The Right Decision

Prince George’s County Public Schools Made The Best Move Available In The Face Of A Tough Situation. Here’s Why.

By Raoul Dennis

Protecting human life is the most important duty of the leadership of any society. And protecting the lives of its youth is perhaps the most sacred.

So, the decision of the Prince George’s County Public Schools led by CEO Dr. Monica Goldson to continue and grow the distance learning option through January 2021, rooted in the primary principle of protecting life and health, is the correct one.

And it’s particularly courageous at a time when political and economic forces rage seemingly without adequate concern for such considerations.

But PGCPS’ Recovery Team focused on safety after looking into all options. They listened to parents and staff via survey. They studied the logistics – even down to factoring in the holiday travel that families take which could introduce additional COVID-19 spikes. They weighed the risks against the rewards and came to a bold decision—one that will, in the end, keep more residents healthy and save lives.

Arguments for a hybrid approach are varied and have merit. How will parents return to work and manage children at home? Will students lose academic ground as a result of distance learning that will put them at a disadvantage in the future? Will county schools truly be able to equip, support and educate all its students via laptops for half a year? Will students suffer psychologically, emotionally, and socially as a result of distance learning?

Among the creative ideas for at-home student management is the notion of Parent Pooling. It involves parents in a given neighborhood to work together to rotate watching over students as they work through their school day. A case can be made for positions such as school bus drivers, crossing guards, and yes, even school resource officers (all of whose positions are impacted by distance learning now) to evolve toward some form of rotating management of young people working from home. Childcare too is likely to expand in its future definition as distance learning and calls for adult supervision and support beyond kindergarten emerge. While these solutions will not all come together by the fall, the creative process at work (at the household and community levels) will yield more solutions in the short term.

Students—especially those who already apply themselves academically and have the appropriate support at home—will not fall to the wayside as a result of six months of remote learning. We need to give more credit to the generation that “lives” more of their lives on their cell phones than their parents ever imagined possible. They are more resilient than we sometimes recognize, and our educators are more capable than we sometimes credit them. If anything, the silver lining is that the digital divide is finally being addressed. The county distributed some 60,000 laptops to students last Spring. Hundreds of county homes where Internet access and computer presence has been a challenge are now getting a real opportunity to participate in modern learning and communications.

County and school officials announce that the CARES Act assures that additional funding for hardware, tech support, programming and even meals are being directed to allow them to build the model in the direction of distance learning. Sure, there are gaps and tweaks to address but progress always demands improvement on the model, not racing back to the past.

Families worried about the emotional and social impact of distance learning on students should also ask themselves about the potential emotional impact on students if their classmates, teachers and family members were to begin to fall ill to a COVID-19 spread as a result of attending schools in person. And as hundreds of students, staff and teachers live in multi-generational residences or with front line workers or among family members with compromised immune systems, COVID-19 can potentially work through school culture and spaces like a Trojan horse, attacking families and spreading through communities all the more rapidly because of it.

And with the best of efforts, there is no way to get all schools, staffs and a safety first operations program 100% ready on time to assure that there will be no spread of the virus through schools in time for August 31 opening day.

It’s not ideal for young people to be isolated from other young people, but in the war that must be waged against COVID-19, it’s better for students to adjust to the distance for now than to the psychological burdens they would face as illnesses and deaths mount around them.

“This isn’t the ideal situation, but we will have an amazing school year despite COVID-19,” Goldson said to some 13,500 parents and residents on a July 15 community phone discussion. We believe her.