Marcia J & Chelsea W

COVID-19 has impacted America severely from the beginning of its appearance. The entire country shut down, affecting businesses, jobs, schools, and everyday life activities. Lives across the globe haven't been the same due to this pandemic. In order to ensure and promote the health of all, we've adopted health measures and precautions such as self-quarantining, social distancing, curfews, and wearing masks when we must go out for necessities. Although we've adopted these measures, the cases of Coronavirus have only risen, with America having over 2 million cases. Florida specifically amasses more and more cases every single day. As students, we keep ourselves informed on this pandemic, and we anxiously wait to hear about reopening plans for school. As patient and understanding as we are, we do not understand why DeSantis is promoting the rush of reopening schools when the cases of COVID-19 are only rising. He made a statement on how Florida's economy depends upon schools reopening and that he has a plan that will have schools reopen in August at "full capacity." This statement didn't settle with us well at all, because it revealed that he's valuing money more than health. He's made conferences and speeches focusing on how certain age groups have not died from the Coronavirus. He fixates his speeches on age and how people within certain age groups have been affected by the virus. We constantly wonder whether or not he takes into accountability of the teachers, who are not within our age group and are scientifically proven to be more prone to succumbing to the disease. There have been talks of "hybrid learning," where students would go to school for 2 days, and then spend 3 days at home doing online learning. Not only will this plan be ineffective, but it will only cause more confusion and inconsistencies within students learning. Ultimately, we find it most advantageous to continue online learning, as the evidence and data we have thus far on this pandemic only supports that it would be unwise to fully reopen schools in August. We do not see this as a vacation, we see it as preserving our health. Contrary to the common belief that we are sitting at home doing nothing, many of us are doing online classes, working on summer projects, and improving ourselves day by day. Our health is more important than the strains that this pandemic is putting on the economy. You can always make money back, but you can never gain a life back.