Going home for the holidays

should be a right rather than a privilege for young people at boarding school. 

This country has relied on "state border closures" to try and prevent the spread of the Covid19 virus.  This state is currently almost free of the virus as a result of "tough" border closures. Is that a good thing or not?

I doubt it is going to prevent a major outbreak here. It will take just one undetected case to be out in the community for a short while and this could happen. 

Despite this people are getting complacent. I was speaking to an otherwise intelligent person a couple of days ago. His reaction was, "There isn't anything here. I'm not going to bother to get vaccinated unless we get a bad outbreak."  It is too late then. He needs to be vaccinated now - along with the rest of the community.

In the mean time there are students who can't cross the border to go home for the upcoming school holidays. These are students who have two options for their secondary schooling. They can continue to do it all remotely or they can go to boarding school. 

Remote learning is not as lonely as it used to be but it is not the same as being in a classroom. It isn't the same as the "home-schooling" deliberately chosen by some parents. There is more support for families who need to use remote learning for their young children. There are still "governesses" on some remote stations. They supervise the work and the best of them will also do some teaching. There are video link ups now, not the crackling microphones of the old "School of the Air". 

All that is fine but it is not the same as making friendships, learning to live and work with your peer group, playing team games and much more. When you reach the first year of secondary school it is something most families recognise and, although it often causes financial hardship, these families traditionally send their children off to boarding school.

And then they want them home for the holidays. It is where the students generally want to be. Even the university students from remote areas wanted to head home - often to help out with shearing, crutching, seeding or something else. They wanted to see their families, ride their horses, play with their dogs and much more. Some of them wanted respite from urban life.

Right now, even though some of these students live in isolated areas, there is no way they can go home. The health authorities simply won't allow it. It matters not that there is no evidence of the virus anywhere and that measures can be put in place to ensure ongoing isolation. All that matters to the health authorities is that they continue to keep the virus out of the state and that they do that by the simple process of keeping everyone else out. 

Except of course we are not keeping everyone out. Goods are constantly being transported into and through the state. That means long distance lorry drivers are coming in - and yes, some of them have tested positive. How they haven't caused a major outbreak is something of a mystery. We have people coming in from overseas. My cousin and his partner have arrived from London. They had to go into quarantine for a fortnight but other people have done the same and then tested positive a few days after leaving quarantine. And of course if you are a league level footballer you are still flying all over the country - supposedly with "precautions" in place. 

The reality however is that some, probably most, of the boarders who want to go home for the holidays could go home and return more safely than the lorry drivers. All of them could go home and return more safely than the footballers who don't wear masks while playing a contact sport.

We need to get more people vaccinated - so kids can go home for the holidays.