A Good Back-to-School Plan

For many of us, back-to-school time has always been a time of optimism. Having grown and rested over the summer, many kids are eager to get back to their friends and routines. They are ready for whatever new and exciting opportunities come their way. Just as COVID has upended our lives, it has the ability to put a damper on our back-to-school enthusiasm.

Many schools are offering parents the opportunity to choose between in-person and fully remote models this year. For parents feeling ill equipped to make very difficult decisions about how they should handle the year ahead, the Centers for Disease Control has offered a way to organize the information we need to make a good decision about attending school or not.

Your community. One of the biggest factors indicating the safety of schools is community spread. Schools are a microcosm of the communities they serve. If cases of COVID-19 are spreading in your community, they have the potential to spread in schools, as well. The Vermont Department of Health reports cases per million people by county. At this moment, all but one of our neighboring counties, Rensselaer, are reporting fewer than 400 cases per million. A low number of cases indicates that schools are more likely to be safe, especially for teachers, support personnel, administrators, and older students, who are more likely to contract COVID than younger students. For reasons that are not yet entirely understood, elementary-aged children are far less likely to get COVID and less likely to spread it to others.

Your school. The next important source of information is how your school is planning to welcome students back safely. The plan should include the ways they will reduce the spread among students, like increased social distancing, more frequent hand washing, and wearing cloth face coverings. They might be planning to decrease in-person class sizes with staggered schedules, for instance. The school’s plan should also include details about how they intend to maintain a safe environment, like increased ventilation, cleaning, and disinfecting. Finally, there should be details about how they intend to screen students and staff, like taking temperatures or reporting symptoms, and to react if someone in the school community becomes ill.

Your home. Many different conditions at home may sway your decision to send a child to school or keep them home. If you have a parent or caregiver in the home who is at high risk of developing a serious case of COVID, you might choose to keep your child at home to decrease any threat of exposure. Realities, like having to rely on school for childcare or not being able to meet the technological needs for learning (like a computer and Internet connection), may increase the need to send your child to school.

Your kid. Some children are healthy and unlikely to develop serious illness from COVID-19, while others could be put at greater risk by attending school. Varying levels of academic and social needs may also affect your decision. A parent of a child who thrives within a virtual-learning environment would likely decide differently than the parent of a child who struggles with learning at home. Families whose kids benefit from school-based services, like speech therapy, or school-based nutrition, like school breakfast, will have a greater incentive to send their kids in person.

What the CDC’s guide reveals is that every situation truly is unique to each student and each family. While we are unlikely to feel the same back-to-school excitement we typically feel, the hope is that we can make decisions that will keep our kids, families, and school staff safe and that we can encourage our kids to continue to learn and grow during this school year.  

Meghan Gunn, MD, is a pediatrician and the chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Southwestern Vermont Medical Center.