Tuesday, July 14, 2020

A school re-opening idea

Right now everyone agrees that our country must get its schools reopened.

Schools everywhere are mightily struggling to decide when and how to reopen.

The stakes for health and safety, for the education and development of the children, and for the economic well being of the country, have never been greater during the past 100 years

Every school is confronted with many teachers and many parents who are torn in different directions about when and how to reopen the schools.

Right now, in July 2020, as much as agreement is needed, there is probably no school that has a plan it is implementing for reopening and that is proceeding with confidence its plan will not be obstructed by parents and/or teachers who find the plan unacceptable.

Further, new things are being learned daily about the coronavirus that potentially impair going forward in the way specified under any particular reopening plan that is being developed and implemented.

In the face of the huge problem of when and how to reopen schools, and the uncertainties surrounding any particular plan that is being implemented, many persons are wracking their brains for ideas for solving the problem. 

My idea
If schools are feeling stymied in developing and implementing a plan for reopening, because the schools are confronted with not being able to gain sufficient acceptance by teachers, parents and students of the school's plan, it may be that big, bold ideas might need consideration.

Here's a big, bold idea I suggest be considered.

Make schools as facilities where students and special teaching staff live for multiple week periods of time, and where students and staff are confined and may not leave the facility and its grounds during the multiple week period of time they are living at the facility.

Outsiders coming to the school facility are controlled, such as the way outsiders coming into nursing homes are controlled.

Making the school facility be where students and staff live requires there be beds at the facility, and the provision of meals must be done in a way that assures the virus will not be brought into the facility. Clothes washing would need to be similarly addressed.

The proposed idea depends on the ability to create a virus free, virus proof facility and its grounds with a high degree of certainty. Experts need to speak to the feasibility of this. Nursing homes can be looked to for their ability now to create a virus free, virus proof nursing home.

A main object is for social distancing not to be required among the students and special teaching staff living at the facility. This depends on the aforementioned ability to create a virus free, virus proof facility with a high degree of certainty.

Having a virus free, virus proof facility requires that students and special teaching staff who come to live at the facility be virus free. This might entail their quarantining themselves for two weeks prior to going to the school facility to live.

The special teaching staff who live at the facility need to be in a position to do that. Recent college graduates looking for jobs could be good candidates to be part of the special teaching staff. 

The special teaching staff would be in communication with regular teachers who are not living at the facility and who provide consultation and support to the special teaching staff in teaching the students living at the school facility.

The regimen for the students living at the school facility can be more rigorous than usual, with say seven days a week of educational classes and more "homework" than usual. Daily physical fitness activities should be a component. Students living at the facility could take on responsibilities such as for clothes washing, cleaning the facilities, and possibly meal preparation and dish washing.

11/12/20
With a rash of Alabama schools suspending in person learning, there could be a revisiting of the idea of temporarily making K-12 schools as "bubble" live in facilities.
I tried to promulgate this idea to many Alabama education officials. The below link indicates how widely I tried to disseminate this idea.

12/13/20
1/30/21
In laying out his vaccine distribution plan, Biden said 'we're in a war with this virus' and promised to fight the pandemic with "the full strength of the federal government." 

Biden has set a 100 day target for opening schools. The vaccine rollout has been excruciatingly slow. Covid variants are popping up and creating new risks and uncertainties for getting back to in person learning. There is growing frustration, anger and even desperation over getting schools back to in person learning.

To fight the war against the virus on the frontline of our schools and on behalf of our children, consider what England did in World War II for its children in the form of Operation Pied Piper, which was a mass evacuation to the countryside of the children in London. See  Operation Pied Piper: The Mass Evacuation of Children in London During WWII.

Think of my idea of temporarily making schools live in, bubble facilities as a very limited Operation Pied Piper in the war against the virus.

2/9/21- the struggles ahead for schools and for others
No matter what, it seems there will be much struggling during the coming months for getting back to pre-pandemic school conditions.

