With the focus on police brutality, the economy and the coronavirus affecting communities as a whole, education, particularly during these summer months, has been shifted to the backburner.
But with schools expecting to reopen in Mississippi in about six weeks, it’s time to seriously look into the logistics on how to safely resume educating the state’s children. The reality is schools represent the largest daily gatherings and pose the greatest danger to the coronavirus spreading throughout communities.
It isn’t just about the children either. All it takes is for one employee or student to get infected, and that person could not only spread it throughout the school but to the families of every person as well. Schools have the potential to be ground zero for a second wave, which means the return to education needs to be treated with extreme caution.
While I think the vast majority of the population has already been exposed to COVID-19 and either were asymptomatic or naturally developed a defense to it, we have no idea what could happen if new strains come about similar to how the flu mutates year to year. The dangers of the disease remain as prevalent as ever even if the mortality rate isn’t as extreme as originally projected.
Although it’s been out of the public’s eye recently, the Mississippi Department of Education last week released guidelines containing three options on how schools can resume in the fall. It posed three options: traditional - students being physically present in school as long as the schools can follow CDC protocol; hybrid - a combination of in-person instruction and distance learning; virtual - students continuing distance learning exclusively.
Most schools will likely opt for the traditional setting because of wanting to return to normalcy and being able to have the greatest impact on students’ education. I don’t think anyone would argue against it being easier to learn in a traditional classroom setting than it is through packets and online work, especially with the many distractions a home environment contains.
However, until we can truly get a handle of the pandemic and squash the idea of a second wave, I think a hybrid approach, at least in the early months of the school year, is the better option. The education board outlines “A/B days,” which would split classrooms into two groups and have the groups alternate days between traditional learning in the classroom and virtual learning. Group A would go to school Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and Group B would Tuesday and Thursday then reverse the days the following week. That would give both groups five days in a traditional setting and five days in a virtual environment.
The main advantage of this plan is cutting the amount of people at the school in half while making it far easier to safely social distance everyone. It is a lot more difficult to get children to understand the importance of social distancing, but having only 12 students in a classroom compared to 24 would make it much easier on a teacher to enforce.
What could also be done is catering different plans for particular students. Everyone learns differently, and there are likely students in every classroom that need less or more instruction. Students who show the capability to learn just as well in a virtual environment could go to school for three or four days in a two-week timeframe while others who struggle virtually could go six or seven days. There is no limit to the creative solutions available with the hybrid model, and it could ultimately allow struggling students to get more 1-on-1 instruction.
At this point the timing of a working vaccine is unknown and likely a long ways off so there is no perfect answer. But having a plan in place to limit the spread of the coronavirus is a much more appealing option than taking the chance of having schools become the epicenter of a second wave.
Joshua Campbell is sports editor of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him via email at joshuacampbell@columbianprogress.com.
