The new school year has only just begun and, despite optimistic Returning Strong pronouncements, the best laid plans of school administrators are starting to fray at the edges.
There’s little real news in reporting that COVID is also coming into classrooms, although thankfully with far fewer cases than in other areas. But maybe we should be surprised in the fact that “districts have been left flat-footed as they figure out how to provide quarantined students an education from home”.
Our overly-large school district has completed two weeks of the new academic year, opening with the very positive “Returning Strong” as the official PR department slogan. The superintendent’s many email messages emphasize that all will be normal (sorta), with everyone in-person, five days a week.
I suppose there is some justification for that optimism.
At the start of the pandemic, way back in March 2020 when there was much confusion around how the virus was transmitted, many people decided public surfaces must be at least partially to blame.
Which led stores, hotels, airports, and other public spaces to jump into a very conspicuous effort to disinfect every surface in sight. Assigning workers to continually wipe down everything someone might touch, resulting in a distinct disinfectant odor hanging in the air everywhere you went.
The pandemic is not over.
While I suppose you can’t blame people for wanting to just forget the past sixteen months and move on, we continue to be stuck in COVID limbo1 because of the far too many people behaving like the virus has disappeared.
We are about three weeks from the end of the academic year here in the overly-large school district, and I don’t know anyone who isn’t ready to finish and head into summer break.
Except maybe, district administrators who are planning a huge summer program for “roughly 35,000 students total, making it 10 times larger than Fairfax’s typical summer offerings”, mostly paid by federal COVID relief funds.