Here’s what Lexington back-to-school plans must include, for parents, teachers & kids.
There is only one villain in this piece, and it’s not Fayette Superintendent Manny Caulk, the school board, teachers or parents.
The only bad guy is the novel coronavirus, who, not content with upending every facet of our lives, seems determined to prevent our children from going back to school. Coronavirus has played with us, dipping its numbers, so normal life seemed for a moment attainable. Now the numbers are climbing again, and the dearest wish of nearly every parent —”please God get the kids off the sofa and back in classrooms” — is looking further and further away.
In fact, it seems pretty clear that there’s simply no way a school district as big as Fayette County can go back to school with any semblance of normality. From the school buses that infected drivers, from the sports that infect players to crowded classrooms that make social distancing impossible, the virus is wielding its unique power over us yet again. People acted shocked when some Fayette school board members said this out loud, but it’s fairly obvious that schools as we know them are more like pandemic petri dishes right now than anything else. If nothing else, look at tiny Hazard Independent High School, where a cluster on the football team has now infected 18 football players, three coaches and 17 other family members.
So what does that mean? Another round of non-traditional instruction? As someone who has three children in three different Fayette County schools, I would rate our experience as ranging from bad to disastrous. That’s not to blame the teachers or the school system, I blame a barely hatched plan (and poor genetics lacking both organization and motivation).
So like many parents, I’m putting a lot of hope into Fayette County’s reopening plan, which will be released Thursday evening, hoping it can approach being as flexible and nimble as the virus itself. That means there need to be many, many contingency plans, both for some return to school and none. As Caulk and others have pointed out, the virus has disproportionately affected those students who don’t have access to technology, so I hope the plan addresses that. It’s hurting children with special needs, so maybe there’s a way those kids can get first priority back in the classroom. It’s hurting families in which both parents work and can’t work at home, so we need to figure that out as well.
Most of all, we need a better distance learning plan that attempts to be more than a stop-gap measure to keep students from playing 10 hours of video games instead of eight every day.
Columnist Kathleen Winter referred to our hopes of re-opening schools as “magical thinking,” as though one student testing positive wouldn’t shut down an entire grade. Magical thinking is hard to resist because it puts us back in normal times. It lets us think that our kids will play on sports teams and will take their AP exams and see their friends every day. (Even more magical is the thinking of colleges and universities who have to plow ahead with re-opening plans because their tuition-based existence depends on it.)
The genius of this invisible virus is that it puts everyone in a terrible situation. Would you want to be the teacher or administrator trying to make these decisions? All we can do is be patient and kind, with ourselves, with our children, with the people who are doing their very best to educate them.
