Reopening plan a ray of hope
School officials across the commonwealth struggled with how to restart schools safely in the coronavirus pandemic. Nearly all reached the same conclusion — that beginning the year with online instruction was the best way to protect public health.
In Virginia Beach, however, school leaders adopted a plan that sets clear guidelines to welcome students back to the classroom — a blueprint that could well be a model for other systems in Virginia and across the country.
At the July 28 School Board meeting, members voted 8-3 to adopt a plan proposed by Superintendent Aaron Spence, which would begin the academic year with virtual instruction but transition to in-person classes.
This itself was nothing groundbreaking. All the school systems in the area adopted online instruction to start the year — including Isle of Wight, which reversed a plan to hold classes in person — with an eye toward resuming work in the classroom when possible.
But Virginia Beach offered a level of specificity in its blueprint that other systems did not. By establishing those metrics now, everyone involved — students, parents, teachers, administrators and community members — knows precisely what’s needed before the buses start rolling again.
Virginia Beach schools will use two metrics to determine how and when to proceed: the test positivity rate for seven days and the number of cases (per100,000) each week. Those numbers are tied to reporting in the Eastern Health Region rather than the whole state, making it more specific to the community.
Those statistics will serve as the guide as they are, for now, a relatively accurate indication of coronavirus outbreaks and spread. They are not perfect measures — again, nothing about this is perfect — but they provide the type of insight that should guide decisionmaking.
School officials didn’t settle on these measures in a vacuum. They used guidance supplied by federal and state authorities, along with the input by various health agencies working on the virus, as well as local physicians and health professionals in order to find a path that leans heavily on their experience.
Those metrics will shape when schools open, and for what grades, in order to provide the best possible educational experience under these conditions. Circumstances may change — the virus ebbs and flows based on behavior, as we know — but establishing this framework for safe in-person learning means everyone will be on the same page.
Even that plan didn’t inspire unanimous support. Three members proposed an alternative plan that would see students return to the classroom right away. That would be reckless, given what other districts have experienced when doing so, but allowed for a healthy debate over the merits.
In adopting this plan, Virginia Beach Public Schools have done well to build a framework that relies on science, that is clear and understandable, that communicates easily to stakeholders what is needed, and embraces a more flexible, less rigid approach to the reopening quandary.
All of that should make it a model for other school districts as well. Virginia Beach didn’t exactly invent the wheel here, but the plan represents considerable effort, thought and input. There’s little reason for other school districts to concoct plans out of whole cloth when this seems promising.
There is no solution for reopening schools in this pandemic that will win universal acclaim. Online-only instruction is far from ideal knowing that low-income students may lack reliable connectivity, that students with special needs thrive with individualized, personal instruction, and that many parents are ill equipped to serve effectively as teacher assistants.
But we also know that returning thousands of kids to facilities where they cannot practice social distancing and where the disease could spread would be a disaster. It unnecessarily risks the lives of teachers, staff and even students — as well as the larger community — when infected students bring the virus home.
There’s much about this situation that is frustrating, infuriating and depressing. This plan offers hope and we could all use a little more of that.