Re-Opening Maryland and School Decisions Still Looming

Beginning a return to normalcy, our 14 year-old's dance studio finally re-opened for classes this week. One measure that is being implemented is a mask mandate for the dancers, even during class. I know that the studio is operating under government restrictions and have no criticism for their efforts. But, in addition to the masks, the classes are, supposedly, being conducted with the students engaged in social distancing. Which seems to me, at least, to make dance a little less beautiful. What's next? Football with social distancing? And isn't it overkill to have both masks and require social distancing?

The next question is what will happen with the local public schools? It is July and the schools here fought the governor to get the right to open before Labor Day, so they have less than seven weeks to go.

President Trump is leading the charge to return our children back to school and was at today's "National Dialogue on Safely Reopening America's Schools."- https://youtu.be/CQG835FyulE. I fear that this will only intensify the Democratic media propaganda to keep schools closed. I'm sorry to say that I do believe that the teachers unions and school boards would gladly sacrifice another year of learning for these children if doing so will result in a Democrat’s victory in November.

Despite scientific evidence to the contrary that closed schools create long term damage to students:

“The Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Pe­diatrics has urged pol­icy mak­ers to pri­or­i­tize re­open­ing schools, cit­ing the de­vel­op­men­tal and health ben­e­fits to chil­dren of at­tend­ing class in-per­son and re­ceiv­ing reg­u­lar school meals. Pre­lim­i­nary re­search sug­gests that low-in­come and mi­nor­ity chil­dren with less ac­cess to tech­nol­ogy will have greater learn­ing loss than other chil­dren un­der re­mote learn­ing.” WSJ 7/7/20