School starts in 70 days here in Michigan.
1680 hours, if you’re counting.
You want your kid back in school. As teachers, we want your kids
back in school. We like teaching. We like kids. Having done 4 months of
distance learning, I promise you the number of teachers nationwide who prefer
Google Meet learning to real, live interaction is probably a 2 digit number. But
we want your kids back when it is safe for everyone; students, teachers and
substitute teachers, administrators, and the myriad support staffers who keep
schools running.
Let me remind you:
6 year olds are walking globbers of
boogers. In the best of times, the boys’ bathrooms are covered in urine spray.
The washing of hands is generally hypothetical for both genders. “Sneeze like a
vampire” might be the most common phrase a 1st grade teacher uses
throughout the school day. Little ones are simply not all that concerned with
hygiene. They pull and tug at every orifice on a near-constant basis. If you
are 7 and your nose itches, you are going to pull your mask off and itch it.
And then sneeze.
Social distancing? In class, the lunchroom, at recess? You
cannot be serious.
Let me remind you:
Middle schoolers are like puppies. The kids
are constantly wrestling. They walk around in little pods, heads bowed, as they
whisper snippets of crucial information to each other. Mask wearing? When they
remember. Except most middle-schoolers’ have a tough enough time remembering to
bring their math book and pencil to class. It’s the teacher’s job, you say, to
enforce these regulations? That would be a full-time job. We can barely keep
kids from texting each other throughout the class day. Send them to the principal’s
office? If you have 250 students in the building, about 199 of them will be in
the office. And that negates social distancing and any chance at learning, don’t
you think?
Ah, high school:
The students understand the concept of
social distancing and masks and handwashing. But that doesn’t mean they’ll do
it. Let me remind you, high schoolers also understand that cigarette smoking on
campus is both illegal and bad for one’s health. But every restroom, every
access point, floors are littered with butts by day’s end.
Masks? “But I need to kiss my boyfriend/girlfriend good bye
as they walk into class because I won’t see them for almost an hour!”
Ah, social distancing among teens who cannot keep their
hands off of each other.
Which raises an ancillary question. 6 feet. Someone, I don’t
know who, will have to remove half the desks from each classroom. I guess they
could be stacked up along the classroom walls or the hallways, just waiting to
be tipped over. Maybe we could load them into a truck and take them to an
undisclosed and safe, free storage location. Someone should probably put 6 foot
masking tape circles on the floor for each desk. Someone, I don’t know who. Don’t
forget, not all rooms have desks. Art classrooms. My classroom is a science lab.
8 tables, each bolted to the floor. 4 stools each. Half of the class can distance
themselves properly, but lord, that’s a lot of surface area that will require
disinfection.
As the students, K-12, enter every room, do we have them disinfect
the desks and lab tables every day? With what? We’re already budgeted down to
the bone. It’s a big deal to have working internet, plus paper and pencil for
those who can’t afford their own.
The most underpaid, understaffed, and underappreciated department
in every school; that’s the custodial staff. You expect the 9 of them to clean
each of 102 classrooms with surgical precision every evening? Disinfecting
every desk top, emptying the trash-bags, sterilizing every trash bin in the room?
What about the bathrooms; a hygienic disaster by the end of every class day?
We feed kids. Breakfast plus 3 rounds of lunches. Is it possible
to clean the lunchroom to CDC specs every 25 minutes as the three rounds of
student lunch periods cycle throughout the noon time? That’s a ‘no, it is not.’
Is it possible to clean the lunchroom to those same specs at 7:25 am after our
students eat breakfast as well? You should share my doubts.
Did I mention the bus rides? Every night, each bus needs to
be cleaned with utmost care. Students need to wear masks on the bus. They need
to use hand sanitizer as the enter and exit the bus. They need to social
distance properly on board the bus. You don’t expect the driver to police that,
do you, and to convey your children, safely and promptly, to and from school?
I get it,100%, that for many students, distance learning is a
gigantic clusterf&*k. For those with emotional issues and IEPs and learning
issues, it might be an unsolvable puzzle. I don’t have an answer for that. The
touch of a familiar adult on a student’s shoulder in the midst of meltdown can
be a lifesaving touch. Is it fair, to expect a teacher to risk their health?
Nope. Is it fair to the student, to not have that support? Nope.
Fortunately, students don’t yet seem to bear the brunt of Covid_19.
But that does not hold true for the adult staff. As teachers take sick, who
will fill in for them? We are already at a desperate point with subs. School
districts simply do not have anywhere near enough guest teachers. Worse, most
substitute teachers are retired teachers, the very same people who are most at
risk for Covid_19. As my teaching colleague Mike Vial pointed out in a
brilliant essay, what guest teacher in their right mind would want to walk into
a minefield of Covid_19? School district employees will get sick. Some will
die.
The economics are staggering.
If
kids cannot get back to school, then parents have a near-impossible task of
getting back to work. The economics are clear. But what are the economic costs
of ‘getting back to normal’ too soon? I suspect they are much greater. The
longer Covid_19 remains a clear and present danger, the worse the long-term economic
costs.
There are real emotional risks to our kids. I understand. Young
people crave, need, real-world interaction with their peers. We all do,
but with kids, you can argue that socialization is the real purpose of school.
Let me remind you:
This pandemic is not normal. This is war.
In World War One, 116,500 US soldiers & civilians died as a result of battle
and disease. This took 1,560 days. In World War Covid_19, it took only 127 days
for the US to reach 116,716 deaths. Moms and Grandmas and Dads and Grandpops
and cousins and uncles and brothers and sisters and aunts – doctors, lawyers,
farmers, stock clerks; the virus does not care. It will never care. It just
wants to make more viruses. It is relentless and emotionless.
I don’t have a solution. I’m not Doctor Fauci or a PhD in
virology or epidemiology at the CDC or Johns Hopkins. I know the virus makes
its own timeline regardless of our dreams and wishes. I do know that if we go
back before the data is clearly in our favor, the virus will slice through our
schools like the Borg’s cutting beam through the starship Enterprise.
A workable idea:
My proposal. We opt for 100%
distance learning in the fall. We plan to return to in-person learning, virus
and data permitting, for second semester in January, 2021. That gives us a few
more months to flatten the curve, look at nearly one year’s worth of data on
the virus and its path, and return our students to school in a, hopefully, much
safer environment for all.
If we don't?
Here in Michigan, there are 1.5 million students, K-12,
among our 10 million residents. There are 57 million students in the US, grades
K-12, for our 328 million citizens. Every one of those kids becomes a possible
vector of infection. The 140,000 Covid_19 deaths to date? If we don’t do this
back-to-school properly, that number will merely be the starting point for this
pandemic. This is not sandlot baseball.
No do-overs.
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