School’s out
Children tumble off a yellow school bus, where every other seat is marked with caution tape.
Wearing whimsical masks—one has whiskers, another rhinestones—they wait to get their temperatures checked before filing into the one-story school building. Inside Wesley Elementary in Middletown, Conn., plastic shields rise from desks, and cartoon posters exhort children to COVER YOUR COUGH. In the middle of a lesson, teacher Susan Velardi picks up her laptop and pans it so her students can see the screen. “Look,” she tells them, “I have a friend that’s joining us at home!”
There’s a new set of ground rules in Velardi’s classroom. “Your mask is on, and your mask stays like this. If we go outside if it’s nice, we have to sit apart,” she tells the students, who will enter third grade in the fall. When one tries to high-five her, she compromises with an “air high five.” Other teachers pepper their lessons with reminders to wear face coverings and to wash hands. “We have to be safe,” a teacher says as she sits on a rug, teaching incoming first-graders how to draw letters.
This is what school can look like amid the coronavirus pandemic. About 130 students in grades 1 through 4 are enrolled in Middletown’s public summer school. They attend classes four days per week, with groups of students alternating weeks of in-person and online instruction. It’s a pilot program the school district designed to catch kids up on reading and help iron out the kinks for the fall, when millions of Americans hoped to send their children back to school. Kids would be able to learn, see friends and be with their classmates; their parents would be able to go to work. Even in a raging global pandemic, public-health experts say in-person schooling is possible, and classrooms have reopened successfully in countries across Europe and Asia.
But in much of the U.S., that’s not what will be happening. In recent weeks, more and more districts have announced that schools will reopen only remotely this fall. Money and time are too short to sort out the complicated logistics as the pandemic worsens in many states, spreading at rates that make in-person instruction too dangerous.
Parents and teachers overwhelmingly back the decisions, saying they are not
