Sending kids to school two days a week and then keeping them home for three days with well-planned assignments, and the technology to support it, would solve several of the problems the nation’s pediatricians identified this month when they warned that education wasn’t the only thing at risk if we don’t get children back in the classrooms this fall.
It’s far from ideal, of course, but it’s the model many school districts in South Carolina and across the nation have been gravitating toward in order to halve the number of children in classrooms and on school buses at any one time, and thus provide enough social distance between children to dramatically reduce the chance of COVID-19 infection.
Aside from the fact that some kids just don’t do well with remote learning, the biggest problem with the so-called A-B schedules is that they require parents to be at home five days a week instead of just two — which isn’t a problem for stay-at-home parents or parents whose jobs allow them to work for home but is for everybody else.
The ultimate insult in the age of COVID-19 is to accuse people of prioritizing economic considerations over health; close behind is accusing people of thinking of schools as baby-sitting services. But regardless of what you think about the politicians who are pushing the save-the-economy narrative, the hard reality is that some parents can’t work from home, and they can’t rearrange their work schedules to accommodate a two-day school week. Their options are to leave their children home alone while they go to work or else lose their job and scrounge to buy food and pay the power bill, and the rent.
So it’s encouraging that the Charleston County School District has come up with a way to reconfigure classrooms in order to safely put most, if not all, children whose parents want them in the classroom back in the classroom five days a week. The district is still evaluating schools, but it says at least half of them have enough space to bring all students back for daily in-person classes, and the other half have the space to bring back from 50% to 90% of students.
Under a plan that goes before the School Board today, those schools with enough room would operate under a regular schedule, while the others would bring half the students back on Mondays and Tuesdays and the other half on Thursdays and Fridays. Crucially, the plan also gives all parents the option of selecting an online-only school schedule if they don’t feel safe sending their children to school.
It’s a reasonable approach, and that online option — and the likelihood that a large number of parents will choose it — should give the district the opportunity to make an important tweak to improve the plan dramatically.
When parents choose the virtual-school option, they’ll free up space in the school buildings, allowing the district not only to increase the number of schools that have enough space for a five-day schedule but also to move students around in order to maximize the number of five-day schools.
It needs to do that, and to find a way to provide transportation to the students who need it. Ideally, the district should find out which parents are able to work with an A-B schedule and which aren’t, and make sure all the children whose parents need a five-day school week have it.
Yes, this will be a logistical nightmare. But the advantages of having kids in the classroom five days a week instead of just two — not just to parents but to the children — far outweigh the logistical problems.
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July 20, 2020 at 03:45AM
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Editorial: Smart plan for Charleston's COVID-19 school restart needs one tweak - Charleston Post Courier
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