With the start of another school year at Connersville high school the poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic by the school is once again brought to the limelight. With the current Delta variant already causing issues with the spread of the virus, likely creating more of an issue than what was around last year, how does the school prepare to protect the health and safety of students and their family from permanent lung damage that'll persist throughout their entire life or possibly even death? Especially when the CDC gave suggestions that schools require masks regardless of vaccination status? 

Opening up entirely in person

Not requiring teachers to sanitize desks or rooms

Not requiring masks for anyone

No attempts at social distancing students

Overall disregard for the issue except for acknowledging it and nothing else.

 It took a school board meeting for them to decide on requiring masks some of the time, and that was after the county's COVID-19 numbers had exceeded the new cases gained at the peak of last year while numbers are still rising

The school has gone through the epidemic once before last year, and it seems they've learned nothing from that fiasco, or at least that's what their actions are conveying. Actions do speak louder than words after all. Last year's school year was a testament to the fact that in an environment so densely populated by people such as a high school, even with masks (not even discussing the fact mask enforcement was very lax and a large chunk of students wore masks wrong, wore poor masks, or both) and poor attempts at social distancing, the virus would likely spread incredibly fast. Our COVID numbers at the time are undeniable proof of that. The virus spread drastically, and only went down when overall numbers nationally went down, but almost magically once May comes around and school is out, our numbers drop massively, even to the extent of some days being completely COVID free in terms of new cases across the summer. However as soon as school started up again around August, numbers began to rise, and fast enough our numbers look like the Grand Canyon on a chart. This is far from a coincidence, anyone with a lick of knowledge when it comes to data analysis can tell you that. The only reason the school would continue to be held open, is almost entirely for money coming from sports events and whatnot. 

When the school board was given a chance to take a look at their current COVID-19 numbers, as well as the trends in last year's cases, they chose to take the irresponsible option and at most very lightly enforce masks only some of the time. Sure they've agreed to go to a hybrid learning schedule and even fully online at 10 and 20 perfect infection rates respectively, but there are 1000 students at the high school, not even including staff. 10% is going to be 100 people with permanent lung damage done, giving them issues with breathing the entire rest of their life. Same goes with 20% and 200 people. Keep in mind that is only people who have been infected long enough to show a noticable amount of symptoms. The percentage of people infected can be anywhere from around 2% to 80%, so even when taking a middle of the road number like 40%, by time the school goes to full online with the current policy, the numbers realistically will be more along the lines of around 300 people in a very rough estimate. When numbers hit those heights, at least one student will have died unnecessarily, and that will be an unimaginable tragedy that could've been fully prevented. 

Something similar to this petition was done last year and it's success was questionable, but this year it will be handled much more seriously on our end that we failed to do last time around. 

Should this petition get enough signatures, somewhere around the range of 500 so that it's shown over half the school's students' worth of people don't wish to have their safety, and the safety of the people they live with, risked daily, it will be brought up to the school board directly. Signing will also in a way be telling the school you don't appreciate their disregard for your safety for the sake of money

(Sources for claims made in the article: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249090 ,  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/indiana-covid-cases.html