Back to School-ish
Sunday, September 12th, 2021
Having arrived to New York a few years ago from a different state situated a little further down south, where children begin school at the very beginning of August, I’ve kept a watchful eye on my Southern friends and their families as they shared their back to school photos. In the school district my own children used to attend, masks were not mandated, relying instead on parent choice. Masks were apparently pretty scarce amongst the students attending in person, and over the last few weeks, I watched in horror as the COVID case numbers surged.
The first week of school, 3.6% of the entire student population had a close contact with someone at school who had tested positive for COVID. In the second week, 29.9% of the entire student population came into close contact with someone at school who tested positive. During week 3 – 45.8% of the entire student body came into close contact with someone at school whom had tested positive. By the end of the first three weeks, 8.12% of the school population had COVID and taken it back home to their families and nearly everyone who attends or works at the school district had been exposed.
Photos and video of cars snaking around the entire town in line for the drive-thru COVID testing site began filling my friend’s posts, at the same time reports of the local hospitals being overwhelmed. Healthcare professionals urging friends and neighbors to get vaccinated and to wear masks as requests for prayers for sick family members struggling with the virus. Even those not sick enough to be in hospital, suffering miserably as they try to care for each other at home. It’s an all too familiar feeling, watching as things quickly escalate. Too similar to how things felt in New York in March and April of 2020.
And then it was time for us, here in New York, to really focus on getting back to school.
With immense heartburn over the clashing of mask and vax debates going on around us, and heartache for my friends in the South, we reluctantly prepared for the school year.
The hustle and bustle of sorting through clothing and shoes, arranging for haircuts, shopping for school supplies – loose leaf paper, composition notebooks, pens, pencils, a ridiculously priced graphing calculator that they’ll likely use for about one month this year and never need again… the weeks leading up to the first day of school felt almost eerily familiar. Clouded, perhaps, a bit by intense debates surrounding masks and vaccines, but for the most part the usual electric back to school rush was there.
The priority to get children back in school full-time is exactly that – a priority.
We’ve seen the impacts of the lack of childcare on the workforce, as some workers with no option but to stay home to oversee school aged children in a virtual learning environment while sacrificing an income. We’ve seen the stress on families as they attempt to juggle Zoom meetings and make sure their child(ren) are pointed towards their Chromebook screen for seven hours a day. We’ve seen the impacts on the mental health of children (and their very frazzled parents!).
So, yes. Back to school, sort of like the good ol’ days pre-COVID, is the priority.
My children have been back in school for 6 days. Well, one of them has been in for 6 days. The other was sent home on day 4 for a headache and nausea, no doubt a result of the stuffy heat of the un-airconditioned classroom. And, of course, they can’t return until we provide a negative COVID test – the PCR kind, not the rapid test – with the earliest available appointment two days away from when we scheduled and the results could take up to seven more days.
And Chromebooks haven’t been distributed, yet.
So, it’s starting off OK (“OK” being relative to the last year and a half, of course). While the inconveniences of mask wearing and COVID testing are still upon us, and we still face the uncertainty of inconsistent school schedules for possible exposure or due to bus driver shortages that have gotten so bad that some local schools were forced to close this week, we seem to be inching our way back to some semblance of normal. Though, perhaps our goal should be towards a “new normal” rather than back to all of the old ways.
Here’s to another weird school year. May this one be a little less chaotic than the last few, and continue inching towards making this all a hazy memory.
