Speaker 1: It's Wednesday. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily Dive podcast
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, and this is Reopening America. The reopening
Speaker 1: of schools in the fall continues to be a contentious discussion,
Speaker 1: with some committed to on campus instruction and others only online.
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, San Diego, and Atlanta, three of the nation's
Speaker 1: largest school districts, said this week that they will begin
Speaker 1: the new school year online and bring students back later
Speaker 1: in the year. Illustrating the divide. In California, the Orange
Speaker 1: County Board of Education voted to support the return to
Speaker 1: school without social distancing or MASK. Laura Meckler, national education
Speaker 1: reporter at The Washington Post, joins us for more. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us, Laura, I wanted to continue the conversation
Speaker 1: about schools reopening. It's been a fight on all sides
Speaker 1: of this thing, and really there's been no consensus on its.
Speaker 1: School districts across the country are going it in a
Speaker 1: bunch of different ways. Some of the latest news we
Speaker 1: have schools in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Atlanta, some
Speaker 1: of the nation's biggest school districts, said that they're going
Speaker 1: to begin the new school year with distance learning. Students
Speaker 1: learning from home, and then maybe later on in the
Speaker 1: year they'll bring kids back to the school. Tell us
Speaker 1: a little bit about these plans and what we're hearing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just that, you know, I think we all kind
Speaker 1: of thought, I think as the last school year was
Speaker 1: wrapping up that, Okay, we got through this year, but
Speaker 1: of course by the fall, we're going to be back
Speaker 1: to regular school, right. I mean, as a parent, I
Speaker 1: certainly assumed that. But it's actually the coronavirus evidently has
Speaker 1: other ideas about what's going to happen. What is happening
Speaker 1: is that there's conversations and pretty much every across the
Speaker 1: country about how to do this situation. And there are
Speaker 1: some that you plan to open up as normal five
Speaker 1: days a week. That a lot of those are more
Speaker 1: rural districts, But now we're starting to hear from the
Speaker 1: big cities. And as you said, just this week we
Speaker 1: found out that Los Angeles, San Diego, Atlanta in addition,
Speaker 1: and also Nashville plans to start the year fully remote.
Speaker 1: So that means we're sort of back to where we
Speaker 1: started from in the spring. Now there's also quite a
Speaker 1: few districts who are looking at what are being called
Speaker 1: hybrid models, where kids are in school certain days and
Speaker 1: at home other days. The idea there being that if
Speaker 1: you kind of cut down the number in the building
Speaker 1: at any given time, you can allow for some more
Speaker 1: social distancing inside the classroom. So those are the two
Speaker 1: major ideas that are really out of the table. We
Speaker 1: have to go back to the concerns that happened with
Speaker 1: this past school year. Basically, everybody had to transition very
Speaker 1: quickly to this online learning, distance learning as it goes
Speaker 1: by a bunch of different names, and it was very
Speaker 1: tough for a lot of school districts to make that transition.
Speaker 1: They weren't ready, they didn't really have the right infrastructure.
Speaker 1: This time around, it's gonna be a little different. There's
Speaker 1: going to be a lot of the same I suspect,
Speaker 1: but where you started off a class here with a
Speaker 1: bunch of kids and you kind of got to know them.
Speaker 1: This year, you're going to start a new year off
Speaker 1: with a new teacher, a new set of students that's
Speaker 1: going to pose its own challenges in and of itself.
Speaker 1: This is going to be so difficult. You are starting
Speaker 1: out at the beginning of the year, you've never met
Speaker 1: your teacher, you're going to be covering all new material,
Speaker 1: and although of course there may be some review, they
Speaker 1: are always is somebody even maybe more than usual, and
Speaker 1: you're but you're in the new grade. In some cases,
Speaker 1: you're at a whole new school, and you're starting out
Speaker 1: remote or partially remote. I think that's a lot harder
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways. I mean, they do have
Speaker 1: more time to prepare for it, so that's the good news.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, as you said, school it
Speaker 1: out in March, but they have kids had already been
Speaker 1: with those teachers since the previous August or September, which
Speaker 1: I think is a big difference. One of the other
Speaker 1: ongoing concerns as well as the safety of teachers. Obviously
Speaker 1: we've talked about it a lot. Students are only half
Speaker 1: as likely to get infected by coronavirus or even get
Speaker 1: serious symptoms, but teachers are a different story. One of
Speaker 1: the statue you had in your article, there's an estimate
Speaker 1: from the Kaiser Family Foundation that found that one in
Speaker 1: four teachers are at elevated risk based on their age
Speaker 1: or underlying health conditions. So well, kids, you know, the
Speaker 1: man thing, the social distancing thing, the teachers that are
Speaker 1: dealing with them day in and day out. If they
Speaker 1: go back to full time learning at school, I mean
Speaker 1: that poses a danger there, right, I mean that is
Speaker 1: in the teacher studients are very concerned about that, especially
Speaker 1: for older teachers or teachers who have some sort of
Speaker 1: compromised health condition. You know, we don't really know that
Speaker 1: much about how much students are carriers for the virus.
