Rogue Teacher Posts Photo of ‘Prison-Like’ Plexiglass Cubicles
Fifth-grade teacher Teresa Holmes posted a video of her classroom as the school district she works for in South Carolina prepares to reopen after a long closure due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Soon after Holmes posted her video, the school district asked her to take the post down and don’t “make it look like something negative.”
“Well, guess what? I feel that it is negative,” said Holmes to her local newspaper.
On the video, Holmes claims the school district spent $5 million on plexiglass. Her video shows how difficult it will be for children in the back of the room to see the front board where the teacher presents her lessons.
Also, there has been criticism that plexiglass does not do an effective job of stopping the spread of coronavirus, and that it is only used as optics to make people feel better.
An aerosol scientist on Twitter had a lot to say about this video and the science behind using plexiglass for virus prevention:
1/ This video on a classroom filled with plexiglass barriers is making the rounds. As the poster notes, it’s not a great student experience to be stuck in one of these. But there’s another problem here – this is a counterproductive solution to combat transmission of SARS-CoV-2. https://t.co/QW5USisq8p
— Conor Ruzycki (@caruzycki) February 13, 2021
2/ If this disease were only spread by droplets that fell to the ground within 2 metres, this would be a perfectly fine solution to limit transmission. Unfortunately, we unequivocally know that aerosols are important with this disease.
— Conor Ruzycki (@caruzycki) February 13, 2021
3/ Aerosols (some containing virus if emitted by a carrier) are small enough to float around and build up in indoor places with poor ventilation. Aerosols are important over both short distances (i.e. within 2 metres) and more moderate distances (i.e. at the other end of a room).
— Conor Ruzycki (@caruzycki) February 13, 2021
4/ They’ll tend to spread out throughout a space, depending on what the local air currents are doing. An extremely useful tool to help reduce the risk of transmission from aerosols is to improve ventilation (see recent guidance by PHAC: https://t.co/F2y88ZilPj).
— Conor Ruzycki (@caruzycki) February 13, 2021
5/ The NHL removed the glass behind benches to increase ventilation (https://t.co/dw7VDVoP0j). Mechanistically, the glass behind the bench creates a dead-zone where aerosol is not efficiently removed. Players would be exposed continually, but removing the glass helps avoid this.
— Conor Ruzycki (@caruzycki) February 13, 2021
6/ The solution shown in the original video (a bunch of small plexiglass cubicles dotted throughout a classroom) creates dozens of dead-zones where aerosol can persist for longer than it would have if the plexiglass wasn’t there to begin with.
— Conor Ruzycki (@caruzycki) February 13, 2021
7/ These dead-zones can be sort of imagined as recirculating eddies of air, like what occurs when you have air moving past a plate: https://t.co/lv8yyWSVA7.
— Conor Ruzycki (@caruzycki) February 13, 2021
8/ It’s not really as simple for real-world geometries like these plexiglass cubicles in a classroom filled with students, but the idea of recirculation behind blunt bodies (and trapping of aerosols within) is a very well understood phenomenon in fluid mechanics.
— Conor Ruzycki (@caruzycki) February 13, 2021
9/ As such, it’s hard to predict exactly how the introduction of these plexiglass barriers will influence ventilation in a classroom (it will be room and situation dependent). But they will undoubtably create dead zones.
— Conor Ruzycki (@caruzycki) February 13, 2021
10/ Dead zones = bad, because you aren’t removing aerosol that can contain virus from the space. Anyone who is unlucky enough to be sitting in a dead zone will be exposed far more than if these plexiglass barriers were not present.
— Conor Ruzycki (@caruzycki) February 13, 2021
11/ A better solution includes mandatory masking (source control and PPE) together with improved ventilation and additional filtration with portable HEPA-type cleaners (maybe even reduced class sizes). Here’s a good resource on that: https://t.co/zt9t0tCFWa
— Conor Ruzycki (@caruzycki) February 13, 2021
12/ $5 million could get you several very nice no-nonsense HEPA cleaners that would be far more productive than these plexiglass barriers in this situation.
— Conor Ruzycki (@caruzycki) February 13, 2021
13 extra/ Note, I do think there are some places where plexiglass barriers are useful, like in the checkout lines at box stores . But widespread use of them is a reflection of the droplet dogma that we know isn’t accurate.
— Conor Ruzycki (@caruzycki) February 13, 2021
Liberals are always touting their love for science. However, when it comes to our children’s schools, they don’t seem to be following the science so much as sticking to “droplet dogma” and politically correct narratives–our children’s health be damned!
