A recent Morning Consult poll by Politico asked if respondents thought it’s a good idea for K-12 schools to reopen for in-person instruction this fall. Fifty-seven percent said it’s a good idea, while 26% said it’s a bad idea. That the percentage of in-person supporters isn’t much higher speaks to the extreme politicization of education over the past year. Yes, a global health crisis should be taken seriously. So, too, should educational regression and mental health.
Discussions continue about what the right course of action is for school reopening around a country with increased vaccinations and declining infection rates. The last year is a reminder that preparing for the unexpected is a must.
A fast-spreading virus has wreaked havoc across the board. Most schools were let out and reformatted to virtual, modified in-person, or hybrid learning in the spring of 2020. The idea that schools should continue in some form of off-campus instruction until the COVID-19 threat greatly diminishes or even disappears entirely is indefensible.
Many teachers unions have demanded to vaccinate fully before returning to a classroom with students. That may not be feasible. And according to Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for the safe reopening of schools.”
Schools must balance caution and protecting the vulnerable with returning children to classrooms where they can grow in knowledge and interact with their peers. Educators living with individuals or who are themselves immunocompromised should receive appropriate accommodation. But these efforts must be made on a case-by-case basis and not applied to the whole. If they are, the results will do much more harm than good in school systems nationwide.
As Kaylee McGhee White of the Washington Examiner wrote in January, for too many students, mental health is at a breaking point. Some school districts have seen a rise in suicides that are directly attributable to pandemic-related lockdowns. And last year in Texas, a 12-year-old boy, feeling isolated and alone from friends and frustrated with virtual learning, hung himself. His father says, “COVID killed my son. I think Hayden would still be alive today if COVID had never happened,” describing the pandemic as a “perfect storm for suicide and depression.”
The stress associated with a pandemic and how it has shaped the lives of young people has parents concerned. Now more than ever, parents believe their childrens’ mental and emotional well-being is being greatly affected as the pandemic drags on. Uncertainty about when children will be returning to regular school and finally be able to experience social interactions again is a major factor.
Quite simply, the reasons to keep young people out of a traditional classroom have all but disappeared. It is clear that keeping children and teenagers within homes, in front of screens, is extremely detrimental to their academic, as well as social, education.
Proceeding safely with reopening schools is not only possible but necessary. We don’t know the long-term effects of remote learning and limited, virtual interactions. But the short-term effects, ranging from struggles with learning to an increase in suicides directly related to the pandemic, should be more than enough to spur the change.
I think a lot of the disconnect on school reopenings is that there’s this binary debate about whether opening schools is “safe” or not when the honest argument for opening them is that it’s *pretty* safe and the consequences of keeping them closed are potentially *very* bad.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 17, 2021
The COVID-19 virus has devastated millions of families. Thankfully, there are several vaccines that are effective in dealing with this terrible and unexpected global health crisis.
There are no vaccines for the mental anguish placed on the shoulders of young people who have found the world shrink around them. Keeping schools closed any longer is not a risk that the nation should be willing to take. If schools remain closed until parameters of perfect health or vaccinations are met, we may see an enduring crisis of another kind.
Kimberly Ross (@SouthernKeeks) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog and a columnist at Arc Digital.
