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What the Botched School Reopenings Taught Us, and How to Do It Better
Can schools actually reopen safely?
After spring lockdowns, several state and local decision-makers went against the advice of health experts and reopened bars, gyms, and other risky indoor gathering places too quickly and fully, before getting Covid-19 spread under control. Infections surged, obliterating the gains made in lockdown and rendering school reopenings risky.
Already some schools are repeating the mistakes, reopening fully before the Covid calculations warrant and being forced to close within days. Yet many others have already decided to start classes online only. The bungled pandemic response has health experts and K-12 educators boiling mad as they scramble to figure out whether and how to get kids back in classrooms, on tighter-than-ever budgets, and sans any national strategy other than an unenforceable reopen mandate from the president and the education secretary.
“Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos are issuing demands, but they have not given us one thin dime,” says Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association. “They left us to figure it out on our own.”
