A Plan for Reopening Schools in the United States in the Fall of 2020

Balancing the interests of teachers, students, parents, and school officials.

The reopening of schools as the Covid-19 pandemic rages across the country has become a cultural and political flashpoint. A FOX News host accuses experts of lying when they say it is too dangerous to open schools, the Orange County California School Board votes 4 to 1 to fully open schools with no mandated social distancing procedures or masks, while the counties to the north and south — Los Angeles and San Diego, jointly announce schools will offer only online remote learning. Then California Governor Gavin Newsom declares in California that schools will remain closed if their county is on a Covid-19 watchlist, while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis insists that schools are to open for full-time on campus instruction. This lack of consensus, inconsistent actions and raging debate reflect the chaos of our country’s reaction to the virus itself.

I teach high school full time in the Bay Area, and have a three-year-old daughter scheduled to start PreK this fall, so I am obsessed with this conundrum. Teachers are terrified to return to teaching. Parents are stretched in all directions and at their wits’ end. School administrators are hamstrung by politics both local and national. It’s a Gordian knot of epic proportions that must be undone if we are to salvage our nation’s future.

That teachers are even being asked to return to the classroom as case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19 are rising precipitously across the county is insane. Schools have been reopened successfully in other countries, but the order of operations in those other countries was get the virus under control, then open schools.

Keeping all schools closed in those counties in the U.S with rising rates of transmission might then seem the safest, best and most judicious path of action. Many have expressed this opinion, both on the news and in social media.

But this all-or-nothing approach fails to take into account mounting scientific evidence regarding Covid-19 risk factors and transmission rates. And it sets up an imminent deepening of our economic and social divide as those families who have the means rush to hire tutors and form pod-schools. I do not begrudge budding pod-school parents this inventive solution to the maddening dilemma of school closures. But a national flowering of tiny teacher-led home schools will contribute to the growing disenfranchisement of those families who cannot afford such a solution.

And to be clear, these days disenfranchisement increasingly extends to what used to be the middle class. It is impossible to square working full time with looking after children, and for many families with working parents, a free public school is the only safe and affordable place to send their kids while they work. Beyond the increasing social disparity incurred by unilateral school closures of grades K-12, irreparable damage has also been inflicted on working women. School closures caused by the pandemic have the potential to lower their earning potential for the rest of their lives.

Even if there were there an equitable way to move school instruction uniformly online in those districts that so choose, the fact is that there are other districts across the country which will insist on opening schools fully no matter what their local Covid-19 infection rates might be. If such districts do not take a balanced and rational approach to opening schools,those teachers who have a high-risk profile for Covid-19 will be forced to choose between their job and their health. The max exodus of high-risk faculty, or worse, their death during the school year, will in no way lend itself to the kind of business-as-normal reopening to which those districts aspire.

As Covid-19 case numbers continue to rise, schools are scheduled in four to six weeks to either reopen fully or move instruction completely online. Now is the time to put forth a practical and evidence-based policy that takes the risks and benefits of all the stakeholders into account, while minimizing damage to the health and well-being of both teachers and children.

The plan I propose is mainly geared towards the reopening and staffing of public schools, but it would be an effective strategy for independent schools as well. It is intended to go into effect as soon as possible and to last the entirety of the school year, because even with all the cutting-edge science we can muster, let’s get real; there is no way the coronavirus will be fully under control before June of 2021.

To start with I would like to acknowledge three key conditions:

The first thing to note is that scientific evidence suggests younger children are less likely to get infected with the virus, less likely to become gravely ill and less likely to transmit the virus to other children or to adults. Children are susceptible to a rare, treatable post-infection inflammatory condition similar to Kawasaki’s disease, but young children are otherwise less likely to get gravely ill. Children from the mid-teens on tend to reflect increasing susceptibility and severity as they reach their late teens and early adulthood. Risk, is therefore, age stratified, both for the children and for the teachers and staff with whom they would interact.

The second thing to note is that the condition of many public schools across this country are unimaginably dreadful unless you have seen the situation first-hand. Having begun my teaching career in a neglected and overcrowded school building in New York City, I have. There are schools across the U.S, both in rural and urban districts, that are old, poorly maintained, and ill-ventilated. Windows do not open, carpets and walls are moldy, and broken-down bathrooms routinely lack toilet paper, paper towels and soap. To think that these facilities, many of them overcrowded, can even begin to meet minimum public health guidelines for reopening is sheer lunacy.

The third thing to note is that there is good scientific evidence on Covid-19 health risk profiles for adults. Parents, teachers, staff and administrators provide the greatest risk of transmission to students, not the other way around. And while there are some healthy and young individuals who have suffered unexpectedly from Covid-19 infection, overall, personal susceptibility and risk is very much defined by co-morbidities and age. The more co-morbidities and the older the individual, the greater their susceptibility and the more likely they are to have increasing severity of disease.

Taking these three key points into account leads to the following proposal that would move all junior high and high schools in this country to remote learning and open all elementary schools to full time instruction while protecting the most vulnerable of the teaching population from Covid-19.

1. Split school age children into two groups — Kindergarten through Grade 6 and Grade 7 through Grade 12.

2. Kindergarten through Grade 6 will attend school, on-site, in small cohorts of 10–12 students per teacher. Grades 7 through 12 to be taught on-line.

