As the Cobb County School District continues with online-only instruction, the head of a professional teachers organization in Georgia said that the classroom experience that awaits students when they return will not be the way it was before COVID-19.
In a commentary distributed to news organizations, Lisa Morgan of the Georgia Association of Educators asked parents “to please listen to us—the educators who you are asking to enter the school buildings in the midst of a pandemic.”
The GAE represents 30,000 teachers in Georgia, including those in its umbrella organization, the Cobb County Association of Educators.
Unlike teachers’ organizations in other states, they are not unions.
The CCAE supported a July decision by Cobb school superintendent Chris Ragsdale to start the school year online-only, instead of giving parents an option of virtual or in-person learning.
Ragsdale has said that the cases per 100,000 people in Cobb—now averaging around 300 for the last 14 days—represents high community spread that’s not safe for students, teachers and staff.
Cobb school parents have expressed frustration with virtual learning and the lack of a timetable for returning to a classroom environment. Ragsdale said he will be guided by data, and not dates, in making that decision.
Under the district’s previously announced reopening plans, K-5 and special education students will return first, followed by middle school and high school students.
While the virus transmission rates and case numbers for children remains low, Morgan wrote that placing them in large group settings at schools poses a threat: “If the risk is 1 percent that any individual child will become sick, that means that in a group of 100 the chance that one of our students will become sick is 100 percent. Just as it is objectionable to you knowingly to put your children in a situation that will bring them harm, for any of our students to be harmed is unacceptable to us.”
She said that once students do return, “the adaptations necessary to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 will result in a classroom experience absent of the interactions that your child is missing now.”
Those include one-on-one encounters between students and teachers over homework and class assignments and students working together on projects in class.
Lunchtime will also be different: “The current plans for meals vary from system to system, but all include either smaller groups and social distancing in the cafeteria or meals being consumed in the classroom. The social-distanced cafeteria will, by necessity, be a mostly quiet space.”
Other tasks, such as cleaning and hand-washing, also will be time-consuming and disruptive, but they’re precautionary measures Morgan said must be undertaken.
“As much as we all wish returning to in-person instruction would allow us to engage with our students as we have always done, doing so is simply not possible,” she said. “The mode of instruction is not the issue we must solve. The realities of the virus and the continued high rates of transmission in our communities dictate that we must err on the side of caution and safety. While we all can agree that virtual instruction is not optimal, unusual times call for unusual measures that include sacrifice on everyone’s part.
“Working together to ensure that everyone is first and foremost safe and healthy will allow us to then work together to ensure everyone recovers academically, socially, and emotionally.”
You can read her full commentary by clicking here.
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