Schools across California have reopened for in-person learning, undertaking the challenging but crucial work of ensuring student safety. Examining multiple districts across the state, LPI researchers provide important models and key lessons for safe school reopening. As their work demonstrates, schools implementing multilayered mitigation strategies can stay open safely, minimize further disruptions to learning, and ensure that students can focus on their education and reconnecting to their school community.
Many educators developed creative and effective strategies to teach their students by using technology in a variety of ways during the COVID-19 pandemic. As schools return to in-person learning, effective uses of technology should not disappear. Instead, they should become a foundation for students to engage in learning with other students in the classroom and beyond.
Although schools are reopening on the shifting sands of COVID-19 variants and low vaccination rates in some regions, they can resume in-person classes in a safe and supportive manner using science-based mitigation approaches, such as masking and social distancing, and by attending to student and teacher social and emotional needs.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, districts nationwide have faced the difficult task of reopening schools safely and keeping them open, while also accelerating student learning and attending to the trauma and loss experienced by students and families. By adopting a nimble and forward-looking recovery strategy encompassing social and emotional, as well as physical, safety, Tulsa Public Schools had a safe and successful spring and summer 2021, and plans to continue these efforts into the fall.
Thanks to unprecedented funding from the American Rescue Plan and other federal, state, and local resources, school districts across the country are leveraging several evidence-informed strategies to accelerate learning and support student wellbeing. Local initiatives include conducting formative assessments to measure and support students’ growth and health, providing high-quality tutoring that is connected to classroom instruction, and expanding learning time.
Many education stakeholders have called for intensive remediation for students to address this year of disrupted schooling and potential learning loss. However, remediation alone will not meet students’ needs and could potentially deepen inequalities. Pandemic and post-pandemic learning environments should be centered on strong teacher-student relationships that address students’ social and emotional learning, creating intellectually rigorous and equitable educational settings
As we work to reopen schools safely and effectively, it’s important not to return to “normal” but to reinvent school in ways that center relationships and are grounded in the science of learning and development. We must move past remediation and, instead, turn to the research on how people learn.
Forbes by Linda Darling-Hammond and Adam K. Edgerton | To reopen schools safely & effectively, we must move past remediation and use principles applying brain science and research on how people learn. In this commentary, Linda Darling-Hammond and Adam Edgerton write that at the center of this reinvention are relationships and social emotional learning.
In March 2020, New York City was a pandemic hotspot. Yet NYC was also the first large U.S. city to reopen its schools. Researchers explore the various mitigation strategies the NYC Department of Education implemented to bring students back and offer useful resources that can support policymakers and educators navigating their own school reopening plans.
How can districts reopen schools safely and reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission in schools? Marin County, CA, offers one example of a thoughtful approach to school reopening that draws on public health research and partnerships. Using multilayered mitigation strategies and collaborating with the county offices of education and health, Marin safely reopened more than 85% of its schools for in-person learning.
