By Henry Bao
More than three months into the 2020-2021 school year, schooling so far has been all distance learning over Zoom, with MUSD schools having yet to reopen to the general population of students. After spending months in quarantine, adjusting to our new lives, and making it past surge after surge of COVID-19, we have one big question looming over our heads: Should schools ever reopen? And if so, when? The answer to these questions is especially important for elementary schools, as distance learning especially impacts younger children.
Santa Clara County is at a widespread risk level. People aged 0 to 17 account for 10.7 percent of California’s positive COVID-19 cases, and zero of those people aged 0 to 17 have died according to the California Department of Public Health as of Nov. 17, 2020. While this data does not mean that young people infected with COVID-19 aren’t suffering, it does show that young people are at low risk.
However, there’s more to these numbers than people realize as many Californian students have been in quarantine for the duration of the pandemic. If students go back to school, the numbers may increase.We have to consider this possibility when answering the question of whether elementary schools should reopen. After all, America’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said that “the default position is we should try to get children back to school,” so what course of action should MUSD take?
I believe MUSD elementary schools should reopen and move away from distance learning, and that they should reopen by the beginning of fall 2021 because keeping them closed long-term is detrimental to a child’s education. Elementary school is important because it provides a setting for children to learn and grow from interacting with their teachers and their peers. Keeping distance learning into the next school year means that elementary school students will have been removed from a physical school environment for parts of three school years, with one of those being a full school year; all that time will instead be spent on Zoom, where socializing is limited. By limiting socialization, distance learning undermines the need of young children to form one-on-one connections with each other. As a result, distance learning fails to deliver what I consider to be the most important function of elementary school: teaching children social norms to develop their social lives.
The norms our children learn from distance learning are not something they should retain. On Zoom, students have to unmute themselves when they want to talk and are only supposed to talk when their teacher asks them to, similar to how students raise their hands and then called on by their teacher in a physical classroom. However, Zoom meetings also allow for students to communicate with their classmates by typing in the Zoom chat instead of talking aloud. In addition, having students attend class with a log-in rather than attending in-person decreases the importance of punctuality since students can just wake up mere minutes before class starts in the morning. Telling students that they can just type their thoughts instead of voicing them and that they are free to pay less respect to their appointments are not values we should be teaching to children. And since one-on-one conversations cannot be carried out in Zoom meetings except for breakout rooms, it is more difficult than ever for students to build new friendships. Of course, the norm should not be for children to stay at home all day; it should be for children to actually go to school.
If MUSD wants its elementary schools to reopen and for its children to go back to school, we will have to be flexible with how we return to this norm. Going to school just cannot be the same anymore now that we live with COVID-19. Schools have to keep their staff and students safe, and to do so, schools will have to continue implementing those same safety protocols we have been following in the pandemic. MUSD campuses already require people to wear a mask and social distance on campus, but reopening elementary schools would require more than that. Desks have to be rearranged, schools have to regularly sanitize, and children have to go to school in small groups at staggered times, all of which are included in the district’s reopening guidelines. No COVID-19 vaccines have been approved for full use as of Nov. 17, 2020 according to the New York Times. Should a COVID-19 vaccine get approved and distributed between now and fall 2021, then these precautions will be unnecessary. As that is not the case yet, these precautions remain necessary for the children of Milpitas to be safe when schools reopen, something I believe should happen.