I am a student at Oregon State University. I am afraid to go back to school.

My sister is a middle school teacher, she is afraid to go back to work.

My other sister has cancer, she is afraid to go to a family gathering.

I work in a college town, my coworkers are afraid to start their shifts.

If I can say this about the people I know, a can guarantee you the rest of the state is afraid in one way or another. 

It shouldn't be a battle between school districts, teachers, students, and parents to decide if their child should go to school or not. It's too late for that. Our state needs to decide what to do for the students in the state of Oregon. 

If it was up to me, I would have shut down the idea of opening schools this fall term and continue online learning. The idea of keeping our students safe and healthy should be our top priority. I can understand that distance learning is hard for everyone, but a page on the schools website dedicated to the students and staff lost to covid would be much harder. If you can't trust your police officers to wear masks after the state mandated it, how can you expect your students.

It shouldn't be a question whether or not to open schools. It's a financial mistake, it's a health concern, and it puts more than just the students at risk.

If you can't supply appropriate salaries for your teachers, or appropriate funding for the schools in a regular year, how do you expect to supply the appropriate cleaning supplies for the school, the extra staff to keep classroom sizes smaller, more desks, more computers for each student to have their own, more classrooms built, more janitorial staff to even the work load, face masks to be supplied to students and staff, hiring more bus drivers and buying more busses to keep children one student to a seat or less, and more that I'm sure you already know. The reality is, schools can't afford this. Private or public, for every grade, for every school. 

Let's just face it, kids are gross. As someone who has worked in a daycare with children a year old to thirteen years old and having family members who teach in public schools, I can say that kids are 'super spreaders'. From kindergarten all the way up until their final year of college, they're all gross.

Elementary kids drool, bite, wiggle their teeth and touch the monkey bars, cry, spit, fall and cut their knee then get blood all over the place.

Middle schoolers sweat, they don't wash their hands, they want to kiss their new secret school girlfriend, they still drool and bite and cry, and on the lucky occasion, you'll get someone who still wets themselves.

High schoolers, they date everyone, they kiss, hold hands, they're in locker rooms, doing more hand to hand contact sports, sharing equipment, sharing computers, sharing desks. Some high schoolers will also be lucky enough to find themselves a puff bar, vape pen, cigarette, or something along those lines, and share it with all of their friends. 

College students are the same, sharing food, water bottles, vape pens, beer bottles, and then they're going to house parties with way too many people at them. They all live in cramped dorms, houses, and apartments with each other because no one can afford to live on their own with living costing so much in cities like Portland, Corvallis, and Eugene. You'll be lucky to have your own printer, most students use the university printers where they are free use to students with no one cleaning them in between uses. And what about university gyms? Hardly any cleaning, hard to regulate mask wearing, and constant sharing of equipment which definitely is covered in someone else's sweat. 

Long story short, there is no escape from the spread in schools. You can try to make students wear masks, but there will always be a student who won't for a multitude of reasons. 

By putting the students at risk for infection, you're also indirectly putting the rest of the state at risk as well. Think about contact spreading. You send your child to school, they come in contact with someone who has covid. While they may be asymptomatic, they can still carry the virus as easily as anyone else. And when they come home, they can spread that to you and the rest of your family. You will go to work the next morning, get the rest of your coworkers sick, they will go home and get their children sick, and it's just a never ending cycle. This will do more even more harm to the economy. Business will have to shut down because their staff is getting sick at an exponential rate, companies will have to stop progress because most of the staff is sick and dying. 

Look at what happens to the people who go to beach parties or social events. There's always a number of positive cases. Then they go home to their families and their families get sick. Now imagine that beach party every Monday through Friday, nine months out of the year. If we're we're advised not to go to social gatherings of more than five people, then why should we be forced to be in a classroom with twenty to fifty other students.

I hope I've made some valid points for you to sign this petition. I hope that our state has the right mind to keep schools online for at least this fall term, and I hope that if our state governor reads this, she will suspended in person learning to prevent a major outbreak in the state of Oregon.