No plan is the best plan for student learning right now.

Too many variables to deal with.

Health of students, health of teachers, safety protocols, reporting systems, contact tracing or the lack thereof, politics in an election year, parent concerns, remote learning, mental health, etc. You name it.

What complicates things is that nothing has really been done to literally make schools safer.

The only thing that my system has given me is a questionnaire from this past summer and a recent form about whether I wanted to have five free reusable face masks to use when school buildings open back up.

There has been nothing else. Not even one COVID test. No gloves. No cleaning equipment. No hand sanitizer. No concrete plans for having students come back.

There has not even been a questionnaire given to teachers about how they feel about returning to school buildings since the school year started. And it’s hard to go to daytime school board meetings when school days are remotely convening.

It’s even harder afterward the school day because of the workload.

In a regular school week, I would see my block students for five days a week and my year-long AP students for five days every two weeks. That’s 450 minutes of face time per week for those block students and 450 minutes every two weeks for the AP classes.

Now in Plan C, teachers are only allowed to spend 45 minutes per period in “synchronous learning” with the other 45 minutes dedicated to asynchronous learning. And Fridays are “Flex Fridays” – no classes are scheduled.

We go from 450 minutes every week (or 2 weeks) of face-to face instruction to 150 minutes of virtual synchronous instruction per week (or two).

Teachers are doing real-time teaching of the same curriculum with about 40% of the time. Maybe someone claims,” Well that opens up so much more time for teachers to get work done.”

Nope. That’s not the case.

Teachers in my system are having to constantly investigate ways to package the same curriculum in less time on an entirely virtual format with students they can only see on a screen. And with all the circumstances that accompany this pandemic and the effects on people’s personal lives, teachers are having to be accommodating to each student in individual ways.

Work comes in late. Still grading them.

Technology doesn’t work fluidly. Become a self-learned IT person.

Discussions and conferencing with students that usually occurred during “office hours” before and after school now has been extended to all hours of the day. Messages and questions received after 10 PM are just as frequent as those received during the school day.

So, then how about going to a Plan B hybrid? Maybe see students a couple of days a week or twice every two weeks to at least get in-person instruction? You just doubled the number of classes that each teacher has to teach as there will still be a virtual component that needs live instruction while there are physical students present.

And any momentum that was ever created with the current Plan C goes out the door. Plus if students / parents have the choice of whether to attend physically or virtually on a given day, then the juggling of just ascertaining who is where on what day will take up a lot of time.

So, what about going to Plan A? Send them all back? To repeat what was stated earlier:

What complicates things is that nothing has really been done to literally make school safer.

The only thing that my system has given me is a questionnaire about whether I wanted to have five free reusable face masks to use when school buildings open back up.

There has been nothing else. Not even one COVID test. No gloves. No cleaning equipment. No hand sanitizer. No concrete plans for having students come back.

Some might say, well we know that younger people do not “carry” the virus as much as adults do.

Please do not assume that each LEA or district or school or county or state or country reports outbreaks and cases the same way. So how many cases have been diagnosed in any of the private schools in the surrounding areas and regions? Not published. Doesn’t have to be.

Look to New York. Look at other countries that have “reopened” schools. There are school buildings being shut down again. And the seasons are changing. Flu shots are available already. Windows will need to be closed as the temperatures come down.

In fact, the metrics that a school system uses to measure the “ability” to go back to school differ from system to system as long as they are within a range. Do you know what that range is and what the numbers are for your system? I don’t for mine. It hasn’t been shared.

What I do know is that the number of cases reported on a daily basis in NC still rises and falls.

That’s from the state’s website today. 2,277 new reported cases in NC. The highest since July 18th. In a couple of hours, the school board in my system will be meeting to vote on a possible reentry plan.

Still, the only thing that my system has given me is a questionnaire about whether I wanted to have five free reusable face masks to use when school buildings open back up.

Nothing else. Not even one COVID test. No gloves. No cleaning equipment. No hand sanitizer. No concrete plans for having students come back.

No talk of if more medical personnel will be available. No talk of what actions will be taken to screen people. And as any veteran teacher knows, kids will come to school sick even when there was no pandemic.

There is not even a commitment to ask the state to wave testing of standardized tests because of the lost “face-to-face” time.

Yes, there is not a plan that is the best plan for student learning right now.

But, there could be a plan for safely opening school buildings, but it requires investment and input from the people on the front lines.

I will as a teacher ask you to consider looking at every school’s HVAC system, sanitary conditions, and how clean a place as big as our schools are on a daily basis.

Because in years of state surpluses, we still run out of paper towels in student bathrooms quite often and looking under each desk at the collection of old gum makes me think that we have a ways to go to even think about claiming things are really clean.

And I don’t want to even think about how bad some schools’ ventilation systems are.