BERKELEY (KPIX) – With many teachers and their unions resisting the call to reopen schools, the issue hit a political stalemate and a rally in Berkeley on Saturday sparked the passion on both sides.
Parents, students and medical professionals gathered in a park near Berkeley High on Saturday morning to discuss the health effects of not being in school.
“We see increasing rates of depression, anxiety, social isolation, children falling further and further behind academically and socially,” Dr. Dan Drozd, an infectious disease physician, told the assembled crowd.
Even the CDC is now saying that, with adequate masking and social detachment, the risk of infection for teachers and students can be outweighed by the harm caused by keeping them at home.
“There is no evidence that opening schools with these precautions increases transmission in the community and the transmission rate in schools is extremely low,” said Dr. Shelene Stine, a doctor at East Bay Hospital. “We have to think about the safety of our teachers and children from both perspectives.”
But not everyone was willing to hear that.
“You don’t love your teachers! … We have had enough of these people! ” shouted Berkeley High calculus professor, Masha Albrecht, who interrupted the demonstration, saying that she did not feel safe to return to the classroom, regardless of what medical professionals were saying.
“I’m especially upset with the doctors who are saying, ‘listen to science’ as if we can’t read science,” she said. “I am a mathematician, I can read statistical studies. No one has shared anything with me that convinces me that it is safe to go back to that school with a lot of children. “
This brought a response from Berkeley High Senior Noa Teiblum.
“They are specialists in infectious diseases!” she said. “I mean, who are you to think that you have more say in the decision than is safe or not than the infectious disease specialists at CDC? It’s frustrating!”
Both sides are frustrated and neither seems to trust what the other is saying. It is opening a division between parents and teachers that may continue to exist after the virus is contained.