Clay Travis: All Kids Need To Be Back in School

It is time to get back to normalcy.

In Tennessee, schools should be open up in less a month. They still haven’t officially said what schooling will look like here but make no mistake: they should be back in school.

If you have a child who is young — under 15 years old — your child is more likely to die of the flu 20-1 than they are of the coronavirus.

I have three kids. I love them more than anything in the world. I have a 12-year-old, a 9-year-old, I have a 5-year-old.

They need desperately to be back in school because we rarely, if ever, shut down schools for the flu for more than a day or two — even when there are massive outbreaks.

Your kids and my kids are 20 times as likely to die from the flu as they are from the coronavirus.

My kids right now are at sports day camps at a private school in Nashville. 

They are at sports camp with tons of other kids playing football, basketball, baseball — a bunch of different sports.

It is imperative that kids are back in school in the fall. They have been out since early March and now we are seeing a more substantial gap between the privileged and the underprivileged.

My kids are going to be fine. They have access to the Internet, access to parents who are educated, they have plenty of food, support, and they have a healthy and safe place to live.

That’s not the case for a huge percentage of kids out there.  Underprivileged kids need school vastly more than privileged kids do.

If you believe in equality and the importance of everyone being well-educated, think about this: many young kids are never going to catch-up if they miss two years of school.  And it’s not the same if you sit in front of a computer.

What if teachers get the virus from the kids?

Kids don’t get this disease very often. They also rarely spread it to adults. Most of the time, it is an adult to kid transmission inside of homes. So getting kids out of their homes actually may very well work in favor of limiting the overall spread of the virus.

The decision to shut down schools was not a good one in retrospect. People thought this was like the 1918 flu and that all different ages were equally susceptible to the virus.

Not true. The reality is kids are much less susceptible to the virus.

If you are a teacher and you don’t want to teach because you are too afraid to do it, good for you. Make your own choice. But you shouldn’t get paid.

Life requires risk. Teachers have been paid for months now — most of them to not do anything.

Everyone else has been taking pay cuts like crazy.  Maybe I’ve missed it but I haven’t seen teachers taking pay cuts even though they didn’t work in April, May, and June.

If you are a teacher and you are afraid of going back to work, then stay home but you aren’t going to get paid. That’s life.

I don’t know why politicians can’t just come out and say this.

Also, if you are a parent and you are terrified of the coronavirus and you don’t want your kids to go to school, they don’t have to.

Keep them at home and you can home-school them. You can sit them in front of a computer and you can think your kids are getting as good of an education that way.

This needs to be a primary focus regardless of state or city. They need to go five days a week for full days and they need to start at the beginning of the school season.

This is not complicated, it’s not a difficult decision, it is an easy decision.

My family may relocate in the fall if Tennessee doesn’t have in-person schooling. We will go to Florida thanks to Gov Ron DeSantis who announced that K-12 will all be in session.

We would move down to the beach house in the fall.

Whether you like Donald Trump or not, all kids need to be back in school. Listen to the doctors: 67,000 pediatricians said kids need to go back.

It’s not complicated, it’s not difficult. The data all pushes in one direction and that is your kids, my kids, all kids need to be back in school.

It is not a Republican issue, it is not a Democrat issue, it’s not an Independent issue. There is no factual reason why kids shouldn’t be back in school this fall.

I’m fired up about it because I’m tired of stupidity and non-data making decisions.

I only care about three things in this world: the facts, the facts, and the facts.

If you aren’t willing to take a chance, then keep your kids home. Keep your kids at home, wrap them in bubble wrap, never them let actually go outside again, and curl up in the fetal position. That’s your right.

Wrap your kids in bubble wrap but you better hope that bubble wrap wasn’t made in China.

Remember, the vaccine may not make any difference at all. Some people have bought into an illusion.

We shut down this country to try to stop overloading hospitals. It didn’t happen. Hospitals didn’t get overloaded.

You bought into a lie. There was never a decision to stay home forever and root for a vaccine that may or may not end up working.

I hope we get a vaccine. I wish we were all immortal.  But dammit, it is time to start living your life.

Flatten the curve didn’t mean never leave your house again.

Go open schools. This isn’t difficult.