By Samuel Strait, Report at Large – March 18, 2021 Recently the Del Norte Unified School District's Superintendent, Jeff Harris, offered his report to the District's School Board with frustrations over the lack of consistent messaging from the State regarding policy towards opening schools and getting back to educating our youth. Part of his complaint is with policies which make holding class in school with less than four feet of distancing between students and six feet of distancing from teachers make it difficult for the district with limits on class room size to accomplish such a mandate without increasing teaching staff as well as lack of sufficient class room space to accomplish that task for the entire student body. He also feels that lack of attention by the State to provide vaccinations for his staff is largely the result of Sacramento's indifference to this largely rural part of California. What is most interesting about Mr. Harris and the State's response to the trials of providing education to young people, is that their appears to be no effort to understand that young people have very little chance of being seriously affected by Covid-19 unless they have some sort of serious health issue. Similarly there seems to be an unwillingness by public health and public school to acknowledge the fact that since most young people display few if any symptoms associated with the virus, the chance of transmission remains exceptionally low. Teachers who fear coming in contact with the virus are far more likely to contract the virus shopping in their local grocery store, masked and socially distanced, than in the classroom. The idea that safety precautions must be paramount to reopening schools seems at the very best to be hardly worse than what has happened over the past year where suicides and drug deaths have ramped up in a youth population that is barely affected by the virus. As far as the complaint that vaccines do not seem to be making an appearance in sufficient quantities in the County, nor for the use of the District's staff, Mr. Harris should know that a vaccinated person can still become infected by the virus and pass it along. A vaccine simply put, will prevent the recipient from experiencing the worst effects of infection by the virus. It does not in any way guarantee immunity. It would seem that had Mr. Harris become frustrated with the State's behavior, 2020's spring disaster in our local schools would have given Mr. Harris the entire summer to lobby the state and encourage parents to protest what clearly did not work and resume real education last fall. Now that the dithering in our local schools have wasted yet another year of education, it seems that this is at least a step in the right direction, if for the wrong reasons. Clearly this County has experienced much difficulty during the past year of which the State has been responsible. To continue this pointless charade mandated by the State which has been revealed on a number of occasions as detrimental to Del Norte County and California should be stopped. Our youth need to return to school in a normal environment without all the hand wringing over non existent "safety" concerns or lack of vaccinations.