Mike Parker: Students will return to school in August – sort of

When Gov. Roy Cooper announced at his press conference Tuesday that North Carolina will reopen schools with both in-person and remote education, the in-person option is perhaps the most difficult to achieve. Possible plans the governor earlier outlined were:

Plan A to have provided minimal social distancing;

Plan B to increase social distancing with schools at no more than 50 percent capacity and buses at no more than 33 percent capacity; and

Plan C to provide only for remote instruction.

Plan A would have been pretty much business as usual. School systems would have done their best to provide social distancing, but most classrooms would have appeared pretty much the same as in years past. In the face of rising COVID-19 cases with no vaccination in place, that option was kicked to the curb.

Plan C, remote instruction via the internet, may sound good, but the truth is infrastructure does not exist in large parts of the state to pull off online instruction only. Even in places that have high speed internet readily available, many North Carolina students and their families lack resources to make remote learning a viable option. The governor’s announcement did allow for remote-only instructions for systems with sufficient resources.

Another problem: Plan C turns parents into de facto teachers, essentially implementing a hybrid of homeschool-public school instruction. Someone in the home must still make sure the students are online at the appropriate times and are doing assignments. Since students often have questions and uncertainties about assignments, many parents face this prospect with trepidation.

Plan B is going to be the most disruptive plan to the normal lives of families. I have neither time nor space to go point by point though Plan B, so let me deal with just a couple of points.

First, if only 50 percent of the students can attend school at any given time, then what happens to the other 50 percent? For many working parents, schools are the chief means of “childcare” during the school day. From the time the children get on the bus until they are delivered home in the afternoon, parents are assured their children are supervised and, hopefully, safe. For Plan B to work, employers must be flexible to accommodate the childcare concerns of their employees.

I have heard several possible schedules for schools under Plan B. One plan would allow one-half the students on campus in the morning and the other half in the afternoon. In this scenario, buses will have to run routes at least twice a day, maybe more, since bus capacity cannot exceed 33 percent. If we assume 50 kids normally ride the bus to and from school, then the number of riders at a single time drops to 16. To achieve true social distancing, the number would drop even lower, perhaps as low as eight riders. What will multiple school bus routes do to the transportation budgets of school systems?

Next issue: what happens to the 50 percent of kids who are not in morning classes? Who watches them? What happens to the morning students who spend their afternoons at home?

I have also heard plans that bring students to school for a full day – every other day. Students on the Week A schedule would attend school Monday, Wednesday and Friday one week and Tuesday and Thursday the next week. Week B students would have an opposite schedule: Tuesday and Thursday when the Week A kids are going Monday, Wednesday and Friday … but you get the picture.

Perhaps you may think the answer lies in opening more classrooms and hiring more teachers. Where will these classrooms come from? Few schools have sufficient empty classrooms to accommodate the other 50 percent of the students.

Have you heard of the teacher shortage in North Carolina – and across the nation? Not only is North Carolina thousands of teachers short right now, but enrollment in teacher-education programs is also shrinking. In 2018 enrollment in teacher-preparation programs had dropped 25 percent.

Systems will have to be creative in scheduling to meet the conflict demands of Plan B requirements and the needs of working parents.

Hopefully, the needs of students will not get lost in the shuffle.

Mike Parker is a columnist for Neuse News. You can reach him at mparker16@gmail.com.