Why de Blasio’s school reopening plan fails students and teachers alike
Many people argue it’s important for the social and emotional well-being of our students to be in school. That’s not even debatable. It’s essential to children and teenagers to interact with both peers and authority figures. They must practice skills to navigate our world.
It’s curious, then, that Mayor de Blasio’s reopening plan accomplishes none of the above.
Depending on how crowded schools are, most students will come to classes once every two or three days to allow for social distancing. At large, overcrowded schools like mine, they might come as little as once a week. They will sit far apart from one another. They won’t be able to interact with teachers or each other the way they usually did. It would become our sad duty to enforce not only physical separation, but masking as well. It’s hard to understand how we help students when we can’t even look at their work — let alone their faces.
The Department of Education offers an option for students to learn remotely full-time, and if my kid were still attending, I’d keep her home. The mayor’s plan is a mess, and he hasn’t considered some very important factors.
The worst thing about the plan is it utterly ignores students who aren’t in attendance. While I teach nine or ten students at a time in the building, what will my other 25 students be doing? If I repeat the same lesson for each group in the building, I won’t have time to cover even half the curriculum. With budget cuts, the city can’t afford to hire more teachers to do online what we do in class. To me, that doesn’t scream “equity CONTINUE READING: Why NYC's school reopening plan fails students and teachers