Reopening Schools: Some Districts Stick With Online Learning in the Fall

in the year. Illustrating the divide. In California, the Orange County Board of Education voted to support the return to school without social distancing or MASK. Laura Meckler, national education reporter at The Washington Post, joins us for more. Thanks for joining us, Laura, I wanted to continue the conversation about schools reopening. It's been a fight on all sides of this thing, and really there's been no consensus on its. School districts across the country are going it in a

bunch of different ways. Some of the latest news we have schools in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Atlanta, some of the nation's biggest school districts, said that they're going to begin the new school year with distance learning. Students learning from home, and then maybe later on in the year they'll bring kids back to the school. Tell us

a little bit about these plans and what we're hearing. Yeah, it's just that, you know, I think we all kind of thought, I think as the last school year was wrapping up that, Okay, we got through this year, but of course by the fall, we're going to be back to regular school, right. I mean, as a parent, I certainly assumed that. But it's actually the coronavirus evidently has other ideas about what's going to happen. What is happening is that there's conversations and pretty much every across the

country about how to do this situation. And there are some that you plan to open up as normal five days a week. That a lot of those are more rural districts, But now we're starting to hear from the big cities. And as you said, just this week we found out that Los Angeles, San Diego, Atlanta in addition, and also Nashville plans to start the year fully remote. So that means we're sort of back to where we

started from in the spring. Now there's also quite a few districts who are looking at what are being called hybrid models, where kids are in school certain days and at home other days. The idea there being that if you kind of cut down the number in the building at any given time, you can allow for some more social distancing inside the classroom. So those are the two major ideas that are really out of the table. We have to go back to the concerns that happened with

this past school year. Basically, everybody had to transition very quickly to this online learning, distance learning as it goes by a bunch of different names, and it was very tough for a lot of school districts to make that transition. They weren't ready, they didn't really have the right infrastructure.

This time around, it's gonna be a little different. There's going to be a lot of the same I suspect, but where you started off a class here with a bunch of kids and you kind of got to know them. This year, you're going to start a new year off with a new teacher, a new set of students that's going to pose its own challenges in and of itself.

This is going to be so difficult. You are starting out at the beginning of the year, you've never met your teacher, you're going to be covering all new material, and although of course there may be some review, they are always is somebody even maybe more than usual, and you're but you're in the new grade. In some cases, you're at a whole new school, and you're starting out remote or partially remote. I think that's a lot harder

in a lot of ways. I mean, they do have more time to prepare for it, so that's the good news. But on the other hand, as you said, school it out in March, but they have kids had already been with those teachers since the previous August or September, which I think is a big difference. One of the other ongoing concerns as well as the safety of teachers. Obviously we've talked about it a lot. Students are only half as likely to get infected by coronavirus or even get

serious symptoms, but teachers are a different story. One of the statue you had in your article, there's an estimate from the Kaiser Family Foundation that found that one in four teachers are at elevated risk based on their age or underlying health conditions. So well, kids, you know, the man thing, the social distancing thing, the teachers that are

dealing with them day in and day out. If they go back to full time learning at school, I mean that poses a danger there, right, I mean that is in the teacher studients are very concerned about that, especially for older teachers or teachers who have some sort of compromised health condition. You know, we don't really know that much about how much students are carriers for the virus.

We do believe that they do not, especially younger students get particularly sick from the virus, But you know, can we carry it. We don't really know. There's evidence going both ways on that front. So the question is that's not just teachers also, it's cafeterier workers, it's bus drivers, there's a lot of staff, it's people who work behind the desk at the office. There are a lot of people in that building, a lot of adults in the building.

So that is a concern. The CDC has said that obviously a lot of these decisions have to be a local decision based on what's going on there. Los Angeles and San Diego put out a joint statement saying that they were going to be learning from home at the beginning of the year. I think in their statement, they said something about there's a disappoint for teachers and parents

as well. What did they say as far as what they're going to do to enrich that or try to get the beginning of the school you're going in a better way. They said that they're going to do more training of both teachers of how to make distance learning work, and also they're going to offer some training for families so that they can know how to interact with the system better. We'll see how much of a difference that makes,

you know. I think a lot of us figured out in the spring that even for families that have all the advantages and really are not facing the kind of difficulties as some are, it's really hard, especially depending on what kind of kid you have. If the kid needs a lot of attention and you're trying to work from home, that's not easy. Especially when you have families that are already in a vulnerable position who are scraping by, maybe parents who have lost their jobs because of the impact

of the crisis. That's even harder I think for those, and I just don't know how much training is going to really get you there, so will have to keep an eye on that. Sticking with California as an example, just to kind of illustrate how deep the divide is. So we have Los Angeles and San Diego saying they're starting the school year online. Orange County, which is right in the middle, their Board of Education just when a different route, they voted to go back to the old

ways on campus instruction, no face masks, no social distancing. Now, the Board of Education there in Orange County doesn't have direct power to direct any of the school districts on you know, how to follow its guidelines or anything like that. That's set up to the individual districts, but the Board of Education is highly involved with the way they operate. So, like I said, just just illustrates the divide that's going on even within a state itself. What are some of

the other school districts that are planning to reopen? Fully, I know you mentioned a lot of them are very rural districts. Yeah, I mean not exclusively obviously, but a lot of them are rural districts. And lets be clear, I mean, if you're in a county for a state that doesn't have a lot of the cases, that probably makes sense. You know, you want to still use some precautions and modify your the way you operate. The CDC has a lot of guidelines for how to go about

doing that. But let's keep in mind that these are a risk to going back to school, but there are risks that staying out of school as well academically, socially and from a social emotional point of view, is just can be devastating to be at home for children. So there are some districts that are talking about going back to all time, and I think that's what everybody would

ideally like to be the case. But you know, I think what we're also going to see in a lot of places, and we already are seeing as these hybrid models where you're partly and partly out. That's what New York City announced that New York is a huge district that by far the nation's largest district. All of these decisions are very localized, and it's up to each school district to decide how they're going to do it. What

do we see from the federal response. I saw Education Secretary Betsy Divas over the weekend doing a round of interviews. It seemed like she didn't fully grasp a lot of the issues. She was asked, what are you gonna do if a kid comes down with coronavirus? How will they be isolated? And she really didn't know how to answer that. Maybe she was just punting it off to a local decision. But what's been the federal response several these days can

be more than one thing. So the message from President Trump and from Security Divoce has been schools need to open. That's the best place for students to be, and they need to open now. The CDC has also said that school should open, but they've offered a lot more nuanced of a message, like pay attention to the local conditions and keep in mind all of these guidelines for how to go about doing it. So it's been a little

bit different. The CDC and the health of experts in the administration are not always exactly saying the same thing as the president. Laura Meckler, National Education reporter at the Washington Post, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget after today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday Friday. So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast,