds, and I’m a little hesitant to experiment on my family like that.

Maybe it would be fine. But since I’ve never grown sunflowers before and know almost nothing about them, it seems safest to just give the fruits of my sunflower garden, such as they are, to the birds and squirrels. Next year I’ll be more deliberate about planting an edible variety and wait to harvest the seeds until later in the summer.

How about you?

How does your garden grow?

Related Links:

More Wordless Wednesdays on Caterpickles When and how to harvest sunflower seeds (YouTube)Sunflowers: How to plant, grow, and care for sunflowers (The Old Farmer’s Almanac)How to grow sunflowers for seeds (Practical Self-Reliance)