Let’s get back to school

I feel strongly that closing our schools for the remainder of the school year is a costly approach that will hurt our children and our community. In France, despite their much tighter control of individual actions and business activities, schools are being reopened.

Children are less susceptible to the COVID-19. Teachers are potentially at risk but they could and should protect themselves as health care professionals and others are doing. Our children are behind most of the Western world in academic achievement.

We have been expecting their parents to manage their online schooling even though they may be working at home or soon returning to work. Some are quite ill-equipped to do so and have no alternative solutions for child care. Summer activities like camps and enrichment programs may be canceled.

We should be taking precisely the opposite of our current approach — sending our kids back to school now and considering keeping schools in session throughout the summer. This could be an opportunity to help our kids catch up. It could also provide more, not less, control of their social distancing behaviors than an unstructured, unsupervised summer.

The budgetary implications might be heavy, but in this period when we are making so many out-of-the-norm investments, this should be one.

I know from my work with refugee children, our current approach means that the underprivileged will fall further behind because they lack the parental support and attention that more advantaged students are receiving. Catherine Anderson, Denver