Teachers imagine how fall will look

Kindergartners in California will not only learn their ABCs this fall, but also why they need to keep their hands out of their mouths and off each other. They’ll need to sing their childhood songs behind masks, and those songs will be altered to reflect a pandemic rather than play.

“If you’re happy and you know it, wash your hands.”

High school students will no longer be able to huddle in small social groups at lunch, swapping gossip. Dances, Friday night football games and school plays all will be on hold for the foreseeable future.

Teachers will have to adjust everything they do to compensate for the coronavirus outbreak. They will have to figure out how to create a fun, safe, inspiring academic environment for children whom they can’t approach to help with a math problem or hug to soothe a skinned knee.

Students walking into schools in August or September will see a different world, one restricted by masks and social distancing and strict protocols for the seemingly inevitable cases of the coronavirus.

Classrooms will look little like they did in early March, before shelterinplace orders shut down school districts.

But not all districts and schools will look the same, with online or inperson learning dependent on local coronavirus case counts, space constraints, labor contracts, finances and other criteria.

Many district officials plan to start the year providing virtual learning only and phase in a return to school, while others vow to reopen fully, with health precautions in place. Yet students would probably need to return to distance learning if someone has tested positive in their designated group.

School reopenings will come with a litany of new rules.

Online extra

Interactive graphic shows what a day at school might look like when students return to the classroom.

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What that will look like, what it will feel like, is still unknown in many districts, but, based on health guidelines and proposed district plans, we’ve compiled several scenarios, and asked teachers and officials to imagine those first days of school in the fall.

Half of a thirdgrade class lines up outside a classroom, 6 feet apart, masks on. Typically, the teacher would greet each student with a fist bump or choreographed handshake. Instead, he stands back as Group A students file to their desks. The other half,

Group B, is at home, waiting for lessons via videoconference. Those at home will swap with the other group for inperson instruction the following week. The kids in the classroom are instructed not to touch the guitars, keyboards or ukuleles hanging on the walls, or the other curiosities and items their veteran teacher has collected as teaching tools over the years. They are prohibited from gathering on the carpet where normally they would sit hip to hip for readaloud time. Instead, the teacher leads a morning class cheer using sign language, so students avoid yelling or singing, reducing the chance of coronavirus spread.

The scenario is a little sad, said Mark Rosenberg, a thirdgrade teacher at San Francisco’s Monroe Elementary. Air highfives can be a suitable substitute for a greeting, but how will he teach music or science to students who can’t be near him or each other? The San Francisco teacher will have to rethink his lesson gathering students around a pine cone to study the spiral that illustrates the Fibonacci Sequence.

Each student will have to have their own pine cone, he said. No sharing. No way to show a classmate their discovery from 6 feet away.

“I can’t imagine teaching the way I used to teach,” he said. “It’s very hard for me to imagine that whole future.”

That said, Rosenberg said teaching has always been about solving problems, and that’s his favorite part of the job.

“The part of me that likes solving puzzles is excited about figuring all this out,” he said. “I look at this as how can I do some variances of the things we do.”

The fourthgrade teacher urges his class of students to simmer down. In prepandemic days, he would gather them together for circle time, allowing them to center themselves, to air grievances, to share whatever is on their minds so they can then focus on school work. Instead, the students are instructed to stay in their seats to share. One student discloses something that happened over the weekend while his classmates shift awkwardly in their seats to see who’s talking. They can’t hear because of the mask muffling the words. Students fidget. “I can’t hear you,” several say. They are frustrated. They are not ready to learn.

Mark Sanchez, San Francisco school board president and a fourthgrade teacher in Brisbane, desperately waits for a vaccine so his classroom can go back to how it was before. The social distancing and mask requirements are antithetical to what classrooms are supposed to feel like, he said.

“There wouldn’t be that warm, cozy feeling,” he said of circle time at desks rather than on the floor. “The overall feeling will be antiseptic in general.”

He imagines hallways with health posters reminding stu

dents to wash hands and keep their masks on all day, where there should be reminders of upcoming student concerts or displays of group projects.

“Kids hug their teachers, that’s something that would be out the door as well,” he said. “The emotional toll that it’s going to take on kids is going to be pretty high.”

The seventhgrader in the back of math class has his head down on his desk. “Are you OK?” the teacher asks. “I don’t feel good,” the boy says. The teacher quickly notifies the office staff and the student is immediately sent to a designated room on the middle school campus, where a trained staff member or nurse takes his temperature and asks him screening questions. He has some of the symptoms of COVID19, staff determine, and he’s placed in an isolation room while his parents are called. Two days later, the school is notified the student has tested positive for the coronavirus. His cohort of 100 students, who are clustered into classes together, as well as their teachers, are told to stay home for 14 days in quarantine. Their instruction for the next two weeks is online.

Without a vaccine, sending students back to school will carry a risk of transmission, district and health officials say. It is likely there will be positive cases in schools, resulting in the quarantine of some students and staff.

It is a risk school officials say they are willing to take, given the health and welfare of students, who belong in school. It is a position backed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which advocates that all education policy decisions on reopening start with the goal of returning students to school as soon as possible.

“My belief system is the best place for a kid is in school,” said Mary Jane Burke, Marin County superintendent of schools. “It’s a risk. There’s a lot of things in society that are a risk.”

Inside the high school cafeteria, a student sits alone at a table with a laptop, as her physics teacher, via videoconference, describes harmonic oscillation using a pendulum. Most of the other students are at home for the class, but the girl has limited access to the internet at home so she spends part of the day at school in areas designated for remote instruction. The high school started the year doing nearly all instruction remotely, although some specialneeds students are in class on campus. Inclass instruction will phase in later in the year, but for now, the library and other rooms are open to students who want to use the school’s computers or the reliable WiFi to attend class.

A decision to start the year mostly using remote instruction would not be an easy one, but that’s the proposed plan in the San Mateo Union High School District, said Superintendent Kevin Skelly. Parents are actively protesting distance learning.

But the plan is to open campuses with teachers in their classrooms and most students at home, while some use the school’s designated rooms to participate online. A fivephase plan would allow the district to slowly reopen to more students in the coming weeks or reverse course to online learning if coronavirus cases spike in the community.

While many officials in other communities are pushing ahead with inclass instruction for most if not all students, Skelly said that might not be the best course of action for all districts.

In San Mateo, a poll conducted by the teachers union found that twothirds preferred to start the year using only distance learning due to health concerns.

“Will twothirds not report to work? I don't know the answer to that,” he said. “It’s a question of what’s the right thing to do.”

With about two months before the first day of school, district officials are still trying to figure that out, while individually deciding whether they can return to facetoface learning based on personal health issues.

Marin County middle school teacher Andrea Gough is trying to imagine 30 or so seventhgraders flowing in and out of her classrooms, the desks spaced 4 feet apart if possible, per county guidelines, their adolescent tendencies pushing the boundaries of social distancing and constant use of a mask indoors.

She wonders about the possibility of hazard pay given the risks. She fears substitutes won’t want to cover for teachers who call in sick. She fears the escalating number of cases in California and wonders whether schools will really reopen classrooms in six to eight weeks and whether anyone will be there to teach them.

“There are people who are definitely going to take leave because they can’t afford the risk,” she said. “At what point will so many teachers need to make that tough choice that it will be untenable to go back anyway?”