What worries me most about schools reopening in the fall is that more people will die. Right now teachers are feeling like we’re rushing toward a reopening that isn’t well thought out. That’s why teachers across the country are talking about safety strikes and staging sick-outs. As I mentioned back in May, just among my students’ families and our paraprofessionals’ families in my small classroom, we had 14 deaths from Covid-19. I don’t want that happening again, and I know that my students are still dealing with that grief.
Under the current reopening plan at my school, we’re going to have three cohorts because we can only fit about a third of the students in the school under the social distancing guidelines in place. And that means that students are only going to be in school one to two days a week. But if I’m in the classroom on Monday and cohort A is with me, then cohort B and C are going to be home remote-learning. Who’s going to be teaching them that day? We just haven’t gotten any information or transparency on questions like that.
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