Every day that children are denied regular, full-day school adds to the remediation crisis we’ll inevitably face once educational normalcy is reestablished.
There can be no doubt that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are committed to reopening America’s schools as rapidly as possible. As early as the first week in December, then-president-elect Biden announced that he planned to at least partly reopen most of the nation’s schools within the first 100 days of his presidency.
Guidelines released last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) underscore this commitment to get most schools open as soon as possible. But the agency’s recommendations are soft, hardly reflecting the urgency justified by the damage to the education of millions of children caused by prolonged disruption of full-time, in-school learning.
The CDC recommendations seem to depend on schools enforcing a range of public health guidelines like masking, distancing, hygiene and sufficient ventilation. Unfortunately, getting anything close to full and effective adoption of these recommendations in the near future is remote. The CDC also gives surprisingly short shrift to the issue of ensuring effective ventilation in all classrooms that would be utilized by teachers and students.
But my principal concern is that the guidelines should be much stronger when it comes to vaccinating teachers.
