I’m not aware of this funding logic but how does this even work? Like in COVID, all students were remote, but finding never stopped. And last I checked, if my kid doesn’t go to school for a week, school funding doesn’t get impacted. I mean coming in on alternate days doesn’t mean you’re not learning, you can still do online classes on that day.

California school funding formulae are a big complicated mess, but student attendance does play a role in budgets during regular times. Every day of school your kid misses costs the district about $50. Some districts even nag parents for donations after absences[1]

However for the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years, they set a baseline so that schools received funding based off of their 2019-2020 (preCOVID, normalized) average daily attendance. This was good for big schools that had lower enrollment but caused issues for suburban/rural districts that saw a lot of growth.

[1]: https://www.mbusd.org/apps/form/form.MBUSD.qZBxuUG.Ee

In most states funding is related to attendance somehow, I think the details vary. At one time I think there was a thought that districts would take truancy and absences more seriously instead of ignore it if there was an impact to the bottom line.

There are also a multitude of programs throughout k-12, particularly in high school, where the student spends part of their day outside of the district. I think this just helps ensure that the state isn't paying twice for the same student when the external program is also state funded. (It also helps to remove any weird financial incentives to get the kids out of the building)

In my area I think this is where the vast majority of the district income variance comes from, and it is known about and largely planned for before the year even starts.

Dumb question and I realize it may be. I've seen that said before, "Nearly everyone is going to catch omicron within the next 2 to 6 months"; the range changes both the quote is similar. I haven't really seen a why, it just seems to be a given. I know it's more virulent, but why is everyone going to have it so soon?

R is between 2 and 3 infections per infected. That’s exponential growth, and omicron’s life cycle is faster than delta or alpha by a couple days. Health care facilities and airlines can’t keep fully staffed despite them taking the most precautions and requiring vaccinations. There was an outbreak in Antarctica where more than half the research station got it despite strict isolation and testing before arrival. How can we possibly stop that?

Definitely not a dumb question.

Virulence refers to the ability of a pathogen to cause disease. Omicron is not more virulent. If anything it is likely to be much less virulent as it lacks the ability to infect lung tissue.

On the other hand because the infection is now concentrated in the upper respiratory tract, patients are much more likely to exhale and spread the virus. On top of that, the virus has sufficiently mutated thus existing vaccines and prior infections have very limited protection. Combined with the lack of ventilation and increased time spent indoors in winter, this translates to more infections.

I don't know whether "everyone" is going to get it eventually. However I have heard anecdotes that multiple insular communities in the US that have largely avoided the previous Covid strains are now badly afflicted by omicron. That is how infectious the virus is.

Omicron is roughly as contagious as chicken pox. Remember what happened when a single child got chicken pox before the vaccine? There was never a question that everybody was about to get chicken pox--the only thing you could do was manage the timeframe.

Before the vaccine, people would have chicken pox parties so all the children were exposed simultaneously and everybody could get it over with. With Omicron, it's simply the reverse, it's blowing through everybody so fast that it will burn itself out in a couple months.

After that, it will simply have a constant endemic background level like chicken pox prior to the vaccine and the flu.

We are in the endgame. It isn't the endgame we wanted, but it is the endgame.

New variants have followed Omicron. And that will continue to happen. They may be more benign or less benign than what we’ve seen so far. But I keep hearing the assumption of “definitely mild”. I’m not sure the science is so definitive on that point.

That will not necessarily continue to happen, at least not soon. Once you've been exposed to omicron (+ vaxed or exposed to original/delta) a new variant has to be very different from both omicron and delta. And this isn't the flu; it only has so far it can mutate.

However, it's impossible to get rid of it because it infects animals and we're not going to vaccinate them.

I don’t understand your statements. Omicron had many changes vs delta — why would successive variants not have the same?

> Only has so far it can mutate

Says who?

Agreed, I can't see anything stopping it mutating further if the opportunity arises.

I believe the understanding is that the omicron variant may have evolved further in an immuno-compromised person (e.g. with AIDS, or undergoing chemotherapy), since it got to stay in the host longer without being killed by the immune system, it racked up more mutations until it got to its current virulent form and started infecting other people.

And there's absolutely nothing stopping that from happening again I guess.

I said nothing about mild. I said "contagious".

Before Omicron, we had a hope of creating an R0 < 1 and stamping Covid out. Omicron spreads so well in so many different mammals that it simply wipes that option off the map.

Omicron, irrespective of whether it is mild or not, is simply going to blow through the population no matter what we do. Afterward everybody will have been infected with Covid, vaccinated, or both.

At that point, we'll have a background level of deaths from endemic Covid every year just like we do the flu. Welcome to the new world.

> At that point, we'll have a background level of deaths from endemic Covid every year just like we do the flu. Welcome to the new world.

I agree. Just like we do for RSV, other common cold variants, etc. We'll get used to it.

The way around it is students "Went" to school 5 days a week. somedays they were on campus, and some days they were remote learning. I know of several schools in my immediate area that implemented such a system.

It seems like the simple solution is to include distance learning days in ADA (does NY even use average daily attendance for school funding?).