Since November, OCD has been a very frequent mailer of actual, physical letters to Kate Brown's office, expressing my opinions of her horrific handling of this "epidemic". And, as I expected, eventually I received a form letter response from her office, telling me about the awesome job she is doing. And true to form, many of her claims made in the letter can be easily debunked.

This post will address the first of multiple untruths (aka lies), and the remaining lies will be addressed in subsequent posts.

Right off the bat, Kate makes the claim that she cares about kids and getting them back to school.

Governor Brown’s top priority is getting our students back into the classroom as safely as possible. COVID-19 is here to stay, and most Oregon students have not been able to learn since last March. In-person instruction is critical not only for students’ educational success, but also for their health and wellbeing.

Anyone who has followed the plight of Oregon's students since last March knows that she really doesn't believe this to be true. This can be demonstrated simply by detailing the steps she has taken to actually keep our kids out of school.

1. All schools were made to do “distance learning” for the entire remainder of the 2019-2020 school year, without an option ever existing for getting the kids back in school. In other countries (China, Demark, Sweden, UK, etc.), they were back in school immediately.
2. Over the summer, she set what you knew to be unachievable, arbitrary, and capricious standards based on bogus “community infection” rates of 50/100k that had to be met for schools to “safely” re-open, at the time where these bogus rates were >300/100k.
3. These standards were maintained through November, at which point Kate adjusted them slightly; not enough to make a difference, but juuuuust enough to look like you were actually doing something that would allow kids back in school. Of course, the majority of schools still couldn’t meet those metrics.
4. In late December, she announced that she was making her school opening metrics “advisory” instead of compulsory. However, that was yet another smoke screen, because of instead of doing the right thing and telling the districts “do whatever you need to do locally to get kids back in school as much as possible, as soon as possible”, Kate instead just moved the goalposts, making them subject to the oft-demonstrated-to-be-worthless Alphabet Bureaucrats at OHA, ODE, and OSBA.
5. True to form, these bureaucrats made the most of their cowardice and power by creating a 91-page monstrosity of a document with somewhere around 160 rules that the districts have to live by. Among them, two of the most onerous and unreasonable rules are that
   • Students must always have 35 sq. ft. of “bubble space” around them at all times
   • Students must not come within range of more than 100 other students in one day.
6. As a result of these, plus the other ~158 rules, the max that high school students will get upon “returning” to in-person class is being locked away in one classroom for 2.5 hours, two whole days per week. And then, even on those days, they then return home to do two more classes via “distance learning.”

In the meantime, something like 36 other states with higher “community infection” rates have not only had kids in school, they have also been playing sports (something else also ripped from our kids without justification). And, the evidence has mounted to the point of being insurmountable (and impossible to be ignored, unless you have your head purposely buried in the sand) that kids don’t spread COVID-19, and the “community infection” rates that Kate uses as her weapon don’t matter at all. The difference between the other states and Oregon, however, is that in those states, they actually care about kids, look at all data, and don’t have achieving the lowest “community infection” rates at all costs (including increased student suicide rates) as their main priority.

So as shown above, Kate's claims in the very first part of her form letter are easily shown to be false. The lies don't stop there, so stay tuned for more debunking in future posts.