Schools around the world are struggling to chart a path forward to open for the 2020-2021 school year, due to the coronavirus pandemic known as COVID-19. Colleges and universities with on-campus class settings have a particularly difficult decision to make, while in towns and cities businesses and working parents are waiting to learn what the school structure will look like — and for how long.
Courtesy of Pixabay
Families sending off their students to college and university residential dorm settings and off-campus housing face a new fear; will they be safe? With July already here, the decisions they face are imminent.
Post Secondary Schools Moving Mostly online
Some Ivy League universities have begun to announce how classes will be held.
Harvard announced on Monday that the entirety of its courses for the forthcoming 2020-2021 academic year will be moved online for the full academic year. It has also announced that it will allow only up to 40 percent of its undergraduate students on campus at a time. Freshmen will be allowed on campus in the fall, while seniors will be on campus in the spring.
According to Harvard’s announcement to students and families: “Students will learn remotely, whether or not they live on campus.”
Princeton has offered to allow students to return to campus for one semester at a time, though most classes will be conducted remotely.
Harvard’s undergraduate tuition of $49,653 will remain the same. Princeton has offered a 10 percent reduction in tuition.
Georgia Tech announced that it is allowing undergraduate students to return to campus this fall — without facemasks. In response, more than 800 professors and instructors issued a written protest.
No post-secondary school or league appears to have yet decided whether to allow fall sports or not.
Colorado Schools A Mixed Bag of Open, Online, Cohorts and Family Units
COVID-19 and Colorado School closures graphic (By Taylor Sumners)
In Colorado, public and private schools are considering options for reopening, with backup options behind those. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Those options including combinations of days-in-school with days online, rotating student grade levels into and out of school buildings, sending younger students to in-person classes, while high schoolers are online for the first semester, and any number of other low-occupancy alternatives.
Nearly every school district says that their starting plans will face challenges if and when they face positive cases of COVID- 19 associated with their schools.
In Chaffee County, neither Buena Vista School District nor Salida School District has yet to formally announce their plans, although each has sought broad teacher and parent input, and given indications of what their reopening plans might include.
Both school districts say they plan extensive communications to parents, students, and the community so that people get a full understanding of what the reopening will entail, and have asked that media refrain from parsing bits and pieces of information too soon, rather than the comprehensive overview they believe is necessary.
Ahead of those announcements, the two school districts will preview their nearly-final reopening plans late Wednesday afternoon July 8, for the Chaffee County Roundtable. County commissioners convened this roundtable of county leadership nearly three months ago to coordinate the county’s response to COVID-19. The goal; to avoid overwhelming the area’s hospital capacity while addressing public safety and economic issues.
Both school superintendents Lisa Yates and David Blackburn, say that they understand how critical it is to get students back in school, learning in as safe an environment as possible.
Yates has made a point of confirming that they will not begin the school year with classes conducted online, as the schools had to do to finish the school year, when in March in-person classes were shut down by a statewide “Stay at Home” order.
“It’s important that we get students back in class. It’s important that we get teachers back in class with direct student contact,” she commented in late June, while school administration and school board were deep in planning.
“I’ll be honest, businesses are waiting to see what schools will do,” said Chaffee County Economic Development Director Wendell Pryor. “It all hinges on the schools and how learning will be done – working parents need to know their kids are in safe, learning environments and they can’t plan until they know what is happening with the schools.”
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