Seeing only one piece of an issue

This AP article about swine flu (Schools urged to prepare for swine flu absences) bothered me a bit. The article was not scaremongering, and was mostly pretty good as far as it went. But, it only touched on one part of the issue - and made it sound like this was the whole story.

It's hard to tell if the problem was with the AP's reporting or the what the Secretaries had to say. But, let's be realistic. Schools are just as likely to shut down because large parts of their staff have swine flu or have been exposed, as they because of large numbers of sick students. So, why does the article totally ignore the reality of this potential problem?

There are a variety of things that can be done to lessen the impact of staff outages. How effective they can be depends on many factors, including whether staff are out because they are ill, they need to stay home to tend to a sick family member, they need to stay away from an environment with alot of flu or some other reason. Some tactics are technology based, such as allowing non-teaching staff to work remotely, allow teaching staff to use internet technologies to disseminate information and using video conferencing type technologies to allow teachers to lecture remotely. Others are not technological, such as figuring out which classes can be combined, identifying substitute teachers, or reassigning tasks. (This list is, of course, not close to being exchaustive.)

Not every technique will work for every situation. But, just as schools need to look at the possibility of large numbers of students coming down with the flu, or being kept from school because of family infection, so too, they need to look at the issues surrounding staff outages.