The Challenges of Reopening Public Schools in Fall 2020
It’s hard to get a handle on how reopening public schools this autumn is going across the United States. A lot of blame and anger is floating around—for botched plans on the one hand and COVID-19 outbreaks on the other. Nobody endorses full-time remote learning, but it seems to be the reality in most places, especially in the nation’s biggest school districts where school operations on a huge scale complicate the best intentions of the people trying to work it all out.
On Monday to examine trends across the country, the NY Times published a major analysis including charts and maps of several states. The conclusion: “Schools are not islands, and so it was inevitable that when students and teachers returned this fall to classrooms, coronavirus cases would follow them. But more than a month after the first school districts welcomed students back for in-person instruction, it is nearly impossible to tally a precise figure of how many cases have been identified in schools.”
Just as the Trump administration has failed to institute national COVID-19 testing and contact tracing across the states, the Trump administration also failed, during many months before schools were scheduled to reopen this fall, to convene health and education experts with state school superintendents, local superintendents, principals and school teachers to listen to their concerns and plan for contingencies. While the states are, through the mandates of their own constitutions, themselves responsible for providing “a thorough and efficient system of common schools” (the language in several of the state constitutions), some effort at least to coordinate school opening plans with broader testing and contact tracing would have made things smoother. The NY Times reports that there has been no systematic collection of data and in many places no reporting of data: “In an effort to better account for virus cases in Kindergarten through 12th grade, The New York Times set out to collect data from state and local health and education agencies and through directly surveying school districts in eight states. Our goal was to understand, as well as possible, how prevalent the virus was in CONTINUE READING: The Challenges of Reopening Public Schools in Fall 2020 | janresseger