Speaker 1: We do believe that they do not, especially younger students
Speaker 1: get particularly sick from the virus, But you know, can
Speaker 1: we carry it. We don't really know. There's evidence going
Speaker 1: both ways on that front. So the question is that's
Speaker 1: not just teachers also, it's cafeterier workers, it's bus drivers,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of staff, it's people who work behind
Speaker 1: the desk at the office. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: people in that building, a lot of adults in the building.
Speaker 1: So that is a concern. The CDC has said that
Speaker 1: obviously a lot of these decisions have to be a
Speaker 1: local decision based on what's going on there. Los Angeles
Speaker 1: and San Diego put out a joint statement saying that
Speaker 1: they were going to be learning from home at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the year. I think in their statement, they
Speaker 1: said something about there's a disappoint for teachers and parents
Speaker 1: as well. What did they say as far as what
Speaker 1: they're going to do to enrich that or try to
Speaker 1: get the beginning of the school you're going in a
Speaker 1: better way. They said that they're going to do more
Speaker 1: training of both teachers of how to make distance learning work,
Speaker 1: and also they're going to offer some training for families
Speaker 1: so that they can know how to interact with the
Speaker 1: system better. We'll see how much of a difference that makes,
Speaker 1: you know. I think a lot of us figured out
Speaker 1: in the spring that even for families that have all
Speaker 1: the advantages and really are not facing the kind of
Speaker 1: difficulties as some are, it's really hard, especially depending on
Speaker 1: what kind of kid you have. If the kid needs
Speaker 1: a lot of attention and you're trying to work from home,
Speaker 1: that's not easy. Especially when you have families that are
Speaker 1: already in a vulnerable position who are scraping by, maybe
Speaker 1: parents who have lost their jobs because of the impact
Speaker 1: of the crisis. That's even harder I think for those,
Speaker 1: and I just don't know how much training is going
Speaker 1: to really get you there, so will have to keep
Speaker 1: an eye on that. Sticking with California as an example,
Speaker 1: just to kind of illustrate how deep the divide is.
Speaker 1: So we have Los Angeles and San Diego saying they're
Speaker 1: starting the school year online. Orange County, which is right
Speaker 1: in the middle, their Board of Education just when a
Speaker 1: different route, they voted to go back to the old
Speaker 1: ways on campus instruction, no face masks, no social distancing. Now,
Speaker 1: the Board of Education there in Orange County doesn't have
Speaker 1: direct power to direct any of the school districts on
Speaker 1: you know, how to follow its guidelines or anything like that.
Speaker 1: That's set up to the individual districts, but the Board
Speaker 1: of Education is highly involved with the way they operate. So,
Speaker 1: like I said, just just illustrates the divide that's going
Speaker 1: on even within a state itself. What are some of
Speaker 1: the other school districts that are planning to reopen? Fully,
Speaker 1: I know you mentioned a lot of them are very
Speaker 1: rural districts. Yeah, I mean not exclusively obviously, but a
Speaker 1: lot of them are rural districts. And lets be clear,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're in a county for a state
Speaker 1: that doesn't have a lot of the cases, that probably
Speaker 1: makes sense. You know, you want to still use some
Speaker 1: precautions and modify your the way you operate. The CDC
Speaker 1: has a lot of guidelines for how to go about
Speaker 1: doing that. But let's keep in mind that these are
Speaker 1: a risk to going back to school, but there are
Speaker 1: risks that staying out of school as well academically, socially
Speaker 1: and from a social emotional point of view, is just
Speaker 1: can be devastating to be at home for children. So
Speaker 1: there are some districts that are talking about going back
Speaker 1: to all time, and I think that's what everybody would
Speaker 1: ideally like to be the case. But you know, I
Speaker 1: think what we're also going to see in a lot
Speaker 1: of places, and we already are seeing as these hybrid
Speaker 1: models where you're partly and partly out. That's what New
Speaker 1: York City announced that New York is a huge district
Speaker 1: that by far the nation's largest district. All of these
Speaker 1: decisions are very localized, and it's up to each school
Speaker 1: district to decide how they're going to do it. What
Speaker 1: do we see from the federal response. I saw Education
Speaker 1: Secretary Betsy Divas over the weekend doing a round of interviews.
Speaker 1: It seemed like she didn't fully grasp a lot of
Speaker 1: the issues. She was asked, what are you gonna do
Speaker 1: if a kid comes down with coronavirus? How will they
Speaker 1: be isolated? And she really didn't know how to answer that.
Speaker 1: Maybe she was just punting it off to a local decision.
Speaker 1: But what's been the federal response several these days can
Speaker 1: be more than one thing. So the message from President
Speaker 1: Trump and from Security Divoce has been schools need to open.
Speaker 1: That's the best place for students to be, and they
Speaker 1: need to open now. The CDC has also said that
Speaker 1: school should open, but they've offered a lot more nuanced
Speaker 1: of a message, like pay attention to the local conditions
Speaker 1: and keep in mind all of these guidelines for how
Speaker 1: to go about doing it. So it's been a little
Speaker 1: bit different. The CDC and the health of experts in
Speaker 1: the administration are not always exactly saying the same thing
Speaker 1: as the president. Laura Meckler, National Education reporter at the
Speaker 1: Washington Post, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks
Speaker 1: for having me. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been
Speaker 1: reopening America. Don't forget after today's big news stories. You
Speaker 1: can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every
Speaker 1: Monday Friday. So follow us on I Heart Radio or
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