All,
As we take a look into the near future there seems to be a lot more confusion than we previously thought we’d be experiencing at this point in the pandemic. We thought that once vaccines were approved and administered the transition back to regular life would be somewhat smooth. For me, and I’m sure many of you, the very opposite is true.
People all around the world are opting out of taking the vaccine for their own personal reason, and they have every right to have their reason. I’m a strong believer in the idea that whatever someone wants to do with their own body is their business. That being said, the world will have to resume at least somewhat normal operations so that we all may have a chance to move on from this pandemic and remember what we’ve learned along the way.
Restaurants will have to be opened so that cooks and wait staff may have a steady and reliable place of work. Gyms will need to reopen so that people may have a place to exercise and promote a healthy lifestyle. And schools will need to be opened so that kids can get a quality education and make meaningful connections with their teachers and peers.
I’ve been lucky enough to have a good relationship with school most of my life due to great teachers, memorable experiences like the school plays I starred in or dances I went to with my friends, and my mom, who taught high school spanish for 18 years and has taught middle school for the last four.
I remember sitting in her classroom watching her teach when I was really young, and she couldn’t find a babysitter. I knew from the way she interacted with her students that she was making a real impact on them, and they cared about coming to class. I’m lucky enough to have a mom that enjoyed her work and shared that with me when I was a kid, and for a time I thought that one day I would follow in her footsteps and be a teacher.
We should value the bonds that form at school, and I believe they are vital in our own development. Kids go to school to learn how to be themselves and try new things and that’s something that goes underappreciated in my opinion.
In the last 15 months, kids have lost those connections. Students were told to stay home and learn through a computer, while teachers weren’t given much guidance on how to perform their jobs properly. My mother never learned how to teach online and struggled to learn on her own even with more than 20 years of experience.
Many of her students struggled and not just academically. Many of them didn’t know each other going into the new school year and had a hard time making new friends and forming new connections. When it came time to go back to the classroom, they were timid at first, not knowing how to act around other kids they may not know.
There are still schools around the world that have not gone back to regular business as usual. In New York City, kids have still been largely online. Over a year without seeing their peers and teachers these kids are going to have a lot of mixed feelings. They’ll be excited to finally see their friends but afraid and anxious about the prospect of going back to class.
With many people still holding out on getting the vaccine there is a lot of confusion on how to keep these kids safe and any possible solution.
The Mount Sinai Health System in NYC may have the solution in the form of testing, and they’ve already been doing it. Since March, the non-profit has done more than 13,000 saliva-based tests at more than 15 charter schools and is ready to ramp up according to a New York Times article.
On Tuesday they announced the Mount Sinai Covid Lab initiative, inviting additional charter schools, as well as local businesses and organizations, to sign up for the saliva-based testing program. They are putting the finishing touches on a new laboratory that they say will be capable of processing as many as 100,000 coronavirus tests a day and are preparing a formal proposal to take the program to New York City’s public schools this fall.
The announcement comes the day after Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the city planned to fully reopen schools, eliminating remote learning, in the fall.
“The way you keep a school safe, the way you make teachers feel comfortable with the reopening of schools, the way you make parents feel comfortable sending their kid, is you have a testing program,” said William A. Ackman, a hedge fund manager who founded the Pershing Square Foundation.
If we test every student and flag them whenever we see a positive test result, school administrators will have the ability to identify those kids and make sure they are sent home. To me, it’s the best way to ensure the safety of these kids outside of making them take the vaccine.
Like I said at the beginning of this column, it’s been a weird and bumpy transition to reopening everything, but hopefully, this will mean we can get kids back in the classroom where they so desperately belong.
Jacob Czopek