Old people telling young people, “Don’t go out and party” is the new Abnormal.
From sex, drugs and rock n’ roll to shelter-in-place, in school districts across America, the new regulations being imposed on young people by school administrators and politicians are: “Don’t go out and party with friends – you’ll either get COVID-19 and die from it or you’ll give it to someone else who will.”
But as Glenn Koocher, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, told the Boston Globe last week,“Schools don’t have the authority to punish or impose penalties for what kids do on their own time.”
“How long are we asking kids not to go to parties for?” Samuel Scarpino, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University, asked the paper. “Are we saying it’s a month, or six months, or a year? How on earth are you supposed to get buy-in from individuals – asking them to do something hard – when they’re completely in the dark about… how long they need to do it for?”
The schools in Massachusetts also have been dealing with how to resume classes while mitigating certain risk factors. In Attleboro High School, there are 28 students who have been forced to quarantine for two weeks because a classmate who tested positive for the virus was sent to school.
“It was a reckless action to send a child – a teenager – to a school who was Covid-positive,” Paul Heroux, the city’s mayor, told WHDH. “It was really poor judgment. If you know that your child has coronavirus, is covid-positive, you should not send your child to school under any circumstances.”
Andrew Keough, Superintendent of MA’s Dover Sherborn Regional School District, told the Globe that a high school turned to remote learning after it was revealed there was a house party that involved some of the school’s students.
“What likely happened is that adults chose to turn a blind eye, pretending that what the kids were up to was ‘no big deal’ and simply a case of kids being kids, or even worse, they set their kids loose without any inkling of what they would be up to that evening,” he wrote to parents.
TREND FORECAST: A great divide will occur between young people who are not afraid of the virus or of transmitting it to others who want to party and those who take seriously all of the COVID Precautions imposed on them by educators and the political system.
Beyond the friction between them that will resonate in and out the school room, the cultural divide will create the ground work for new political movements as well as new genres in all forms of art… music, theatre, books, paintings, etc.
