School shutdowns due to the Coronavirus pandemic have affected over 56 million students in the US, and their families. A new school year begins in Fall, and most US schools still do not have a detailed plan for reopening.

“It’s scary,” said Linda Carpenter, a fifth grade teacher at El Rincon Elementary School in Culver City, California. “We are supposed to hear the plans the first week of July—that’s less than eight weeks before the new school year.”

The Los Angeles School District has a task force that meets every Wednesday to discuss plans for reopening. Every Monday, all teachers can join what they call a “Listen and Learn” meeting to join the reopening conversation.

The plan they have now is to develop three plans: one for entirely distance learning reopening, one for in-person limited reopening, and one for a hybrid reopening of two days a week in-person instruction with safety precautions and distance learning for the rest of the week.

For Carpenter, who like many of her fellow teachers starts planning for the fall school year mid-summer, this means less time to develop even more planning.

Schools that are considering limited in-person instruction in the fall are citing plans for social distancing, regular testing, isolation plans, and regular cleaning protocols.

For teachers, the prospect of any in-person instruction in the new school year has them concerned for the health of their students. A fifth-grade teacher in Louisiana, Janet Wilson*, said that she isn’t sure if the students wearing face masks, a precaution experts suggest students take, would fare. “I can see it becoming a distraction, or even a liability if a child has breathing issues,” she said.

A study done in two cities in China (Wuhan and Shanghai) showed that when schools were opened, children had about three times as many contacts as adults and three times as many opportunities to become infected. 

According to Fauci, the decision to reopen school should be determined based on the level of infections in each community.

Teachers are torn about whether reopening will be better for their students.

Wilson said she feels more effective with in-person instruction. “I like to have discussions, small groups, kids getting up, partner work, writing conferences, etc., and I found that it was hard to carry out over a computer. A Zoom meeting feels very impersonal and distant,” she said. “There’s just something about being able to see their body language or that light in their eye when they get something. A typed response doesn’t do that.”

Carpenter, a veteran teacher, also feels that she was more effective in person, and was surprised to find that her students didn’t feel the same way.

In one-on-one discussions with her students on Google Hangouts, Carpenter asked them how they felt about their ability to learn and retain the lessons taught during distance learning. Almost all of the students felt they had a good understanding of everything they had learned during quarantine, and their weekly test scores reflect that.

But Carpenter said that attendance has been a big problem with distance learning. When a student forgets to log on to the Zoom lesson, the teacher has to contact their parents afterward to find out why.

Sometimes they are doing their online assignments and don’t set an alarm to log in when class begins, but whether it’s an accident or intentional, missing just one lesson is detrimental during distance learning. Teachers have been asked to limit live lessons out of compassion for what students and their families are going through during COVID-19. So when students miss a lesson, they miss the only lesson that week on the subject, and they aren’t likely to perform well on the weekly quiz.

Despite the health scares, experts are stating that kids need to return to school for their education and a child’s development. A pediatrician at Children’s National Hospital in Washington D.C. told the American Academy of Pediatrics, “Many children are reliant on school for free lunch and other meals. Other kids get special education services like speech therapy and occupational therapy. Schools are a real, clear piece of kids’ behavioral health support and community support.”

Wilson isn’t sure what her district is planning for the upcoming school year. “Until the federal and state government give out more guidelines,” she said, they are left to speculate based on the re-openings of other aspects of normal life.

*Some names have been changed to protect the person’s identity