The reopening of schools w/o appropriate safeguards is potentially dangerous wishful thinking.

It would reverse the progress we've made to date in keeping the spread down. Contact tracing becomes impossible in a wildfire spread. There's NO containment strategy that can get that genie back in the bottle once let wildly loose in the world.

Classrooms (indoors) are metaphorical petri dishes for Covid-19 festering.

UConn holds the potential to devastate and overwhelm the resources of the Mansfield/Storrs host community. Eastern holds the same threat next town over. College students are "less inclined" to physically distance in social settings (outside the classroom dictation), are extremely mobile, and will permeate the host community. 

(Please review the op-ed concerning this topic at: University Towns Poised to become next Coronavirus epicenters)

Any grade school teacher, also, will inform that their level of control over students is ... let's just suggest "less than absolute", and that puts their lives, as well as all other lives in crossfire of the vectors of disease spread, in unnecessary jeopardy. Their vectors leads directly into homes. Ever catch a bug your child caught at school? That's the risk with this also.

It is to be reminded that with everything accomplished so far, the success, in part, occurred because students were REMOVED from the ability to create volumes of random tangential vectors. I can only imagine the added difficulties inherent in containment should those steps not have been wisely taken. So, why, all of a sudden, is now so different from then?

We are still just not ready for it, and our community faces a double forked threat, so alternatives must be found that don't ... frankly, lead to the unnecessary demise of others.

(Please read the attached photo for a letter drafted by the Richmond, VA teacher's union regarding reopening of their schools in the fall.)

Alternative mechanisms need to be employed that reduce the very factors we already are completely aware contribute to the spread of the pandemic.

I would appreciate if our town council drafted a letter to forward to the governor's office advising a slow and careful walk toward ANY reopening of indoor learning until the time and safe conditions are deemed right for all stakeholders, and offer to open a direct dialogue with the Governor’s office moderating a discussion between UCONN officials and the Mansfield Town Council. It is paramount that the host community be involved in the University's decision making and virus monitoring processes.

Indoor learning, at all levels, is an environment of spread on the level of close exercising in a gym. Create the conditions, and the virus will blossom in those conditions. It is folly to believe it won’t.

Reopening must be delayed (or alternate means established that do not include indoor proximity of any kind) until the risk of infection spread can be appropriately safely managed. Until there is either a vaccine or successful curative therapies, we're just not out these woods ... yet.