Opinion | The Economy Can’t Fully Reopen Until Schools Do - The New York Times

Opinion | The Economy Can’t Fully Reopen Until Schools Do - The New York Times

When Can Kids Go Back to Class?
The economy can’t fully reopen until schools do.

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If you’re a parent stuck at home with young children — or, hypothetically speaking, if you’re a childless millennial stuck in a dictionary-size Brooklyn apartment below another dictionary-size Brooklyn apartment in which said parent is having trouble keeping said young children quiet — you are probably wondering when they can go back to school.

As my colleague Katrin Bennhold reports, restarting classes is essential not only to parents’ mental health and children’s development, but also to reviving the economy, which is why several countries have already done so. When will the United States?

Since the severity of the outbreak varies so widely across the country, there isn’t likely to be one answer, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious disease expert, in testimony before Congress on Tuesday. But here are some of the core questions that could affect the timeline no matter where you live.

How do you make schools pandemic-proof?

Absent a vaccine, experts say mass testing is the only surefire way to keep the reopening of schools from becoming a disaster, according to Ms. Bennhold. But mass testing remains the exception. Instead, some countries, such as Japan and Australia, are opening in phases by staggering classes on different days. In China, students' temperatures are checked before they can enter schools, and cafeteria tables are outfitted with plastic dividers. In Germany, class sizes have been halved, hallways have one-way traffic and teachers wear masks (in Taiwan, so do students).

[Related: 9 Ways Schools Will Look Different When (and if) They Reopen]

But whether these measures will be enough to prevent cases from surging remains to be seen. Even if they are, applying them in the United States is “going to be a scheduling nightmare, a logistical nightmare,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, told NPR. After all, how do you socially CONTINUE READING: Opinion | The Economy Can’t Fully Reopen Until Schools Do - The New York Times