I am strongly advocating for an online start to the school year.
I cannot wait to begin teaching again. I live for the moments when a student finally grasps an elusive concept. As a choral educator, I get to discuss, shape, and make art with inspired and motivated young people, and the experiences we have in rehearsals, sectionals, retreats, and performances can’t be duplicated remotely. (I should know, I organized, led, and did the creative and technical work for eight virtual choir projects this spring. They came out well. It was tremendous work for the end result.)
I cannot wait for in-person school as a musician. Much of the work I do is writing for middle and high schools; most school choral programs are not interested in commissioning choral works they can’t imagine performing in the near future, and most have also had their budgets decimated. It’s a significant loss of my yearly income.
I cannot wait for in-person school to begin again, too, as a parent – my three kids have all thrived in school. As different as they are, they have all made close personal relationships, learned who they are in relation to other people, and begun to understand more about the world around them through their teachers, classroom environments, and creative schoolwork. The virtual environment we pivoted to in March was lackluster at best and busywork or worse in many cases. It had to be, with no preparation, a steep learning curve, and . My own kids did fine, but they aren’t shy about saying how much they loathed it. Many other kids struggled from the lack of social interaction, with depression and anxiety becoming secondary epidemics resulting from the primary COVID-19 pandemic.
I cannot wait for in-person school, but the many known factors and the many unknowns make it impossible to imagine safely. Among the unknowns I think about daily are these:
- We do not know the long-term health risks to children from contracting COVID-19. A small recent study showed over 75% of patients who had recovered from moderate (not severe) cases of COVID-19 showed evidence of long-term damage to their hearts.
- We do not have data on the safety of our teachers and support staff. We can anticipate based on trends in other countries and in US summer camps that there will be significant outbreaks and that it is likely that older teachers, staff, and administrators will be affected. We do know that virtually no school has the physical or financial ability to enact the safety guidelines recommended by the WHO, the CDC, and local health agencies.
- We do not know how children behave as vectors for spread of virus. Some studies suggest younger children might spread the virus less. Other recent studies suggest they shed more virus, and lack the hygiene and respect for distancing that older children and adults exhibit.
- We do not know the motivations of those most intent on reopening in-person school. We might think we can infer motivations, but we do not know them.
- We do not know how a local level ad-hoc response will affect educational inequity. Probably the biggest losses will be sustained by those least able to overcome them – those living in poverty and people of color.
- We do not know what the long-term mental health effects will be of each schooling choice. We talk a lot about the mental health difficulties that will be felt by students during virtual school. I mentioned them above. But we don’t talk as much about the mental health difficulties students will experience if they attend face-to-face school and infect their favorite teacher or their bus driver or their best friend. We don’t talk about the mental health difficulties that will be involved if they go from in-person school to quarantine to in-person. We don’t talk about the mental health difficulties of attending a school with no physical interaction (especially for the youngest), no traveling, no lunchroom laughter.
- We do not know what school will really look like with appropriate safety precautions. We can guess, but we won’t know until we get there, and until we make some mistakes along the way. The best guesses are that either (a) it will resemble 1950’s school, with direct lecturing, no group work, and strictly enforced behavior expectations; or (b) it will quickly revert to teachers and staff saying “we can’t possibly enforce these rules” and going back to behaviors that provide much higher risks of transmission.
- We do not know what “falling behind” looks like. One of the most common arguments for getting back to in-person school is that our kids are Falling Behind. But we don’t really know what that means. Is there such a thing as falling behind when we are in a global pandemic? Students across the world are dealing with the fallout of COVID-19. Furthermore (let me tell you a secret), benchmarks for kids’ growth are arbitrary. Virtually every adult I know has been talking for years about the need to slow down the pace of their busy life. I do not know why that slow down would be called “falling behind” for my own children and students, and I do not know what would happen if we just added a grand pause to our expectations of kids in school this year.
Those unknowns should be enough to perform a risk/benefit analysis that rules out starting this school year face-to-face. Are the benefits of in-person school enough to outweigh the risks? Are the risks of virtual school enough to compel an in-person start? Let’s at least agree that it’s impossible to answer those questions with so many unknowns.
But there is another known to consider. I am confident that whatever most school districts choose, we will see widespread regression to online schooling this fall, as outbreaks pop up and force us to return to safer behavior. When we switch to online schooling, I think it’s important to prioritize the following:
- Increased one-on-one or small group teacher interaction, focused as much on the mental and emotional well-being of students as their academic growth.
- Prioritization (not lip-service, but actual behavior) of so-called “Specials” – the art, music, physical education, and library time. These areas of the curriculum fire the imaginations of young people, provide brain-breaks for them amidst academic study, and are shown to increase retention of learning.
- Decrease active screen time whenever possible. K-12 students shouldn’t be asked to spend a normal school day in front of a computer, staring at the screen. We can do better at engaging their brains in “analog” activities and time spent away from the computer, with check-ins with teachers to provide wraparound support. This might require creative solutions with paper workbooks and offline activities.
- Increase student access to counselors, social workers, therapists, and other support staff who can help them deal with the challenges of this pandemic. I have heard people warn against keeping physical schools closed, saying we will risk a teen suicide epidemic and other mental health crises. This is certainly possible, but risking the health of millions isn’t the right solution; the right solution is to additionally invest in the mental health of kids. (And a reminder, childhood mental health isn’t really what public schools are chartered to do. We just do it because no one else does.)
With this anticipated switch at the classroom, building, or district level from in-person to online (or even a ping-ponging back and forth as quarantines elapse and develop), there is a further question. When “face to face” means “sometimes online”, what is the value of prioritizing any face to face, and what are the downsides to multiple pivots in educational paradigms, with no chance for educators to prepare and deliver their professional best.
I am not an education expert, but I do consider myself an expert educator. When I weigh the knowns and unknowns, when I spend long sleepless nights stressing about my community, my colleagues, and my kids, I come to the same conclusion every time:
It is not possible today, almost anywhere in the United States, to safely reopen schools at full capacity.
