A letter to school board and administrative staff

Dear [school board and top administrators]:

Like you (I am sure), I have been giving a lot of thought to school reopening in the fall; I am literally losing sleep (hence the time stamp on this email). Thank you for surveying the staff and families about options. I suspect you have come to the conclusion that there are no good choices, only less bad ones. I personally have volunteered to teach my classes at [my university] face-to-face; but in light of the increasing prevalence of COVID in [our state], I am less and less sure that is a good idea, even for my classes that are smaller and less socially complex than classrooms full of children. I am particularly concerned about the [middle] school building, with few windows that would allow immediate fresh air to ventilate classrooms.

The more I think about it, the more I have circled back to the following principles that I would like to see govern the return to school in the fall:

• No staff member or students should be required to be in a school building unless they volunteer to be present
• Students with special educational needs and whose families cannot manage with them continuing to be at home should have top priority for being supervised at school.
• Regular in-building instruction should resume only when COVID is not still actively circulating in our community, according to public health authorities, and even then we probably need social distancing measures to begin.

These principles to me imply that the district should adopt a flipped-classroom model. Here's what I would suggest:

• All formal instruction takes place online, with Chromebooks issued to students and financial support for internet access for families who cannot afford it on their own. As occurred in spring, minimize the requirement to attend sychronous sessions (but make them available), to prevent bandwidth conflicts within households.
• The school buildings are opened up with staff and other supervising adults (volunteers?) who are willing to be physically present. The combination of the number of voluntarily-present adults plus social distancing factors should determine how many children can be present at the school together. The in-person adults can then a) supervise the work of students who need direction to get going and stay on task; b) provide additional tutoring and instruction to meet the needs of the particular students they have with them.
• Priority for access to the in-person building time should be explicitly allocated to families with the greatest needs (I don't have a system for determining priorities, but I assume school administrators including guidance counselors will have a good sense of this). The district should explicitly encourage families who can manage with their children at home and whose students will suffer the least from continued lockdown not to opt for the in-person option. Note that access to the physical school could rotate, or people could sign up on a drop-in model so that even mostly locked-down students could have some opportunity to connect with peers in person.
• Everyone in the building needs to wear a mask.
• Return to in-school instruction should not begin until the public health gating criteria indicate that it is safe to do so. I personally consult the [state recovery] plan every day; although [our state] was briefly at 5 out of 6 green lights, we are currently back down to 2 out of 6 gating criteria met. Even then, students and staff will need to practice social distancing until COVID is not actively circulating in the US or most of us are vaccinated.

I know that this will not be an easy decision to make. I am an educator myself and have placed a central value on education in my life. But I do not want our students and staff to face death or life-long health effects for the sake of keeping up with standards of achievement that were imposed in more normal times. We continue in a state of emergency, and our choices about how to proceed should reflect that state of emergency--the situation is substantially worse now in [our state] than it was four months ago when the schools (rightly) shut down. Humans have a long adolescence. For those who survive this pandemic, there will be plenty of time to make up for "lost" learning. Let's maximize the numbers of our children and staff who have that opportunity.

Sincerely

Amanda

An Open Letter to Wisconsin Republican Legislators

Dear Legislators

I am writing to appeal to you to get the Republican leadership in Wisconsin to cooperate with Governor Evers on finding a way to end COVID-19—even if that means ordering Wisconsin residents to wear masks in all public settings and temporarily shutting down businesses, churches, and other organizations again.

It is clear from the public health data that Wisconsin is on the cusp of tipping over into an outbreak of COVID that resembles the situations in Florida, Arizona, and Texas, which have become dire in the past week. Cases of COVID are steadily increasing, and they have been since Wisconsin reopened after the state supreme court decision setting aside the governor’s Safer at Home order. If this continues unchecked, we will soon arrive at the point where our hospitals are overwhelmed and cannot provide adequate treatment either to COVID patients or to people with other health emergencies.

My family and I have spent the past four months locked down at home, going out only for food and medicine, public service, and a tiny bit of outdoor recreation. We wear masks everywhere, even walking around our low-density neighborhood. Although my gym has reopened, I have not gone back to it. We are trying to model responsible behavior for our children as well as to protect our neighbors in case we are infected unawares. Even though the Safer at Home order was no longer in effect, it was evident that the key to beating the virus is to drastically reduce the number of potential transmissions.

But my family simply cannot do this alone. My children want to go back to school in the fall. They will not be able to do so unless the pandemic is under control. It was the right decision for schools to shut down in March with only a few cases circulating in Wisconsin, and it would be the height of recklessness to reopen them in September if the caseload is still growing—teachers and students will die and suffer lifelong effects of illness if schools are reopened too early. It is clear from worldwide evidence that the only situation that will allow safe reopening of schools is the virus is no longer in wide circulation in our communities. The only way to get that result six weeks from now is to get Wisconsin residents to stay home now and wear masks when they go out. And given the state of politics in Wisconsin, only the Republican leadership can make these things happen.

Please do the right thing for the people of Wisconsin, step up to promote sensible and mandatory public health measures, and turn the spread of COVID around.

Sincerely

Amanda Seligman