- Hannah Lebovits, her husband, and their two young children live in a Texas county that has not been as affected by COVID-19 as neighboring Dallas has been.
- After months of juggling childcare with full-time work from home, they found a summer camp that instituted a long list of safety precautions before opening, including masks, social distancing, not sharing food, etc. .
- These safety precautions matched the list that the school district is in the process of implementing.
- Lebovits enrolled his children in the camp, and within days, a COVID-19 outbreak, several children and teachers tested positive, and the camp was closed.
- “This is what the school will look like too. And it’s scary,” he wrote in a now viral tweet.
- Lebovits tells Business Insider the details of his decision, the outbreak, and how he taught him not to send his children to school in the fall.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
When I tweeted about the closure of my children’s day camp in the Dallas suburbs last week, I was hoping that some people would see it and think about what our lives would be like if schools tried to open this fall. I wasn’t expecting nearly 80,000 likes and countless retweets. But the story struck a chord. Because it is exactly what every parent in this country is concerned about.
In late June, after having our children home for almost four months and moving across the country in the midst of a global pandemic, we decided to put our two young children in day camp. They should be out Monday through Friday from 9:00 am to 3:45 pm
Although we had seen a rapid increase in numbers in neighboring Dallas County, in our area, Collin County, the cases, and certainly the death numbers, have been much lower and the camp was located even far from the father. The camp also implemented numerous safety precautions, including the use of masks, daily temperature controls, social distancing of age groups, not sharing food or materials, the list continued.
They seemed like the same precautions our schools have e-mailed us about. So, we make the decision. We prepare our children by socially isolating and practicing wearing masks at home. Then we send them to camp.
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Less than two weeks later, a boy at the camp was sent home sick with a fever and headache and tested positive for COVID-19. In the next few days, other children and counselors also tested positive. The camp closed immediately.
The whole situation really shook us.
My husband and I are scared for our children and have been monitoring ourselves. But we also have no idea what we will do about school this fall.
For the first time, we are taking seriously the idea of fully educating our 6 and 3 year olds at home. We both have jobs, so we don’t know if that’s feasible. But we are so concerned about the safety of our children and ourselves that we have to consider it.
After tweeting about my experience, I received hundreds of responses and direct messages from people concerned about exactly the scenario I described. Several told me that they had decided not to send their children, even when they could, for fear of an outbreak. Others noted that they send their children to camp or daycare, but they are afraid every day. Still others sent in to tell me they were on the fence about it and that my tweet helped them decide.
But some people did not seem to appreciate the difficult decision that many parents have to make.
Several comments expressed disbelief that we even considered sending our children. Others claimed that because kids like ours were out now, that’s why schools will have a hard time in the fall.
I think those claims are incredibly inaccurate and, frankly, very unfair.
Many of us who have seen the number of cases increase across the country understand that there are risks of being in public places.
But for parents, the decision to send our children to camp, daycare, or soon to school is a difficult one.
We are lagging far behind in our jobs during a period of economic uncertainty. Our children are out and our own mental health is eroded by turning our home into an isolation room. Everything has been turned upside down.
We make decisions all the time about degrees of comfort and safety for our children. And for most of us, there are clear paths for these decisions. Data, stories, our instincts. We rely on a variety of things to help us determine what is best for our children. But there is no playbook here. We are all lost and confused and our children are also struggling.
I know it was a wake up call for us. We know very little about what this virus is or does, especially in children. But now we know exactly how we feel now and we are making decisions based on that.
The camp was a test run for the school. And for us, that attempt failed. And the camp staff tried everything, did everything right.
When will we feel comfortable sending them to school? Like everything else in this pandemic state, I can’t say for sure. But for now, we are working with the data we have, our own lived experience, and we cannot imagine sending our children to school this fall. We couldn’t have known until we tried, but now we are sure that we feel safer with our children at home.
