How to Determine If Your School District Is Enough
I’m still looking forward to the moment when the image of the school that will look this fall will change from damn gloomy to something, at least visible. Face-to-face education carries enormous public health risks. Fully digital learning is difficult for some students and impossible for others. And the combination of both is a material nightmare for working parents. It’s like picking one damaged apple out of a basket of damaged apples – which one is the most rotten inside?
Several major cities – New York, Los Angeles, San Diego – have announced plans to return to school, which could be part-time or fully online. Meanwhile, the Orange County Board of Education recommends the exact opposite – returning to full-time education without masks or other social distancing requirements. And many of us are still holding our breath, not knowing where our areas will be in the range from “ugh” to “ugh”.
So much of this is out of our control. Our personal preferred strategies may not even be feasible. You may want to study at home, but you still have to work. You might want to pay someone – else for training at home, but you do not have to place it in the budget. You may want them to attend school full time and now find yourself trying to figure out how to manage their education at home again.
But, but there is one little thing you can do. One tiny control needle amongst the haystack that is this pandemic. You can view this report , compiled by researchers and professors of the Healthy Buildings Program at Harvard School of Public Health. And then you can compare it to your school district’s plan (every time you get that) and see where the discrepancy is. Because once you know what the discrepancies are, you can advocate safer action with your parent-teacher organization, school administration, superintendent, or school board.
The report provides recommendations for five aspects of face-to-face learning:
- Healthy classes
- Healthy buildings
- Healthy policy
- Healthy Schedule
- Healthy activities
The authors provide a summary, background and risk reduction strategies for each of the five categories. There is a lot in this report – it is 62 pages – but it is organized in such a way that it is easy to skim through if you are looking for specific recommendations, for example, regarding the use of masks, as well as more detailed information on the problems we are facing. … collide.
Of course, the usual caveat applies: there are many suggested strategies here, not all of which will apply in every school or every classroom. But by noting how many or how many of these strategies your district is implementing, you can determine if they are doing enough – or at least as much as possible – to gradually reduce the risk if they decide to move forward. -personal education.