Why educators and parents are resisting face-to-face instruction

Governor DeSantis has spoken and schools will be reopening for face-to-face instruction by the end of the month. But educators are trying to paint a picture of what in-person schooling in the age of coronavirus will look like: face shields for teachers, socially distanced lunches for students and six-feet apart at all-time in the classroom.

So, to avoid that, Kyrstal Smith has decided her daughter will be learning from home. She asked, “How do you keep kids that haven’t seen many of the kids that haven’t seen their friends since summer or March, how do you keep them distanced from their friends on the first day of school?”

Smith’s daughter is a fourth-grader at Allen Park Elementary School.

Susan Patti, School Counselor in Lee County said, “of those ten people if some or all of them are asymptotic, they’re almost invisible to us so we don’t know how would we do contact tracing if they’re asymptotic?”

Because of this, teachers are begging and even petitioning the district to start school remotely.

The Director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, Dr. Ashish Jha had this to say, “If you have in a school of a thousand people and you have ten people walking in…with the virus and you don’t know which ten you are you might get away for a few days. But if that happens on an ongoing basis you’re going to have large super spreading events. And I think it’ll be very hard to keep that school open for any extended period of time.”

Governor DeSantis reiterated in Monday’s COVID press conference that parents should have the option to send their children to school.

However, researchers do believe that children under ten will not transmit the virus as easily.