Pandemic Narrative Part 14: Back to School, Kind Of

First, the numbers. Cases in the United States: 5.97 million. That’s a number greater than the population of thirty different states. Deaths: Just over 183,000. In Minnesota, that’s more than the population of any city other than Minneapolis or St. Paul.

School for the staff in our district begins tomorrow. The meetings and training sessions will be held virtually this year, with an extra week of planning and organizing built into the calendar. Students will be welcomed back after that one-week delay, with hybrid learning in the elementary schools and distance learning for secondary, with the intention that the secondary schools will transition to a hybrid model two weeks later. However, any families who were hesitant about sending their children back were given the option to have them continue with distance learning, at least for the first trimester. Enough people chose this at our school that one teacher from each grade has been designated a distance learning teacher.

These teachers will still collaborate with both their grade level teammates and each other, and most of them will be working in the building with the rest of the staff. Most, but not all. One was granted an accommodation by the school district because they’re carrying around Covid-19 underlying health conditions, so working in a public building puts them at a greater risk. That walking risk factor? That would be me. 

Maybe this is a surprise to you. It has been to a lot of people so far. If that’s the case, it’s  probably because I decided it isn’t your concern and I’ve chosen not to share it with you. Don’t take it personally, since that describes most people. We all have aspects of our lives we choose to keep to ourselves, and since this is one for me, I’d rather we all just accept it as a truth and move forward without making an issue of it. In other words, mind your business, and have a nice day. 

So why bring it up in the first place, you might be wondering? It would be pretty impossible to write this post without giving you at least that much context. So, context established — let’s move on.

I stopped at school this past Friday, for an hour or so, just to pick up whatever personal or curricular items I would need before my classroom is turned into a day care center for the next x number of weeks or months. There had already been at least one email sent out from our principal by then that would make it clear to anyone paying attention I won’t be roaming the hallways for this year, or at least for some of it. It was good to see some of my grade level team and a few other friends and colleagues in the short time I was there, because I know the separation from all of them will absolutely be the hardest thing about teaching remotely for me. 

Don’t get me wrong: I know how lucky I am to have gotten this accommodation. With the number of morons in the general public either ignoring, disregarding, or not taking mitigation guidelines as seriously as they should, it seems likely that eventually some student or staff member is going to let a little Covid nugget piggyback into the school. Not ideal, but we’re talking about a virus that spreads aggressively, which means that old brick schoolhouse that’s welcomed me back for the past twenty-eight school years is not the place for me to be right now.

So, where does that leave me? As far as the job goes, eh, it’s not really a big deal for my part. I’ve done distance learning before. I’m not getting the whole thing dropped on me out of nowhere like the big ugly surprise it was in March. I had a trimester to find out what works and what doesn’t. I’ve learned a lot about the tech. Not everything will go right, but most of it will. The families I’ll be working with chose that model, which makes me hopeful they’re at least on board with the idea. There will be things about it that are difficult, but there are going to be difficult things about the hybrid model I won’t be doing, so it should mostly be a wash in the end.

I’m not expecting the job to be too much of a problem. In fact, I’m actually looking forward to taking on some of the challenges. So I’m ready for the job. I’m anxious to teach again, even like this. I’m more worried about all the other things. 

I won’t see my team. Online? Sure. Group messaging? Constant. But will I be there to laugh at the knock-off Pringles? The Asimov quiz at lunch? The hallway decompression after another day in the psychedelic monkey house? No. But they will. And they’ll have each other. And they will build bonds based around the shared experiences unique to this school year that I will only ever know about as second hand, at best. 

I won’t see my friends. I don't suspect I’ll be missing out on many happy hours or game nights or team building events on the weekends, but: Our staff shifted hard last year. There were seismic changes in the district with new schools opening, and a lot of my long-time friends left, as a whole bunch of strangers came in to take their places. In many ways, I started last year feeling barely tethered to what my school had always been to me. As time went on, I slowly got to know a lot of these brand-new people, and developed stronger relationships with some of the others I’d work with for years but had never known well. This kind of relationship building happens gradually, collecting the momentary experiences that occur and letting them grow. Sometimes relationships organically occur, and sometimes you have to decide to put in the work needed to foster them. This year there are going to be more brand new people walking our halls. Most of them I haven’t even met. They’ll be nothing to me but names on a Google Meet tile, and I won’t be much more to them than a ghost or a rumor. They’ll build relationships with my friends and colleagues, and I could be a year behind everyone else by the time I get my chance to know them half as well.

