One of the nice things about the internet is that there is real time dissemination of information. Today, that information has been about the coming school year. Parents are eager, possibly very eager, to get the kiddos (God, I hate that word) back to school. They seem to have grown quite tired of their progeny and wish to off load them to the schools.
Because of the state of the economy, school budgets are getting cut. There simply isn’t enough money to go around. And education is just one of those places that seems quite easy to cut. The schools, however, are going to open, dammit. They just have to. Because … well, see paragraph above.
There are three programs being offered in South Carolina, Ohio, and Arizona (that I know of) and I assume across the entire country. Students and parents will opt into one of three options to start the school year, and will be able to change options as they see fit as the year progresses.
First is full time school with social distancing and all that stuff. It will be every day but with seating available for only half to one third of the students if that social distancing will be enforced. So we need more teachers and more classrooms. It seems like we should be building some more schools, if you ask me.
Another option available either to all students (Ohio and Arizona) or older students (South Carolina) will be daily virtual classrooms with set times. Schools will provide laptops to each student magically making them appear out of thin air and classes will be mandatory with teacher based lectures. This seems to me to mean that we need to hire some more teachers for this segment, although we don’t have to build more actual schools.
Then there is the combined version where some of the time will be spent at home and some in the actual schools. I have no idea where the room for this comes from.
Students will be provided some time for recess, but they shouldn’t get close to each other. They will have access to what in educational parlance is known as specials, but they may not share materials or equipment. I guess gym is going to be running laps and I have no idea what art class is going to be like. Music will be singing and more singing. I have no idea if libraries are even possible in this situation.
There will be lots of cleaning and hand washing with soap and water and lots of hand sanitizer. I’m unsure how meals are going to go, but the process states they will. Somehow.
I’m sure that the kiddos will be all over this social distancing and be very efficient in the hand washing and certainly no one will touch anything that another person has used. The younger grades that use manipulatives for hands on learning will be out of luck. Group projects don’t seem to be very promising, either.
Sports will still be able to be played and no one will be in the bleachers to watch, right? Or if they are, they will be scattered throughout the bleachers without any grouping together. I’m not quite sure how football is played if there is no touching, but I’m sure someone smarter than me figured this all out.
We shouldn’t worry about all this because little kids don’t usually die from Covid. And the average age of teachers is 41 and those people are pretty resilient as well. Of course, the way to get that average is count all the new grads who are in their 20s and match them up with the old and experienced teachers in their 50s and 60s and then average that out. So the old one are just going to have to … what? Are we sacrificing them? Apparently so.
What isn’t commented on in this rush to get back to “normal” even as daily records of new cases emerge nationwide, is that just because some people don’t die, it doesn’t mean they don’t get sick. And with all the congregation of the “distancing” students bringing in the germs they have gathered from their ever more active lives outside, there will be an increase in the number of cases.
It looks to me as if we need, regardless of methodology, as least twice the number of teachers, even as budgets are getting cut. So, when the teachers get sick and cannot come to school for two to three weeks, where in the hell are we getting all the substitute teachers from?
In normal times, when there aren’t enough subs, they cram the kids together in one of the classrooms. Can’t do that now.
How do you make little kids (and all this includes preschool to grade 12) aged 3 to 7 to actually wear a mask or not touch anything? How are you going to get a bunch of 3-5 year olds to wash their hands frequently and not just spend the whole day with kids washing their hands?
So, exactly HOW is any of this going to work? In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren’t. While this may, at least to some, look like a plan, there is no reasonable way to implement it. There wasn’t a way to make this happen before budget cuts and there surely isn’t a way after them.
Who is going to teach the remote learning? Who is going to make sure the kids actually remotely show up? (Pro tip: they don’t all show up.) Where are the laptops coming from? Who is providing the internet service? Who is going to keep my sister alive? Those kindergarten kids are Petri dishes in the best of time. This is not the best of time.
Anyone have a concrete plan telling me how this will work?
