Lack of vision is failing students
Innovation is needed to create more education options during the pandemic
Last week’s decision by Chesapeake schools to continue in-person classroom learning in the face of rising coronavirus cases numbers precisely illustrates the failed approach to education during this pandemic.
It’s not that the city’s school officials were wrong to keep kids in the classroom, so much as that communities are being forced to choose from a buffet of unpalatable options.
By now we should have a response organized around the preservation of public education, even to the expense of all else.
What would that look like? It could mean setting up temporary classrooms in convention centers, arenas or any large building with adequate ventilation. Or even erecting large event-style tents in parking lots that allow for social distancing.
It could mean recruiting an army of substitute teachers to help reduce class sizes. We would be considering sweeping changes to the calendar and making sure teachers are prioritized for vaccine distribution. Or imagine if the state and the teachers union agreed to suspend school in January and February until students and staff could return in March, either in alternate buildings or with vaccinations or both.
To salvage the current school year and invest in our children’s future, we need more creative, unconventional solutions to this crisis.
Every and all options should be on the table, yet here we are forcing binary choices — open or not, in-person or virtual — on local school officials.
The Chesapeake School Board voted unanimously last week to keep bringing the district’s 40,000 students to classroom buildings for in-person instruction. It did so in the face of surging COVID-19 numbers in the community and at the same time neighboring school systems reverted to online-only instruction, citing public health and safety.
Was it the right choice?
Keeping kids in the classroom is far better for instruction and socialization, but exposes teachers, administrators and staff to risk and could contribute to community spread of the disease when the virus replication rate is already alarmingly high.
On the other hand, virtual learning is a woeful substitute for in-person classroom learning. It poses a greater threat to children from low-income families, who may not have ready access to a computer or high-speed internet, and kids who need more attentive instruction or personalized learning.
It may seem courageous for Chesapeake to choose the in-person option, but an outbreak among teachers — heaven forbid — would radically alter that perception. This is precisely the type of high-risk scenario playing out across Virginia and the nation.
In retrospect, we should have moved faster to center our national response around the preservation of in-person instruction in public schools.
More energy should have been spent helping states coordinate and implement strategies to achieve that, including an abundance of funding specifically to that end. Other countries chose to keep schools open to the expense of nearly all other economic activity, investing heavily into worker and employer assistance to do so. The absence of a national strategy means that states are fending for themselves.
In Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam and his team have generally acted with caution and made smart choices to slow the spread of coronavirus and protect the commonwealth’s health system. With schools, though, the administration has taken a hands-off approach, leaving each district to make its own calls.
The result is that the approach to public schooling varies wildly from one city to the next, as we’ve seen here in Hampton Roads. Virginia Beach saw rising case numbers and opted to return to online-only classes, while Chesapeake saw the same and doubled down on in-person instruction.
Both communities are following the path they think is best.
But they are limited in their choices because of a lack of imagination and support for the type of bold thinking needed here.
We are failing our kids by not doing everything in our power to keep them in schools safely. And unlike the virus, there’s no vaccine on the horizon that promises to fix it.