I’ll still have my role in the greater purpose, but I won’t have anyone to share it with in the crucial moments. Everyone in a school knows which kids are the challenges in which homerooms and which grades. We all have our people we can safely vent to when it’s necessary. We have the running jokes that keep us sane. Being a part of a school staff is very much a “We’re all in this together” feel, in a way people who haven’t experienced it themselves could not appreciate. This year, I suspect that feeling is going to be even stronger and more connecting for the people there. And then there will be me, the virtual one, the afterthought, the asterisk. We’re all in this together, and, ooh, that’s right. Someone needs to remember to tell him, too.

I selfishly hope distance learning does start for everyone, which is counterintuitive since the only thing that would make that happen would be an even wider and more aggressive spread of the virus through the community. But if things do get bad, I want my friends and colleagues and my students and their families off the front lines. I want to know they’re all safe, and I want to know that when I rejoin the world, someday, it will still be somewhat familiar.

It’s daunting to consider how it’s inevitable the world is going to move on, and that the school, and the school community I return to, is going to be very different than the one I’m sidestepping away from so I can stay alive. It’s also daunting to think about how the experience at my end of it will change me as well. 

There’s nothing any of us can do but survive and wait to see what’s next.

How to Fix School For 2020-21 and at Least the Next One Hundred Years

For the past several weeks, finding the best way to operate schools during a pandemic has been at the forefront of a national discussion. Most people agree that it’s a nearly impossible problem to solve, which actually puts it on top of a pile of several other nearly impossible to solve problems education has been facing for generations. That’s okay though, because these problems are only nearly impossible to solve, and not literally impossible. I know this because I thought about them for a little bit this morning, and I think I’ve got everything figured out.

Now, full disclosure: These hypotheticals would cost a LOT of money. There’s no way around that. But didn’t the government just issue stimulus checks like they were Bed, Bath, and Beyond coupons this past spring? I’d argue that with the size of our national economy, there’s money available to allocate if education is made a big enough priority (or, in other words, if it finally became the priority it already should be). 

So, let’s start with the easy part: How do we get through the 2020-21 school year? 

*Accept that 2020-21 is the Covid-19 Year and will be forever marked with an asterisk because of that, which — let’s face it — is already going to happen anyway. We’re in a pandemic. Don’t let the gravity of what that means diminish just because you’ve heard the word so many times in the past six months. There is no true sense of when this will end, or how much worse it will get before it gets any better. It’s a health crisis at a global level. We have to deal with it. So far, our country has come up with some spectacular ways of failing at that.

*Start the school year on October 1st. Go 10 weeks instead of 12 for each trimester this year, to allow for a built-in quarantine stretch between academic terms. Abbreviate the curriculum and eliminate the time used for baseline-establishing standardized testing. Use that extra month up front to give the active teachers time to plan out what needs to happen to make the rest of the year successful. I’m not saying the curricular specialists or the administrators wouldn’t have anything to add, but leaving thousands of teachers out of the planning loop is a waste of talent and creative energy and passion. Give us a rough outline to follow. Give us guiding standards. Then let us start doing the things we do better than anyone else ever could.

*Distance learning for everyone, period. The whole year. Let’s not worry about the time and energy that would need to go into trying to arrange a completely safe hybrid or full return. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than a whole bunch of funerals no one could physically attend. Plus it would take away all the stress related to wondering how each separate district is going to try accommodating their communities every time the Covid data changes a tenth of a percent. Remember — this is the year that’s getting the asterisk anyway. The school buildings could remain open to provide food service for families in need of assistance, and opportunities for students to meet in individual and mitigated settings with social workers, psychologists, speech pathologists, tutors, and whatever other professionals provide necessary services. But traditional classroom teaching? Nope. Just be sure you keep those devices charged. 

