[JAG]

Originally Posted by Danny

I'm a school psycholgist in a management position and have been practicing for about 10 years now. As someone said, there are no good options here unfortunately.

There are a lot of factors that really are not being considered here. My responses are primarily for areas who are not in stage 4 of opening. In my case our county is on the watch list and already has a significant rise in cases. There may be areas where some of my points do not apply.

What happened in the spring was crisis learning, not remote learning. I can only speak for my district, but our planning, and training is significantly better now than it was then. As usual there will be variance but we have some teachers who are going to be doing a great job. Now will even a much improved remote learning experience be as good as pre pandemic normal schooling? Not even close. But is it on par with what school will look like with in person learning under these conditions? Possibly and in some cases in person could be worse. I can tell you some of our more talented teachers doing remote learning is much better than whoever we'd get in for an in person sub. .

Some practical considerations. There are huge sub shortages. We couldn't get enough sub coverage pre pandemic. With in person learning its due to a number of reasons its quite likely many teachers will be out and using their sick days often and we will likely have many classrooms with no teacher. And a lot of teachers who are not new have a lot of sick day. Not to mention time out if there was possible exposure.

Teachers are not health care workers. They are not trained in this. Teachers are scared, really scared. Scared teachers do not provide quality instruction. This isn't making sure a patient lives, its creating a learning environment for kids. Schools are not set up to follow procedures like hospitals. My wife works at a hospital directly with covid patients. But they have strict protocol. Not kids chasing each other threatening one another with covid. And along the previous point, starting on in person school where cases are high is just going to lead to shutdown and emergency response again, resulting in poorer remote learning. And for my county it currently takes a week to even get a test and a week to get results so again your going to have classrooms and potentially whole school sites shut down for weeks at a time to even know if someone was negative.

Mental health is a very real concern but this is true regardless of the learning model. Being at school 6 feet apart from everyone, not being allowed to play with classmates, do collaborative learning, play on the playground, having to wear a mask, not being able to come near your teacher, or having them back away from you etc.. these are not therapeutic conditions for mental health. Having more people get sick and or die are not good for mental health. We have many many kids who have their older grandparents as their guardians. Them getting sick or dying isn't good for mental health. Counseling services can be provided remotely. As a community we need to step up in regards to mental health, not just the schools.

Now remote learning has some major issues too. Some primary ones being equity and special education. Remote learning is really difficult for students who had school as their safe place and home is not a comfortable or safe place for them. These kids are suffering, though based on the polling we did, almost all of them chose remote learning for the year anyway. And while I do think kids with specific learning disabilities and speech or language can still benefit from remote support services, kids with autism, intellectual disabilities, significant emotional and behavioral difficulties and others in special day classes are the most affected.

All the options suck, but I am seeing teachers work their butts off all summer in prepping the best they possibly can for remote learning this go around.

This whole mess was caused by irresponsibility in the first place. We should have the virus largely contained and testing and tracing to a degree that in person learning could work and specific cases quickly isolated and dealt with. Back when we to crisis learning in the spring and shut down I was hopeful wed have the virus response managed and be back in to in person schooling now as when safe that really is best for kids. But were not even close.

This whole crappy situation is the result of our societal failings.

Thanks for your insight Danny, this is very informative.

Our school board had a meeting last night where they outlined their plans (distance learning to start the year, re-evaluate after Q1 ends in October), which were summarized in a 19 page document. One thing that was mentioned during the meeting that Danny alluded to above is that in a survey of teachers, over half of them had someone in their households who have complicating risk factors if they were exposed to COVID-19 and expressed concerns about working in person as a result. I am sure that was a significant factor in deciding to start the year with distance learning.