NYC Educator: Can We Safely Reopen Buildings? If So, How?

NYC Educator: Can We Safely Reopen Buildings? If So, How?

Can We Safely Reopen Buildings? If So, How?

We're looking at the possibility of opening our building in September. Will that happen? Your guess is as good as mine, but mine is we will not. Nonetheless, everyone's got to plan otherwise. I imagine a lot of schools would go end to end. That is, half the students enter in the AM, and half in the PM. Teacher schedules in high schools would overlap the sessions. I suppose elementary teachers could prep while other classes are going on, but I don't know much about what they do, so I could be wrong.

Now this will suck for a whole lot of reasons. One is the schedules could easily run 6 AM to noon, and then noon to 6 PM. I don't imagine many people will be happy about either. Another is this will only reduce student population by half, and that may not be enough. In my school, already at 210-220% capacity, it will certainly not suffice.

How do you achieve adequate social distancing to make a school building safe. Well, on top of your end to end programming, you could have students come in every other day, or every other week. You could then have classes stream via video, and the other half of the students could submit work via Google Classroom or something of that nature.

In the case of a building like mine, perhaps students could come in live every third or fourth week. This really underlines the lack of vision of those who run the DOE. As though it weren't bad enough that they had such disregard for us and our students that they forced us to convert classrooms into two, and convert closets into classrooms, the health issue makes it that much worse. And you can't argue that students who get so little face time with teachers are being treated equally. This makes the state's decision to defy the C4E decision, the one that specified lower class sizes, all the more egregious.

As for those who speak of schools being babysitting services, those days are over. Parents will have to make other CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Can We Safely Reopen Buildings? If So, How?