Should We OpenOur schools?
This week in one of the groups i follow online someone posted how upset they are with decision that schools will be online for the first quarter. Then there was lot of other folks mentioning that this is a bad decision etc. My initial reaction was- are these people ‘Mad’ , they don’t care about their kids etc , Don’t they understand the gravity of situation? How much harm this will cause. Did they even think of teachers?
Then i actually started to read the comments. There is one theme that i noticed. Most of these people are not privileged to work from home. They have jobs that they need to go and some of them are single parents and some with kids of special needs. Most of them have to send their kids to daycare or need some one else to take care of their kids when they go to work. I assume these daycare expenses may be also some considerable amount of their income. So Now if i look from their point of view — Yes it does not make sense why school should not operate?Why sending to school is more dangerous than sending to daycare? I don’t want to debate on that School is not a daycare. looks like in reality it is for some . Some of them even mentioned that the daycare they send to refused to provide access to internet or help students with their classwork as they don’t have capacity.
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This made me think -I never thought this issue in this way ? What would i want if i had to go to work and have small kids or not much support ? Now this argument to open schools from these folks is not nonsense .
This kind of highlights the clear divide we have as a society. The school which we send our kids did a survey and huge percent of parents responded they are looking for Online for at-least first quarter and not interested in sending kids to school. But i wonder what would be the survey result if its a public school in low income area.
I still stand by my decision on not sending my kids to school . But now i do understand (to some extent) where the other side of this argument is coming from. What can be done to ease their concerns instead of looking at this politically.
I think decision of opening or closing schools should not be at state level/ district level etc. Unfortunately even it’s painful to admit we still have a kind of class segregation in our school districts where there are some schools in wealthy areas vs low income areas. This is real though it’s not politically correct to say.Why don’t we use that , conduct survey at school level , see what parents want ? Make decision based on that.Provide alternate arrangements .
Providing safe or alternate environment should be a priority than just blankly saying “YES” or “NO” .