3. Because the middle school and high school spaces will not be used for in-person instruction whenever possible these Grade 7–12 spaces would be appropriated for K-6 instruction so that on-site cohorts will have more space in which to social distance. In districts where it is possible tents will be set up on school or municipal property and students will be taught outdoors.

4. Teachers will teach either the younger students on site or older students remotely based on their individual health risk profile. This means that under these extraordinary circumstances in which we find ourselves, teachers with a secondary credential may end up teaching elementary aged students. And teachers with an elementary credential may end up teaching high school.

5. Each school system or district will survey all its teachers to establish an individual health risk profile. Teachers deemed high risk, and those over 55, will be given the opportunity to teach the older group of students remotely. All teachers deemed at lower risk and under 55 will be assigned to teach the younger students on-site.

6. Teachers on-site will conduct meetings online and interact with one another as little as possible in person. Meals will be prepared with social distancing protocols in place and delivered directly to classrooms.

7. Since middle and high school students will study remotely off-site, each student will be assigned an adviser, most likely a K-6 teacher who has been shifted to grades 7–12, who will check in with that student daily to make sure they are able to access their assignments and are on track to meet weekly learning goals. These teacher-advisers will have a roster of students, not to exceed 20, whom they track and report on daily.

8. All teachers will create asynchronous curriculum in their area of expertise. K-6 teachers will develop K-6 curriculum that can be implemented both on-site and online. Grades 7–12 teachers will be available during regular school hours for one-on-one check-ins and office hour tutorials conducted in Zoom or another video conferencing application to help students progress through subject-based content. Teachers will be given compensation and time before the school year starts to develop this asynchronous curriculum. When and if that is impossible, core and enrichment curriculum can be purchased through online educational companies such as Lexia, NoRedInk, Lightsail and Dreambox.

9. Families with younger students who are immunocompromised, who live in high-risk households or who can manage remote learning at home may opt to have their K-6 students complete the school year off-site. Those families will be provided the appropriate technology, and a hot spot if needed.

10. All schools will utilize a robust learning management system such as Canvas or Schoology and all schoolwork, both on-site and remote, will be assessed and count towards a final grade.

This plan calls for a sacrifice on the part of those teachers with a lower risk profile for Covid-19 who will be putting themselves in harm’s way for the good of K-6 students and our society as a whole. How will these teachers be compensated for this sacrifice?

Any teacher who completes the 2020–21 school year on-site and in person will receive full student loan forgiveness. And this program, call it the Teacher Covid Student Loan Relief Program, is not to mimic in any way the fiasco that is the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program in which 90,962 people have submitted applications and 845 have been approved. This debt relief program is straight forward. Teachers will obtain total student loan forgiveness immediately when they complete their last day of work in June 2021, not over a period of years, and not after wading through mountains of paperwork.

Those teachers who have no student loans outstanding will be granted a hazard pay stipend of $20,000 for the 2020–21 school year.

Since this propsal is intended to result in a coordinated national effort, the federal government will supply all teachers with a regular supply of PPE and sanitizing supplies, and teachers will be trained in how to use them effectively.

It is less than ideal for teachers to be adorned in face sheilds and masks while working in a school, but if teachers are protected appropriatelyand trained in health and safety protocols in the same manner that health care workers are, their risk of contracting Covid-19 will be minimized.

The plan I describe avoids a unilateral move to remote instruction for all grades. A full stop to on-site in-person instruction is harmful to young children and working families, and fails to take into consideration the varying Covid-19 risk profiles of different sets of children and adults.

While it is projected that up to one-in-four of the teachers in our educational workforce are older or in an otherwise high-risk category for severe Covid-19 complications, there are many young, healthy teachers who are at markedly lower risk. In schools and districts where there are not enough teachers with a low Covid-19 risk profile to cover teaching the younger cohort on-site, the offer of full relief from student debt is likely to draw an influx of well-prepared recent graduates of educational programs to the workforce when needed the most.

This plan balances the needs of children, teachers, parents and school officials, and would allow education to move forward in this country, even now, while the Covid-19 infection rate is decidedly on the rise in many communities. Similar plans have been suggested elsewhere, in the news and on social media. The critical difference in this proposal is that teachers working-on site will be compensated accordingly for the health risk they take on in this extraordinary situation.

It is an expensive plan, but the expenditures incurred will cost less than the considerable and lasting damage to young children and working families that will certainly occur if local government takes a blanket approach by either fully reopening K-12 on campus or completely moving K-12 instruction online.

I recognize that there are issues I have not yet addressed within the immediate scope of this plan, such as older students with learning differences, and the role of teacher aides and school staff in school openings. I welcome feedback, and further refinements to this initial framework. This proposal is intended to initiate a productive dialogue that will lead towards a strategic, uniform national policy to open schools with on-site instruction for younger children in a manner that balances the welfare and best interests of children, parents and teachers.

I do not pretend to be an expert economist, or a state school official or an epidemiologist. If there were in this country a unified approach to reopening schools led by a panel of experts in the field, I would not feel compelled to wade into the fray. But as it stands, I am a teacher and a mom who wants desperately for our nation to resolve this issue in a way that saves my fellow teachers from being immolated on an altar of ineptitude, and that will demonstrate to my young daughter that we live in a country that honors all its citizens as such. I am radically hopeful that if this proposal sparks enough interest among concerned educators, families and school administrators we will, as a country, unite behind one plan and move forward through this crisis together.