Only one thing is certain: the 2020-2021 school year will be like no other. After a summer of planning by administrators, BoE members, teachers, and staff, ICSD has scrambled to develop a feasible plan to reopen school. With the newly delayed start for virtual learning on September 14 and physical learning delayed to October 5, ICSD has reevaluated the potential risk of reopening its doors amidst the international traffic of returning Cornell students. Their choice to provide students with the options of either in-person or virtual learning accounts for the enormous variety of needs and perspectives that IHS families and teachers have expressed. By offering both learning alternatives, ICSD aims to benefit as many people as they are able with the understanding that satisfying everyone is impossible. However, a barrage of unknowns and logistical issues relating to both virtual and in-person learning options have created many new problems that still lack solutions. Although reopening school strives to return a sense of normalcy to the chaos of the pandemic, the holes in the district’s plan add further uncertainty.
Over the summer, ICSD’s leaders have worked tirelessly to alter the normal education system to accommodate in-person learning during the pandemic. By modifying the structure of the school day and spending $1.2 million on retrofitting its buildings, ICSD aims to make physical school as safe as possible for returning teachers, staff, and students. Assuming that schools reopen as planned on October 5, IHS will be introducing staggered arrivals and dismissals as well as a new block schedule to reduce hallway traffic. ICSD also re-analyzed the ventilation system to make improvements to the air flow before students return in October. With face masks and social distancing becoming a necessary reality, gone are the days of busy hallways, friend clusters, and the five-minute frenzy between classes. When students return to IHS, the structure of the school day will be completely changed.
While these broad alterations to the school day are meant to improve safety for students, teachers, and staff, many specific details were not disclosed until the last minute. Communication during the summer was vague and infrequent, leaving families and teachers ill-informed to choose between physical or virtual school and unprepared for the school year either way. In an interview at the Ithaca Times published in early August, DeWitt science teacher Liz Quadrozzi said, “The district has provided a broad overview on the plan to return to school. However, it seems there are quite a few details that have not been included. In my case, as a middle school teacher, I still have not been told what my day will look like at the middle school or what the expectations for me will be as an in-person teacher.”
Quadrozzi’s statement is a testament to the many questions that remain unanswered: How will in-person classrooms be modified? How will social distancing be enforced? How will the district transition to full virtual learning, if necessary? The district’s communication on its reopening plans does not account for the problems that will arise from implementing so many changes in such a short time as well as the safety risks that remain.
Beyond questions of safety, there are also logistical problems to consider. For instance, ICSD has announced that students who are able should be driven to and from school, although students in need of a ride will still get bussed. Even with a reduction in the number of students per vehicle, keeping a bus clean and maintaining six feet of distance will be difficult. Additionally, the staggered arrival and departure times will force students to sit on the bus and wait for long periods of time in an enclosed, unventilated area.
Staggered departures between classes will reduce hall traffic, but according to administrators, this means students will have to wait in their classroom for up to 15-20 minutes between each class—an hour or more of waiting time each day. This inefficiency is only one example of the logistical difficulties that will result from the sudden changes in the school day.
Many students have chosen in-person learning because they are ready to return to an ordinary school lifestyle. But in reality, school will not be the same as it was before the pandemic. In addition to having reduced class sizes—decreased by half or more, students could find themselves sitting in a classroom watching an online lecture from a teacher who chose to stay at home. As of August 7, 32.5% of teachers and 55.9% of students opted to return to their physical classrooms, according to Deputy Superintendent Talcott. This statistic raises another question: will there be enough teachers and staff to supervise students? Allowing students to opt for in-person learning before determining the number of teachers willing to return to their classrooms resulted in a disparity in numbers. Although district administrators plan to honor both students’ and teachers’ choices, the imbalance of the teacher to student ratio presents a problem for ICSD’s current reopening plan.
With so many potential safety and logistical issues with in-person school, virtual learning seems to be the clearest and safest solution, but it isn’t without its faults. For instance, it is simply not feasible for many families who are unable to provide childcare due to work or those with unstable internet connectivity. As demonstrated by Distance Learning 2.0, there are barriers to overcome for online instruction to become an effective learning model. For many students, it can be difficult to connect with peers and teachers over Google meets, not to mention the nightmare of taking tests and submitting assignments online. For teachers, the problems include Zoom fatigue from speaking into the camera, compelling students to participate, and overcoming the technical difficulties of modern technology in order to teach a class through a computer camera.
Given the inevitability of virtual learning for all students at some point this school year, ICSD should have spent the summer focused on improving the online learning experience. Offering students the opportunity to go back to their classrooms has meant sacrificing planning time for virtual learning and signifies that a rocky start is almost inevitable for both virtual and in-person school. That being said, many of ICSD’s reopening decisions made between June and September hinged on many other factors, including government funding, local colleges’ reopening plans, and the perpetual shifting and spread of the pandemic. Waiting until late July to make last-minute reopening decisions might not have been ideal, but this outcome was only a result of the constantly-changing landscape.
With this in mind, other changes will need to be made in order for students and teachers to be able to interact effectively online. ICSD’s Let’s Talk! portal was a successful method for responding to questions over the summer. Maintaining an active and centralized communication network between administrators, teachers, and families should be continued in order to ensure that everyone is able to stay up-to-date on current information. Individual communication should also be prioritized between students and teachers for asking questions and getting feedback. During virtual class times, students should be given opportunities to interact with peers. Organizing small group discussions would push students to participate and motivate them to learn. Rather than focusing on testing (which has inevitably become an honor system in the new, virtual world), teachers should look towards other alternatives for students to demonstrate their knowledge, such as projects and written assignments.
For many students and teachers, choosing whether or not to go back to physical school has been a difficult decision. With strong feelings on all sides, there are still many uncertainties, both in terms of the pandemic itself and the plan ICSD has put in place. Students returning to Cornell from across the U.S. and overseas could potentially cause COVID-19 numbers to skyrocket in our area. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association, 97,000 kids were infected with COVID in the last two weeks of July in the United States, making up more than one quarter of the total number of youth COVID cases since the start of the pandemic. As youth infection rates rise across the country, ICSD may be forced to change back to virtual learning at a moment’s notice. Already, reopening schools in Georgia, Indiana, and Mississippi have been forced to shut down in their first week, while other schools planning to offer in-person learning have changed their minds before the beginning of the semester— including the Rochester, NY school district and even our own Ithaca College.
Regardless of the time that has passed since schools shut down in March, the pandemic situation remains unchanged, and large gatherings are equally dangerous now as then. The risk factors affect not only students and their families but also teachers, who might see hundreds of students each day, as well as the staff members who have not been given the option to stay at home.
With safety always in our peripheral vision, modifying the education system to meet the needs of students and teachers poses considerable problems. Ideally, reopening schools should feel like a return to normalcy, but in reality, it will be anything but. ICSD’s plan to reopen its schools has taken into account the needs of our community, but it is far from perfect.