You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
We got word this week -- late afternoon on Wednesday -- that The Girl’s high school has abandoned its plan for half-week sessions in person in September. Instead, it will be fully online until at least Oct. 19.
On a personal level, this is arguably good news. Even with the half-week option, we also had the option of letting TG go entirely online. We chose to exercise that option. Now, with everybody else staying home, too, she doesn’t have to deal with fear of missing out (FOMO). She’s relatively immune to FOMO anyway, but this allayed any lingering doubt. So that’s fine.
What makes it worth noticing is the reason behind the change.
According to the letter from the superintendent, about 20 percent of the teachers in the district put in for COVID-related leave. One of the most frequent reasons cited was that the districts in which they live went online, and they have school-aged kids. So when neighboring districts elected to go online, the teachers who live there and work here couldn’t go to work, effectively forcing this district’s hand.
I’ll admit feeling a little bit of vindication. When Brookdale made the call to go as online as it could, one factor was the number of employees and students who have school-aged children. At the time, it seemed likely that most districts would require at least a few days a week of online learning. Now, the biggest one in the county is going fully online, at least for the first half of the semester. To the extent that we can prevent conflicts over childcare, we have.
The snowball effect doesn’t end there, of course. We’re looking now at possible impacts on other districts, the vocational schools, dual enrollment programs and the like.
In administration, anticipating snowball effects (or ripple effects, if you prefer) is part of the job. In the summer of COVID, it has become far more difficult. Many features of the landscape that we can usually take as fixed have suddenly become variable. That complicates matters tremendously. Tight deadlines make the challenge even worse. It’s one thing to come up with alternate plans a year, or even six months, before they take effect; it’s quite another with two weeks and counting.
I don’t blame the local district; there’s no track record for this sort of thing, and it couldn’t have known the extent of requested parental leaves. In normal years, precedent can give you a pretty specific range of expected outcomes; ideally, the gap between the likely best case and the likely worst case is small enough that you can handle it either way. In any given year, we expect x percent of employees to take disability leave, y percent to resign or retire, z amount of snow removal and so on. Budgets are essentially compilations of probable outcomes.
But this is not a normal year. Usual parameters may or may not be relevant, and complicated arrangements made a few weeks ago could be upended tomorrow.
I’m glad that Brookdale made the call it did, and even more glad after this news broke. Going first is always a risk, but we made the right call. But universe, if you’re listening, a little bit of normal would be really helpful right about now …
