Course changes are required.  An airplane takes off from Chicago, sets a course toward San Francisco, flies for hours over the Midwest, plains, western plateaus, mountain ranges, and then lands at San Francisco.  Easy peasy.  Not so much.  From take-off to touch down, the pilots of the plane make numerous corrections in the compass course, the elevation, and speed as the plane flies.  If there were no corrections, this flight would end somewhere on the west coast but not at San Francisco.  So many things happen between Point A and Point B that course corrections are always required.

So it is with piloting schools in the Time of COVID.  School leadership is required to make course corrections in order for children, staff, curriculum, learning environments, and families to arrive safely and educated at a Point B somewhere in our future.  In the Time of COVID, the two courses of school leadership – safety of all and education of all children – require well-thought out flight plans and then close monitoring and constant sensitivity to needed course corrections.

That brings us to this moment in time.

School leaders have set many different pandemic education plans in motion.  At one end of the pandemic plan continuum are schools that completely opened a campus for teachers and children and in-person schooling as usual.  At the other end are schools that assigned teachers to teach from home and children to learn at home and closed the campus to all.  And, in-between are an untold number of variations. 

Schooling requires plans for health and safety and plans for continued teaching and learning.  Time, place and function wound these two courses of action together into a helix design of who would teach how and from where and who would learn how and from where.  The design reflected the leaders’ understandings of medical science, educational delivery systems, and community resolve for each of the two courses – keep children safe and educate my child.

In March 2020, no school leader anticipated the depth and breadth of the pandemic or that five school months later their school would still be on a pandemic flight plan.  In March, we shuttered schools when there were few or no positive cases of the virus in our schools or local communities and made our way through April and May toward the end of that school year.  In August/September, we launched a new school year when there were tens to hundreds of positive cases in our school and community environment.  Now, in later October, we are maintaining our course plans through the facts of thousands of local positive cases and nationally more than 224,000 virus-related deaths. 

As good school pilots, we check our instrumentation constantly.  Although our county is rated as very high in viral activity, there have been very few local children or school staff infected with the virus.  That metric within a metric becomes an important focal point.  Our course mission of keeping children and school staff safe is being met by the current course of action.

We check a second instrument – quality of teaching and learning – and we find a very erratic array of data displaying the current status of how well we are schooling children.  The data is teacher and child dependent.  Some instruction by some teachers is of the highest quality and children are engaged and achieving.  Student learning data indicates that some children are achieving and even surpassing our educational expectations. Some instruction by more teachers began with quality but over five months of stressed delivery is no longer causing learning in the acceptable achieving range.  And, some children, a growing percentage, are checking out.  Hybrid or remote education without continuous contact with teachers, school activities, and classmates leads children at home to push the “off” button and disengage.

Reminder.  Our point B is the quality of school health AND the quality of student learning.  It is time for corrections in course.  The issue before us is how to keep children and staff in a low incidence virus environment while bringing children and staff together in-school for teaching and learning. 

Of course, parents will retain the option of remote education for their children if they choose not to return their children to school.

First course correction —  Open school for in-person learning to one grade level in K-2, one grade level in 3-5, one grade level in 6-8, and one grade level in 9-12 on Monday.  All children in other grade levels remain in remote education.  On Tuesday, rotate the next grade level to in-person learning.  On Tuesday, grades 2, 7 and 10 will be in-school.  On Wednesday, grades 3, 11 and 11 + 12 will be in school.  On Thursday, start the rotation again so that one day in three, all children have the option of in-school learning. 

During the rotation, a teacher teaches simultaneously to children in-class and at-home or only at-home depending upon the grades being rotated.

Maintain this rotation for two weeks to monitor the effects of in-school teaching and learning on school health.  Maintain all school protocols – everyone is masked except when eating or drinking, social distancing in classrooms and hallways, and constant hand sanitation and schoolhouse disinfecting. 

After two weeks, if low incidence of infection is sustained, shift the rotation of in-school learning to alternating days for alternating grade levels.  Half of the children will be in-school every day for the next two weeks.  If low incidence of infection is sustained, open to campus to in-school learning for all children every day.

So, what is a low incidence of infection?  It is not zero infections, although the current remote education course has caused zero in-school spread of the virus.  The current county positive test rate is more than 20% of all tests each day.  The school board’s initial target was less than 3% and that should be the new course, in-school low incidence indicator. 

Second course correction — Children will have the option of in-school learning as long as the in-school infection rate is below 3%.  If a child has a positive test, the child and child’s class(es) will return to remote education for fourteen calendar days.  If the in-school infection rate rises above 3% of the student body, all children will return to remote education for fourteen calendar days.  And, if a teacher has a positive test, the teacher and teacher’s classes will return to remote education.  After quarantining, teachers and children may return for in-school learning.

Possible course correction — Course correcting always allows for a return to the initial course heading.  If required, all teachers and children may return to at-home teaching and learning.

Arriving at Point B for a school, even in healthy years, is a matter of monitoring and adjusting how well school policies are causing children to safely attain the school’s quality educational indicators.  Those usual adjustments do not draw much attention.  In the Time of COVID, every course correction is contentious depending upon a person’s initial preference – protect the health of children and teachers or protect the educational options for all children.  Getting to Point B in these times requires course corrections across each of these targets and then more corrections until we all arrive at Point B.