School reopening must pass test

Andrew Cuomo during his COVID-19 briefing on Friday. Credit: NYS Governors Office
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared the state’s schools and colleges would remain closed throughout the rest of the school year, putting an official stamp on what most people had already concluded. School’s out, except it’s not, with distance learning still in session and students, educators and parents focusing on the challenges of widespread home schooling.
But what comes next? What happens with summer programs, and will the buildings and campuses reopen for the next academic year?
Cuomo first closed the schools on March 18, waiving the state’s requirement that students have 180 days of seat time spent physically in schools annually. Since then, there’s been little serious discussion of reopening this year. Cuomo could have eased the uncertainty earlier by acknowledging that a spring return to campus was unsafe, unworkable, and too unpopular among many parents and teachers. But holding back created an opportunity to build a necessary consensus among a diverse coalition of interests.
Now what must be determined is how school reopenings can be timed and structured to mesh with a safe and responsible return to normalcy, which includes the reopening of society as a whole — from public transportation and school buses to workplaces and day care centers to athletics and other extracurricular activities.
And how to serve those students, facing unusual and even extraordinary challenges, who need schools most, year-round.
And how to pay for it, with state revenues flagging, federal help up in the air and every out-of-the-ordinary action sure to create extra expense.
Much of what will happen with schools this summer and in the fall depends on what happens in society. If the state is to pull throngs of children and teachers into buildings, socially distanced or not, masked or not, the state must keep pushing the number of new cases of coronavirus down. And much of what happens in society depends on what can be done to reopen schools. Many parents cannot work, or at least not at top capacity, if children normally in school are home and in need of parental supervision.
Many of the concerns that need to be answered to get students back on campus must also be answered quickly regarding summer camps, both day and sleepaway, day cares and extracurricular activities. Finding a way for kids to be together in groups extends well beyond the final school bell, even if much of the solution involves shielding not the kids themselves, who are not terribly vulnerable, but the older adults in their lives who are.
Schools must first make sure distance learning during the rest of this school year is as productive as possible, which means districts continuing to push students to learn, and continuing to push themselves to learn how to teach in this new configuration.
To the most successful, best-resourced students, the missed class time is an unfortunate blip. Top districts are providing fairly intensive education now, and many such students’ home environments are full of enrichment and stimulation. They’d have been OK whenever schools reopened.
But for students who struggle, when and how they get back to campus could be a life-altering question. Because of that, such a return may not be one-time-fits-all.
Many special education students, for instance, go to school nearly 12 months a year, and this closure has been especially hard on them and their families. But such students also generally learn and go to and from school in very small groups, where social distancing and other precautions might let them safely resume classes well before kids whose classes hold 30 students.
Many students also take summer school for remediation, and while it’s not possible to get them into class yet, a summer session, perhaps abbreviated, could well happen. If it can, it must, even if that means classes will have to be smaller than normal, or staggered by time or day of the week. Maybe students will get fewer hours of instruction than in the past. Maybe they and teachers and bus drivers will need to be regularly tested for the virus.
Colleges, too, are facing an unprecedented dilemma during this pandemic, and creativity will likely be a key to getting through it while getting students educated. Again, the solutions may not be the same campus-to-campus or even major-to-major. Computer programming classes can probably be handled pretty easily on computers, while it might not work for chemistry labs. Classes that met three times a week in auditoriums in previous years may find that once a week in that setting is enough, if the other two sessions are online.
It’s important that once the schools and colleges start to reopen they can stay open, just like businesses and recreational facilities and the rest of our normal lives. Pushing the process so hard that we have a second shutdown would clearly be a mistake. Old rules don’t always fit new challenges, and new rules may fit different students and schools, and even various districts and regions, differently.
— The editorial board