Assisted Play Care (Schools)

Dear Schools: stop fussing about EDUCATING the kids. Education is a nice auxiliary benefit to schooling—but the really essential thing is CHILD CARE. That is what you must focus on now, in what our esteemed and compassionate leaders call “these difficult times.” Child care is what both the president and many parents REALLY want. So just get busy and convert those classrooms to child-care isolation wards (plastic cubicles?) for about ten socially-distanced internees per room. Staff members formerly known as “teachers” will become fully PPE’d nurse/monitors who move about their wards checking to see that sanitation measures are respected and that “every child succeeds” in playing video games and watching cartoons on school-provided computers or i-pads. 

When necessary, a student internee may be excused to go to the restroom, accompanied by a junior teacher/nurse/ monitor to ensure that peeing and pooping and hand-washing are accomplished according to CDC guidelines. Other, more senior (i.e., old and at-risk) teacher/nurse/monitors will be equipped with walkie-talkies and will patrol halls and public areas to ensure that no one is using them and that absolutely nothing is going on anywhere. About twice a day, a KP teacher, fully PPE’d, of course, will push a little cart from ward to ward, offering internees water, jello cups and cellophane-sealed Velveeta sandwiches.

Interestingly, the sole testing procedure occurring in these new “assisted play centers” will be for Covid-19, but only if a teacher/monitor has observed that an internee has symptoms and only if prior permission has been obtained from a parent or guardian. Thus, the few remaining teachers who have not been assigned ward duties, bathroom duties, patrol duties, or KP duties will be occupied in plastic cubicles filling out necessary forms and shredding outdated legal documents. All teacher/nurse/babysitters will therefore be fully employed, though not in teaching, of course. Nevertheless, every teacher will be required to possess an official teaching credential, as will any substitute hired to replace a regular teacher who is sick, hospitalized or dying of Covid-19. Obviously, this is to ensure a continuity of competent care for our precious children “in these difficult times.”