District 203 needs to rethink its plan
Don't be fooled by District 203's seemingly harmless reopening guidelines. For at-risk families, the recent guidelines are forcing hard decisions.
Living with multiple at-risk family members, these new guidelines put my family between a rock and a hard place. We're not alone. Thousands of families, many living with grandparents now have to make a choice no family should have to make: between their health and their children attending in-person school. Teachers are also forced to choose between their health and their students.
Even with impeccable social distancing techniques, COVID-19 will almost inevitably spread through schools. Masks aren't perfect. A study in the journal Science showed although COVID spreads less among children, it spread enough in Chinese schools to cause significant increases.
Devastatingly, although 203's new guidelines allow online learning or "hybrid learning," where students attend school halftime, 203 will automatically enroll students in the hybrid option and allow only eight days to opt in to the online option, weeks before school starts. This dangerous policy could result in many students losing parents to COVID-19 and doesn't even help working parents who need child care 5 days a week.
Parents should be able to make decisions informed on current events, not hypothetical future scenarios. District 203 should instead automatically enroll students in e-learning and allow them to opt into hybrid learning. They should preemptively set concrete boundaries for scenarios when school must be closed altogether, for example if cases rise, or hospitals risk overflowing.
Moreover, they should seriously consider instead providing 5-day in-person supervision exclusively to working families who need child care.
However, I worry without public outcry, the district bureaucracy won't be receptive to our concerns. That's why we need everyone to contact their representatives and the school board and tell them to seriously rethink their reopening plans with these common-sense proposals. We can't wait.
David Mengel
Lisle