Successful School Reopening Plans Will Have One Thing In Common
Plenty of folks have thoughts about the conditions under which schools should be opened. The CDC thinks desks should be six feet apart. The American Enterprise Institute suggests that districts might want to get all staff members over fifty-five to take early retirement. Senator Bill Cassidy has called for aggressive testing and contact tracing.
Over the next few months, we’ll see many plans floated for opening schools in the fall. The successful ones will have one thing in common.
They will be written—or at least co-written—by teachers.
Reopening schools will be the ultimate exercise in devil-concealing detail work. A recommendation like “put all student desks at least six feet apart” is easy to make, but it will take the people who actually know the configurations of rooms in the building to turn it into a workable plan
The plans will hinge on nitty-gritty details, not sweeping policy ideas. In a district with few students who walk to school, how do you get them to the building without stuffing them into a means of transportation? If you are, as some suggest, checking temperatures as they enter the building, how do you do it without creating a crowd outside? Where are the bottlenecks in your building, and how might scheduling help reduce them? If one source of bottlenecks is, in fact, the doorway into each classroom, how do you manage that traffic issue?
How will students move from class to class? How does an elementary teacher move a line of fifteen kids, all six feet apart, through the halls? In a high school, how do you dismiss different classes at CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Successful School Reopening Plans Will Have One Thing In Common