Back to School

Photo by Gustavo Fring from Pexels

The big news this week, in addition to ever increasing cases in the US (we passed 3,000,000 today), is planning for going back to school in the fall. Many school districts have been sending out surveys to parents and faculty, and people have been sharing their thoughts on social media.

From parents, it seems to be, "What are you doing with your kids next year - sending them to school, or doing remote learning?" Aside from a few whose kids thrived with remote learning, most seem to be looking forward to sending their kids back, as if everything will be totally normal with friends, sports, and activities. Many of the parents are saying going back will be better for their kids' mental health, maybe not realizing that the school they return to will be very different, with everyone wearing masks, separated, and unable to interact like usual.

Educators themselves seem much more conflicted. On one hand, they would love to be back in the school with their students. But on the other, there are a lot of logistical issues. Teachers could be with hundreds of different students each day, sometimes even in different schools. Students usually travel between teachers' classrooms, rather than the other way around, leading to more germ-spreading time. Teachers barely have enough lesson planning time as it is, let alone time to reconfigure all their hands-on lessons for a socially distanced or virtual environment, plus sanitize everything between classes. And there are concerns about them being exposed to so many people each day if they or a household member are in an at-risk category.

Lots of compromises have been proposed, like putting students on a staggered schedule by day or by week so not everyone is in the classroom at the same time. But if the same teachers and staff are with both cohorts of students, wouldn't exposure in one group still shut the whole school down? There's also concerns about getting adequate numbers of substitute teachers, who were hard to come by even pre-pandemic, and could be working in many different schools from day to day. One viral post I've seen outlines the schedule of the first day back, with the first "super spreader" event taking place on the bus before classes even start.

An article that came out last week says "In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both." If a parent chooses to homeschool their child, place them in remote learning, or has a child on a staggered in-school schedule, that means time away from their own work, whether they're physically going somewhere or working remotely.

There's also policy issues, as everything seems to be political now. After the president called the CDC's school reopening guidelines "tough and expensive," the CDC will be releasing a revised guide. The president also threatened to withhold federal funding from schools that don't reopen in the fall, and the Education Secretary demanded schools be "fully operational."

I wish schools had been more proactive, starting on the first day of summer break to put together a realistic plan for reopening, rather than waiting almost until fall and holding out with wishful thinking. We're still several weeks away from a final plan, and if things can get under control, maybe there will be a chance for some kind of semi-normal school year. But the way things are going currently, I just don't see how that can be a possibility. Either way, everyone is going to have to be flexible with things shutting down and restarting as needed for the foreseeable future...