What hybrid learning gives my child
very day that our 7-year-old daughter gets to go to school is the best day of her life. On April 11, when the mayor announced that schools would not reopen for the rest of that academic year, she cried deep, heaving sobs, and so did I. For our child, it was an incomparable loss. School was where she was quickly becoming a person: a joyful, bilingual kid with a love of learning and a wide circle of friends, and it was gone.
Our home had descended into dystopia. I’m a public defender. My husband is a public school teacher. In my bedroom law office, clients in COVID-ridden prisons cried out for help nonstop. In his kitchen classroom, he tried mightily to teach his students, but also simply to reach them. We attempted to do our jobs in rotating shifts, and two overnight blocks, while volleying our 2-year-old son. And so our daughter bore the brunt, and stared at screens all day. Keeping her on task with remote learning devolved into an unending struggle.
This fall, the return to school — more accurately, to half-school — has restored a sense of normalcy to our lives. Disentangling the collapse of work, home and school has improved all three. We can focus on our jobs — moral imperatives, in addition to paychecks — and give my clients and his students necessary attention. We’re better parents because we have space apart from our children. But by far, the greatest gain is the return of our daughter’s joy, which she found on her first bus ride back to school.
We are fortunate that our daughter attends a remarkable school, which reflects the racial and socioeconomic diversity of our neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, and seamlessly integrates all types of learners. We marvel at our dynamic principal, our exceptional teachers, and their ability to drive a bold school culture. It is a powerful, tight-knit community that we cannot replicate at home. Parents’ overwhelming confidence in our majority-minority, low-income school explains why we have the highest percentage of students attending in-person in District 6.
Our experience ought to be a baseline expectation for every New York City family, and it is not.
Faced with the very real trauma of 20,000 deaths in two months, it is unsurprising that most parents were concerned about schools’ ability to keep families safe. Decades of educational neglect in poor, Black and Brown communities — the same medically underserved communities disproportionately devastated by the virus — compounded distrust.
Fortunately, New York City E BE OUR GUEST BY MIA EISNER-GRYNBERG data has borne out what scientists across the globe told us all along: Schools are not viral hotbeds, children are far less likely than adults to contract and transmit the virus, and they are vastly less likely to suffer its worst effects. Conservative — perhaps overly so — mitigation measures which keep sick people home, strictly limit the number of kids in each classroom and require universal masking, have driven COVID-19 in schools to barely perceptible levels.
Concerns that students, riding public transportation to old buildings, would be asymptomatic superspreaders, bringing sickness home to grandparents, have been proven false. Of 58,435 randomly-tested students in school — a five-minute, painless disruption, per my daughter — 78 were positive, or 0.13%. Fears that positive cases would thrust students between in-school and remote learning have been largely dispelled: At our school, we’ve missed three days. On every metric, being in school has been far less disruptive than remote school.
On the days my daughter gets to go to school, she gets to be a child. She gets to be with her friends, be fully immersed in a second language, sit on the rug for read-a-loud, have recess, paint and dance and make music. She gets to be a human being: to have her feelings hurt, learn conflict resolution, and become who she is apart from us. When she has a question, she can ask her teacher. When she wanders off task, they have the expertise to steer her back.
As currently constituted, our daughter is in a class of eight students, with two teachers. On in-school days, she is receiving focused attention that would otherwise cost tens of thousands of dollars. Accordingly, her learning on in-school days dwarfs her remote days, during which an unconscionable agreement between the DOE and UFT has left many students essentially unattended, despite our school’s superhuman teachers working 14-hour days, attempting to simultaneously teach kids who are in the classroom, at home, and fully remote.
In a civilized society, going to school ought to be a right, not a privilege, and certainly not an option. In these days of no good choices, we are fortunate for relative stability. We yearn for full-time school. But half-school is many times more valuable than the hell that was April. Eisner-Grynberg is an assistant federal defender at the Federal Defenders of New York. PRINTED AND DISTRIBUTED BY PRESSREADER