During this rainy mid-summer week, many of us are thinking ahead to September. The traditions of back-to-school this year will be anything but routine. What they will look like is anyone’s guess.
Washington’s superintendent of public instruction has promised that schools will reopen, if health conditions allow. Our nation’s president is also demanding that schools reopen. Political pronouncements are easy, but neither are offering many specifics. That’s left to local school districts to figure out. It’s hard to imagine a more difficult, fraught decision.
As of Friday, America had seen 3.2 million cases of COVID-19 and 135,885 deaths. Washington state has had 39,686 cases and 1,409 deaths. Lewis County has seen 95 positive tests and three deaths. The virus is spreading, and the vast majority of us are still susceptible. The death rate ranges from 3 percent to 4 percent, but that doesn’t include many people who suffer serious, costly illnesses that can have long-term health effects.
It appears that the COVID-19 virus, at least in its current form, doesn’t hit children as hard as it hits people who are older. (There are still risks to children, however. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, 10 percent of infants with COVID-19 become critically ill. There are cases of older children being hospitalized. Children age 2-15 can also develop a rare condition called pediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome.)
The adults in schools are much more at risk. Teachers, aides, custodians, lunchroom workers, bus drivers — by stepping into a school environment with hundreds of people, they are putting themselves into the center of a viral storm.
Educators are essential workers. Ideally they would all be issued N95 masks for protection, but those virus-filtering masks are still in short supply. Even hospitals, dentists and nursing homes can’t get enough.
And so school districts have the all-but impossible task of ensuring that schools can reopen in a way that minimizes risk for both students and the adults.
How to keep desks 6 feet apart?
How to ensure that children wear the masks that keep them from spreading the virus through their exhalations? And wear them safely without contamination?
What to do about kids who come to school sick?
Once they are sick, how to institute distance learning plans to ensure continuous learning?
How to plan for the real possibility that cases will rise, teachers will get sick, substitutes won’t be available, and schools will have to close down again?
Hastily improvised virtual education last spring was dissatisfying for all concerned. Children struggled to learn. Parents who were home struggled to supervise and help. Working parents struggled to replace the key child-care function that schools also provide. And teachers were demoralized, struggling to teach remotely to students with no internet access, while losing the key in-person relationships that make teaching effective and satisfying.
And yet it’s clear that virtual education of some sort needs to be an option going forward.
Some parents won’t feel it’s safe to send their children to school. Even if the children are at a lower risk of serious disease, they are still very capable of bringing the virus home to at-risk parents, grandparents and family members.
Perhaps the best back-to-school approach would be a continuum of education options. On one end is full virtual education, perhaps taught by older or immunocompromised teachers who are high-risk for serious coronavirus symptoms. Schools could become sources of resources for these new home-school families, even loaning out WiFi hotspots and Chromebooks.
The next tier could be students who come to school one or two days a week to check in, get questions answered, have social interaction with their peers, and get the full educational experience that only in-person schooling can provide.
And at the far end of the spectrum are students who need to go to school each day. Maybe their parents work and need child care. Maybe these children have an unsafe home environment. Or they have special needs that require daily education.
However, more options mean more complications and expense for schools. It’s already mid-July. The start of the school year is racing toward us.
I am grateful for the hard-working educational professionals who are making plans for our community’s children to learn this fall.
This virus is serious, and planning school around the uncertainty is a nearly impossible task that local educational leaders are tackling with care and professionalism. They embody the ideal of that old saying, “the difficult we do right away. The impossible takes a little longer.”
This could be an opportunity for creative solutions that can become long-term improvements to this vital part of our nation’s social infrastructure.
Ensuring that our children are effectively educated is truly a family’s responsibility. Most of us outsource the job to public schools at some point, but we need to stay involved in watching what they’re learning and how they can apply it to life. Like it or not, the coronavirus has pushed us to become more engaged with our children’s education — and while it’s been hard, it’s also been meaningful.
This fall’s return-to-school will look very different, but for parents, the importance of being our children’s first, most important teacher will still be our paramount duty.
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Brian Mittge is a public-school parent in rural Chehalis. Full disclosure: his wife, Sarah, is a volunteer parent representative on the Chehalis School District’s reopening committee. Contact him at brianmittge@hotmail.com.