*Socialization worries? Overlooking the fact that socialization will be nothing at all like what people advocating for a hybrid model are hoping for, the districts can organize properly mitigated activities, perhaps weekly, for student and/or family participation depending on the course of the virus through their communities. Parents who are concerned about their kids seeing their friends can decide whether or not they’ll allow them to attend. Transportation would be provided to make sure everyone can get there. 

Okay, there we go — 2020-21, settled. Boom, we’re done. Nothing to it. Let’s move on, because we still have some work to do here. Now, when it comes to solving all the other problems school has:

*All teachers working with students through distance learning this year will be doing so with the maximum student-teacher ratio allowed for that grade level. This will allow hundreds of teachers to step away from their direct teaching responsibilities for the year, and instead begin working on reinventing the education model. They’ll be tasked with developing ways an equitable education can be delivered to each student. Covid-19 isn’t our only problem, folks. Systematic racism. Culturally imbedded sexism and gender biases. Fundamental disadvantages associated with poverty or language differences. The constant pursuit of eliminating the achievement gap. Varying opportunities available not just when comparing different school districts, but sometimes between schools in the same district. Schools have become the hubs of their communities, because they represent cross-sectioned samplings of the problems all of our communities face. Every person in education tries really hard to do the best they can, but too often getting through the school day is like swimming uphill. There must be things we could do better.

So what would a complete reinvention for something like this involve? As it happens, I have a few starting points in mind. 

*Keep classes capped at a maximum of twenty students. 

*Each grade level or department in each school should have its own administrative assistant, as well as its own paraprofessional to support instruction. (To be fair, I'm stealing this idea from a friend of mine who has advocated for it for at least a decade.)

*The number of social workers staffed at any building should increase by at least five times, because that many are needed. Really. They are. Additionally, Character Education, or whatever it would be called, would be raised to the level of any other academic discipline. Too many members of our society clearly have things to learn about getting along with other people.

*Speaking of curriculum, it would be reimagined from the ground up. The days of trying to accommodate specific numbers of minutes spent on each subject daily while using prepackaged curriculum plans as gospel truth would be over. Curriculum packages would be starting points. One of the biggest jobs those teacher Think Tanks during the Covid year would be reimagining curriculum in ways that would (a) address state standards and (b) efficiently integrate different disciplines into the same learning opportunities.

*All specialists would have adequate space and materials to work with. Media centers would be updated with current fiction and non-fiction titles each academic term.

*Get rid of the agrarian calendar. Instead of giving students a summer break (because it’s not really like a lot of them need to spend their summer helping to work the family farm anymore), give them four three-week breaks between academic periods spread out during the year. This will go far in eliminating the dreaded “summer slide” and the reteaching time needed at the start each new year to make up for it. I know, I'm not crazy about giving up summer breaks either, but we're doing bold thinking here.

*Extend the school day by an hour (and increase staff pay accordingly). Use that extra hour to give the students more time to eat their meals, more time to read, and more time to meet with the psychologists, social workers, and health professionals they need to see. And on the subject of health professionals, each school health office should be staffed full-time by one doctor, one nurse, one dentist, one psychologist, and at least one paraprofessional.

*Each school should be staffed by a minimum number of licensed substitute teachers, ready to step in and take over a classroom when the emergencies happen, because they do. Exactly how many people would be staffed in these positions would depend on the size of the building. If these teachers are not needed as substitutes, they would be available for classroom support or tutoring during their work hours.

*Finally: No more Flamin’ Hot Cheetos for snacks. Those are just wrong.

Okay, so — I think we all know this list barely scratches the surface about what could be done differently to make schools more effective. But I don’t really know if the original premise is that far out of line: This school year isn’t going to be any kind of normal. No solution will be great. We’re all just imperfect human beings moving into this great unknown, hoping we’ll be able to do our best with the unprecedented situation we find ourselves facing. But if there ever was a time to re-evaluate the way we do things, why not take advantage of a time when we kind of have to do that already anyway? It doesn’t hurt to dream. Procedures begin as plans, and plans start as ideas. Without an idea, there's no first step.

