In the era of COVID-19, school has been turned upside down and inside out. When everyone was in lockdown, decisions were pretty simple. Now that states are reopening to various degrees and with different levels of success, the decisions about returning to school are about to get really, really hard.
I am thinking off the top of my head here, so if there are lots of unanswered questions and problems and holes, I get it. This is off the cuff writing and thinking happening here.
Maybe we need to take a cue, kind of sort of, from school choice advocates and restructure school districts where families have some choices. For instance, thinking about the district where I work, there are 4 school buildings. Currently, the buildings are divided according to grade levels. Rather than dividing by grade levels and trying to come up with a schedule that fits as many as possible while allowing for those who need/want exceptions, maybe we change each building to manage the learning environment different ways. One building can be "school as usual" where everybody just goes back and does what we have always done. Another building can be an environment where the strictest possible health protections are put in place: very small, self-contained groups of students, 6 feet apart, wearing masks, no shared materials. The other 2 buildings could be varying degrees of the 2 extremes -- maybe bigger class sizes, masks, semi-self contained. Maybe split schedule for families who have some flexibility with their time and who want kids to not have to wear a mask all day. Then finally, there can be a pool of teachers who have offices instead of classrooms who run online instruction for families who don't feel sending their child to a school environment right now is safe or beneficial. Families can choose the configuration that suits them best. Or I think about my local high school district, which has 2 buildings: grades 9 and 10 in one, and grades 11 and 12 in another. One building is a 3 story building; the other is a 1 story building with many wings. Buildings like that could be reconfigured by floors or wings. A change like this would really shake up education in this country. So often, school doesn't look like what it did when today's parents were in school, what with Common Core, technology, standards-based learning, and an emphasis on 21st century skills. This kind of change would really be mind boggling. It's an incredibly different way to think about how to structure the learning environment and experience. But we are living in such a strange time, maybe school needs to uber, ultra flexible. This would be a massive undertaking by any school district, one that would require a great deal of planning and preparation. But schools could do it. After all, most schools were able to pivot to remote learning with very little notice. Education could pivot again -- this time, it's just going to look more like pirouettes.
