Children Spent Months Adjusting to Learning Online, Only to Abruptly Be Back in the Classroom

Many school systems are opening on a blended system - with students coming into the classroom on different days of the week and remotely learning other days in order to have less crowded classrooms and buildings. Having a third to half of students out of the classroom at any given time, while they learn online at home does not make for a cohesive lesson plan or classroom experience. Teachers argue that integrating assignments and charting how well students are learning the material is especially difficult in this model on top of the stress of health concerns. There will also be students who will choose to learn remotely full-time, an option offered by most school districts for parents concerned about spread of the disease. However, because most remote learning the last semester of the last school year was done on the fly, it was asynchronous, or not 'live.' Students have adjusted to that, allowing parents to help them as work and life schedules dictated. With the blended system, some students will have to learn through synchronous instruction, meaning sitting on a laptop while some students are in the classroom. Parents and teachers say this will be incredibly difficult to navigate for younger kids who may require the physical setting of the classroom in order to remain engaged for that long. There is also the issue of those families without reliable, high-speed internet access at home. Those students may have fallen behind state-mandated learning benchmarks and forcing them into a blended system may push them further behind on their remote learning days.