Pandemic Narrative Part 13: Stability Threats and Opening Schools

I had my first education course in my junior year — Intro to Elementary Education, predictably enough. Starting it was a big transition, signaling that I had dispensed of all my generals and was finally starting to work on my major. I don’t remember a lot of specifics about the class, but I do remember one point our professor made early on — the generalization that a lot of people went into education because they wanted a life of security. 

His point, essentially: “Your jobs will be more secure than most, because society will always need schools. You’ll have unions to protect you. You likely won’t be rich beyond your wildest dreams, but you probably won’t have to live paycheck to paycheck, either. Your work schedules will closely align with the schedules your children will have. All of these things will provide you with a fairly reliable sense of security that will enhance your quality of life.” At first it seemed like he might have been taking a shot at us for following a safe and easy route with the directions we were choosing for our young lives, but it was really more of a read on what he assumed we valued, and even a compliment for picking a career that could likely provide us with the kind of life we hoped to have. (Of course at twenty years old, we still had no idea how infrequently “easy” was ever going to figure into our professional responsibilities.)

Our education system is an absolute bedrock of social order. The amount of time, thought, capital, energy, and emotion invested into just its peripheries says a great deal about our collective priorities. Football games played on autumn Friday nights are such dominant community events that the results merit coverage on more than one local television station. Video cameras seem to spontaneously generate whenever a few dozen second graders climb up on risers in a gymnasium to sing about the United States while playing rudimentary percussion instruments. Which high school people attended sometimes becomes so ingrained with their identity that they’ll wear it as a badge of honor throughout adulthood. Several aspects of our economy are arranged around, if not defined by, the school schedule. How many families organize their lives by the school year instead of the calendar year?

We crave stability. We want to know our vehicles will get us where we want to go, and get us back home afterward. We want to know our loved ones are alive and healthy and happy and safe. We want to trust our paychecks will show up in time for us to pay our bills. We want to be able to rely on knowing Fridays are something to look forward to while Mondays are test of endurance. When fundamental stability is threatened or diminished, people have a hard time accepting it. 

So what happens when a previously unknown and potentially lethal virus becomes a variable in the equation? Where does it leave us when the stability we’ve come to appreciate and base our lives around is torn to shreds? Which of our priorities are revealed to be more luxury than necessity?

Well, the virus is here, so things are going to be different now. Being able to rely on the stability schools have provided throughout our lives is, in the best case scenario, temporarily on hold. Institutions we once felt we could rely on when situations became dire might end up losing some of our trust. Sometimes that’s fair, sometimes it’s scapegoating. Sometimes the truth will be on a spectrum somewhere between those two points. 

Speaking of truth, there aren’t many truths greater than the facts, so here’s what we’re looking at as far as our worldwide pandemic goes. As of the day I’m writing this: 

*More than 18.6 million people worldwide have been infected by Covid-19. The United States has 4.9 million, or more than one fourth, of those cases. 

*Over 702,000 people have died from the virus. The United States has seen 160,420 of those deaths. That number was closer to a still horrifying 36,000 less than four months ago.

*The state where I live has seen 1,670 deaths. Of those, 938 of them have occurred in the two counties where the schools of the district in which I teach call home.

*The most recent testing positivity rate in my state is 5.1%. Anything higher than 5% is an “indicator of concern.” That rate has been trending upward in recent weeks. 

This is what our world is now. 

The school district where I teach recently announced they’ve decided to open the year in a hybrid model, meaning the kids will be learning at school for part of the week, and at home for the rest. I can’t be much more specific than that, because there’s still a lot about what this model will look like that we, the staff, don’t know yet. If this hybrid plan actually comes to fruition, a degree of risk for students, staff, and families undoubtably comes with it. I’m personally hoping that while our district leadership engages in this thankless and nearly impossible decision-making process, they still might change their minds and give distance learning a hard second look.

This pandemic has made me acutely aware of the privilege I carry. My life is far from perfect, but compared to so many others I have to admit how unbelievably fortunate I am. I have that secure job I was able to pursue in college, and it’s given me a nice and stable life I try not to take for granted.

Acknowledging that, as I think about exactly what it will look like when the new school year begins, I can’t say I’m feeling particularly secure. I’ve said this before, and it’s still true so I’m going to say it again: I have already figuratively given my life to education. I’d prefer not do it literally as well.