The struggles for schools need to be considered in the context of millions of other Americans going through struggling in other areas, including that of small businesses; essential workers seeking to get vaccines to protect themselves in doing their essential work; healthcare workers and hospitals striving to keep from being overwhelmed; and workers who have lost jobs that may be permanently lost, and who need retraining.

In the pandemic struggles for schools and for millions of other Americans, there have been and will be sacrifices, risks, personal needs for income, and external pressures on people to do things needed for the nation to win the war against the pandemic.  

In the nation's pandemic struggles, there have not been and will not be for numerous more months bright, absolute lines of what is "safe" in various situations and contexts in which safety is a critical factor, be it returns to the classrooms or opening bars and restaurants.

There has been and will continue to be much contentiousness between interested parties, be they be parents and teachers, or the government and bars and restaurants. Ultimately, the contentiousness will get resolved. In the meantime, interested parties will need to press against each other and achieve interim working compromises for going forward.

2/17/21
In January, the Alabama A+Education Partnership issued a lengthy proposal entitled: "Tackling Unfinished Learning and Learning Loss: Support Expanded Access to High-Quality Afterschool &Summer Programs for Alabama Pre-K-12 Students"

The Executive Summary of the proposal says:

A+ Education Partnership proposes a new state grant program to expand high-quality summer and afterschool learning opportunities for PreK-12 students in Alabama. This grant program aims to accelerate student learning in reading and STEM through a combination of evidence based academic curricula and engaging enrichment activities aligned to student interests. Similar to Alabama’s nationally-recognized First Class Pre-K program, this program would be a diverse delivery model that could include partnerships of public schools, nonprofits, faith-based programs, and other community organizations. Grants would be provided to communities to both leverage existing programs and create new programs in unserved communities. In both cases, the goal is to increase quality and expand access. Priority should be given to communities serving low-income students. 
Alabama ranks 49th in the country in 4th grade reading and 52nd in 4th grade math. In 2019, more than half of Alabama’s 4th graders (53%) failed to reach proficiency on the state’s reading assessment. To compound the literacy challenge in Alabama, COVID-19 has put both an academic and social-emotional strain on Alabama’s students. Research from McKinsey & Company suggests that if progress is not made, students could, on average, lose 5 to 9 months of learning by the end of June 2021. Students of color could be 6 to 12 months behind, compared with 4 to 8 months for white students. Students in poverty could lose up to a year of learning. With 50% of Alabama’s public schools at or below the poverty line, Alabama could see a greater amount of learning loss throughout the state. In addition to learning loss, the firm also estimates that an additional 2 to 9 percent of high school students could drop out.

In other words, Alabama public education has bigger problems than just COVID-19, and COVID-19 has only compounded the bigger problems.

3/13/21 One year anniversary of COVID-19
One year ago, no one knew the terrible damage that COVID-19 would inflict on our nation's children and their education, socialization and mental health.

Had we known a year ago what we know now about what the year would inflict on our children, would we have done anything differently from what we did?

My above idea would have required stupendous community mobilization, organization, economic resource dedication and adaptation in order to implement the idea. Without knowing a year ago how bad the past year would turn out, my above idea could not be taken seriously a year ago.

Now we know how bad the past year has been, and perhaps had we known a year ago about how bad the year would be, my idea would have been given serious consideration.

The harms to our children's education, socialization and mental health have now happened, and there is no going back to one year ago and doing something different from what was done. Instead we have to be focused on going forward, and what needs to be done going forward.

At this time, we know little about how the past year will have lasting adverse effects on our children going forward as regards their education, socialization the mental health and we don't know what will be needed to remedy the damage that the past year has done, or even how fully it can be remedied.

Further, the harms of the past year have not been evenly inflicted on our nation's children. Some children have been in environments where the damage from the past year have been mitigated. Other children have borne a much harsher adverse impact from the past year. 

This differential impact on our children of the past year will further translate into significant differences in needs going forward for repairing the harms from the past year.
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