Thoughts About the Coming School Year

I can't pretend to know what this fall will bring. I do know that my (private) school is planning to start in person and on time unless they are told they can't. It's why I was hired - to ensure class sizes will be reduced to the point that six feet of distance is possible between students when they are seated in their desks. I want to work this fall. I want to be in a classroom with students, teaching. I know my own child learned very little in the distance learning that occurred in the spring. I know my own students learned less starting in March, and those that were not self-motivated learned a lot less. 

My students were equipped with the devices and bandwidth needed for distance learning. I did my best to create engaging lessons, spending hours vetting video clips and creating web quests that met minimum learning targets. I tweaked my end of the year activities and felt like I did a decent job of getting my eighth graders ready for high school. I was told by parents that their kids said things like, "It's just like being at real school," and that their kids were engaged by the content I was providing. But I also knew that we didn't get to the final project I had planned for ELA and I didn't dive deeply into the final history unit (The Civil War and Reconstruction) or have time to address the lessons for today, especially in light of the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted at the end of the year.

I'm switching schools, not because I chose to, and moving to a new grade level. I'm really excited about the upcoming year for lots of reasons. I know and love the community and they know and love me back. (As evidenced by how I was received when I went in last week.) If we need to start remotely, I won't feel like an outsider among the staff. I won't know my students, but that would be mostly true even if I wasn't switching schools. I am grateful to have a job for fall, and ecstatic that it's in a place I know and feel welcomed.

My plan book came in the mail today.

But, we won't be sending our high schooler to school in person this fall. His school district has not announced their plans yet, but we already know that a daily (or multiple times per week) bus ride and in person instruction is not something we will sign him up for. Every fall of his entire schooling life he has ended up sick, with a fever among his symptoms for long enough that he has missed up to two weeks of school. We can't, in good conscience, send him out into the classroom, knowing that he will end up needing a COVID-19 test within weeks of returning to school.

And that leaves me in a strange place. The community college my oldest will be attending announced several weeks (months? who can remember timelines during a pandemic?) ago that they will be starting online only for the fall term. My husband was working on a project that would shift many employees, including himself, to working from home more often than not before the pandemic struck. He's now allowed back in his office every other week, but no one is required back in before December, and the long range plan is for his team to be working from home almost exclusively going forward.

When the school year rolls around again, I will be the only person in my household required to leave the house and report into a specific location. It makes me think of the meme of the politician saying that if stores can be open schools need to be open, and the other pane saying, "I don't always go to (insert store), but when I do it's not five days in a row for seven hours at a time." Yeah, um, try eight or nine hours on any given work day, historically speaking. And I know teachers who go in on weekends regularly and/or stay in the building for more hours than I do on a regular basis. 

Almost every (Every?) industry that can hold meetings online is doing so. Kids have been more effectively quarantined than adults since the middle of March when their activities were all cancelled. Opening schools based on data collected while activities for kids were cancelled seems extremely risky. Not even considering any personal risk I might be taking, how can we be considering the risk to children in our schools? I was a long term sub three years ago for one of the kids who got the mysterious inflammatory illness linked to COVID-19. It hit me pretty hard when I saw his face on the local news. How much harder would it hit to have a student die from this pandemic?