HELP Us Change Our Mind and (Not) Open Schools Too Soon

By Drew Catt

As a native of Indiana and science fiction fan, I grew up loving Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and was downright giddy when Stranger Things lasted more than just one season. Both of those storylines, in some ways, seem more plausible than what we’ve been experiencing in 2020.

While I certainly have my own thoughts on what the not-so-distant future might look like that I’d be more than happy to share over a virtual happy hour or during a socially-distant meander through nature, the thing that has been mostly on my mind is how in the bloody hell schools are going to have students physically attend classes in the fall.

As someone who works in the world of education policy research and evaluation, I’m excited to see entrenched districts finally adjust in ways that are more focused on individual learners. As a pragmatist with a spouse who teaches at a large public high school and who falls into one of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) buckets of “higher risk for severe illness” from COVID-19, I’m “Scooby Doo and Shaggy encounter a specter”-level frightened of schools fully opening in the fall.

I’d normally label myself as extremely risk tolerant. These are not normal times.

Some are saying the United States is already experiencing its second wave of the virus. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington is estimating that the number of deaths from COVID-19 will increase about one-third in the United States within the next eight weeks — before most schools would normally start — and another model is predicting the number of deaths from COVID-19 could potentially double in the United States by September 1st.