Don’t cancel summer, reimagine it
“New York City’s pools, beaches and parks are typically filled with families trying to find respite on humid days, and subway cars are often crowded with students enrolled in free summer camps heading to air-conditioned museums,” writes Eliza Shapiro in The New York Times. “But with so many of the city’s usual summer activities called off or up in the air, there will be few such havens this July and August… Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced that city pools will not open this summer… The usual roster of city-funded camps will not happen. The summer youth employment program, which typically enrolls about 75,000 low-income students each year, is canceled.”
While education thought leaders like Andrew Rotherham have argued that schools should stay open this summer to fill the gap, Shapiro reports that “Top officials at the United Federation of Teachers indicated that the powerful union would push back vigorously against any attempt to continue the school year online through the summer.”
All of these cancelations and prohibitions have created a huge vacuum that can only be filled by creative and resourceful leadership. While Shapiro describes the continued suffering for the city’s most vulnerable children during the summer months as “inevitable,” the failure to put in place a robust response to this summer vacuum is a choice.
With two months left to go before most school systems go on break, there is still time to reimagine summer for this new reality so that kids and families aren’t left to struggle through on their own. That means finding ways to make virtual schooling available as an option for every family that wants it rather than declaring summer school a non-starter, making structured outdoor activities safe for kids in an era of social distancing rather than canceling camp outright, offering opportunities for older students to secure meaningful work opportunities rather than ending programs for lack of imagination of what is possible, and building up an army of tutors to work one on one with students rather than resigning ourselves to huge gaps in learning when students return to school in the fall.
Help every school become a resilient school
“Anyone who thinks we’re going to come back and have the same start we always have is fooling themselves,” says Stephen Pruitt, former education commissioner of Kentucky in an interview with USA Today’s Erin Richards. From Philadelphia to Cleveland to San Diego, and many school districts in between, officials are predicting that when schools do reopen this fall, they’re going to look very different than before this crisis hit.
A key goal for every state should be using the next few months to ensure that every school is resilient enough to handle what may be a challenging mix of problems in the new school year: waves of teacher and principals absences, students missing long stretches of in-person classes, and new shutdowns to respond to the reemergence of Covid-19.
One crucial opportunity to invest in resilience is through the billions of dollars in federal assistance on its way to the states. These funds can help complete the efforts underway to ensure every school age child has their own device for use in distance learning, that they can connect into lessons through free internet access, that schools have sufficient masks for everyone entering a school building, and that all teachers have been trained in effective distance learning instructional practices. Unfortunately, right now many states aren’t committing to use these funds on behalf of all of their schools. In North Carolina, for example, many charter schools have been left out of the planned distribution of federal aid. And as 50CAN’s own Derrell Bradford notes, many private schools could end up with no help in making this transition to safe and effective operations, leaving their students unprepared for the challenges to come.
