ODALIS SANTANA EXPLAINS WHY RETURNING TO SCHOOL IS SO HARD

 This is from ABC news:

After her mother's death in April from COVID-19, Odalis Santana changed her voicemail message.

"Thank you all for the outpouring of love that you have given my family during this difficult time. I know that my mother would appreciate it," Santana's voice says on the tape. It's now August, but her fresh grief from the spring, captured on the recording, cuts through. "Thank you all for your texts, your messages, your emails. We really appreciate it. Our family really appreciates it."

Santana, 46, works as a universal literacy coach at an elementary school in the Bronx, where she supports teachers with young students who are struggling with reading.

She recalled her last days in the classroom in mid-March. Santana had asked her mother, Ana, to stay with her because of the pandemic. It wasn't an unusual request. Her mother often helped Santana, a single mother, with childcare, and Santana didn't want to leave her mother, who lived in public housing for seniors, alone. Besides, in addition to being mother and daughter, the pair were close friends -- "twins," Santana said.

On April 1, they got tested together for COVID-19. The tests came back positive. Santana's two children and her brother tested positive, as well. Santana was asymptomatic, but within days, Ana, who was struggling to breathe, was hospitalized. In the early hours of the morning of April 10, Santana received a phone call. Her mother's heart had stopped.

"The last time I saw her was when I sent her to the hospital by herself," said Santana, who used to talk to her mother on the phone multiple times each day. "I never got to say goodbye."

While Santana will never know whether she picked up the virus at school, she thinks back on the days when New York City restaurants and bars were shuttered, but teachers were still going into the classroom, regretfully.

"I’m just angry that we were told to go back to work without knowing what was happening," she said.

She doesn't blame the principal at her school, who she says, was "clueless, just like we were," about the pandemic back in March. But she's frustrated that Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza are pushing to reopen schools in person in September.

As the fall approaches, the issue of whether to reopen New York City schools, which were closed on March 16, to in-person learning has been hotly contested.

Futher down:

New York's case positivity rate (the rate of positive cases to total tests) has been consistently below 1% in recent weeks, an indication that the virus is currently under control.

But those statistics belie the horror witnessed by educators and students last spring, particularly in black and Latino neighborhoods, when more than 20,000 residents died of the virus. New York City schools weren't spared the devastation. As of June, 79 department of education employees, 31 of them teachers, had died of COVID-19, according to the department.

Sorry for your loss, Odalis. My wife lost her grandmother from COVID-19 in April. This is a tragic time in our history.

If you can't understand why so many UFTers are reluctant to go back to school buildings, you have to try to remember what UFTers have been through already. Nobody trusts the DOE or the city to keep staff and students safe.