EPftF: Despair
Jun. 7th, 2020 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutWhen thinking about how to reopen schools / get back to normal / ensure that our children are educated in the Now Times, it is easy to fall prey to despair.
We may never have a safe and effective vaccine.
We might have a vaccine, but it might only provide limited and/or temporary immunity. Getting the disease might also provide only limited and/or temporary immunity.
Current cases / new daily cases in the United States / our part of the United States might remain stubbornly too high to safely open schools in any in-person format for months or even years.
We might be dealing with a polarized school system, in which some people want to go back to pre-Pandemic normal NOW and vote accordingly, and be unable to find any staff willing to actually open up the school.
We might find that exactly those families which we most desperately want to reach — English language learners, special needs, kindergarten and early primary students, families experiencing DV, families who cannot get basic needs such as adequate food and shelter — are the ones most resistant to integration into whatever plan we devise for education going forward.
We might put together a delightful plan that our local department of health signs off on, that enables us to open with some clever allocation of resources that makes every parent happy and lets everyone get back to work — and that students hate and/or cannot comply with.
I want to acknowledge here that despair is a rational response to this situation. Despair is the absence of hope. And hope is a shitty plan. Let us instead contemplate how to make a good plan.
We may never have a safe and effective vaccine.
We might have a vaccine, but it might only provide limited and/or temporary immunity. Getting the disease might also provide only limited and/or temporary immunity.
Current cases / new daily cases in the United States / our part of the United States might remain stubbornly too high to safely open schools in any in-person format for months or even years.
We might be dealing with a polarized school system, in which some people want to go back to pre-Pandemic normal NOW and vote accordingly, and be unable to find any staff willing to actually open up the school.
We might find that exactly those families which we most desperately want to reach — English language learners, special needs, kindergarten and early primary students, families experiencing DV, families who cannot get basic needs such as adequate food and shelter — are the ones most resistant to integration into whatever plan we devise for education going forward.
We might put together a delightful plan that our local department of health signs off on, that enables us to open with some clever allocation of resources that makes every parent happy and lets everyone get back to work — and that students hate and/or cannot comply with.
I want to acknowledge here that despair is a rational response to this situation. Despair is the absence of hope. And hope is a shitty plan. Let us instead contemplate how to make a good plan.