America's Public Schools Re-opening: A Slam! Dunk!
**https://www.dailynews.com/2021/02/04/healthcare-providers-pen-open-letter-calling-for-schools-in-l-a-county-to-reopen/
Okay, social distancing in the illustration accompanying the LA DAILY NEWS article ** cuts classroom capacity roughly in half. Simple math suggests that you would need an additional teacher - at a minimum. That simple math assumes no additional staff in the classroom. However, since the advent of mainstreaming students requiring a variety of different support personnel, social distancing will be very difficult to impossible (?) to maintain.
Now let’s also consider instructional techniques that require working in small groups, classrooms that didn’t have adequate numbers of tech equipment for each student to force students to work in small groups, and rolling shortages of hygiene supplies that could increase potential for asymptomatic spread of a deadly virus. There is also the reality that older and newer campuses have cold zones and hot zones that in pre-COVID times took whole semesters to be corrected in windowless classrooms especially.
Also, can we talk about increased staff during lunch and recess to manage social distancing? In most schools teachers are doing prep, writing IEPs, meeting with colleagues and or parents and or administrators and taking breaks and lunch periods when students are at lunch and or recess.
Teaching before the pandemic and during the current crisis was always more than a 40- hour work week. Moving to virtual and or virtual/hybrid formats has increased the standard 50-60 hour work week for all teachers who previously had the luxury of choosing how much technology they used daily in their praxis.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. As long as additional human resources and finances are no objects, re-opening before Fall 2021 could be a slam dunk!
This is what comes of people who haven't worked in public schools since they were in their K-12 years demanding schools reopen ASAP.
(C) VernonNickersonSchoolcoach 2021
