Today (January 7 2022), Montgomery County Public Schools announced a modification to the COVID-19 response plan that puts the lives of staff, students, and families in even greater danger from the coronavirus than we already were.

Previously, as established on January 3, there was a green/yellow/red system for school closure. A school with 5% or more staff and students infected would be in the red, and would transition to virtual learning. This was already a late response--at the start of winter break, my school alone had reported 50 cases in the past week, and there were already schools in the red. This led to the immediate closure of 11 schools.

Today, they made a release that said that being in the red would no longer justify school closure. They justified this with the statement, "The state of Maryland does not currently recommend any automatic trigger or threshold for the suspension of in-person learning." This came two days after the announcement that the majority of Montgomery County had a greater than 5% positive rate in the past two weeks--with only 8 out of 209 schools in the green.

Schools will remain open, now, with one in twenty staff/students confirmed positive with the coronavirus in the past fourteen days.

Their justification was only the state of Maryland not requiring closures--not any medical guidance, and clearly not consideration of the safety of people in Montgomery County.

As we battle the new, far more infectious and far more dangerous omicron variant, this shift away from closure puts the health and lives of the 1 million citizens of Montgomery County endangered.

Montgomery County's approach to COVID-19 sends a clear message. They are willing to risk the lives of disabled students, of young students who cannot be fully vaccinated, of high risk MoCo families, and they don't need any true justification to do it.

At a point in this pandemic where eleven thousand of Marylanders die of coronavirus by the day, Montgomery county is more willing to close for a half inch of snow than a pandemic to protect the lives of the district's children.

We demand action by the MoCo BOE to return to the color coded system, or something better. We demand that they take this pandemic seriously, and protect our students and our familiess.

We deserve better; we deserve action.