Covid-19 is and has been one of the world's most prominent issues over the last year-and-a-half, especially in schools. It was the middle of March 2020 when the virus shut down our schools. The schools planned to close for a couple of months while we found a way to deal with the virus, but it just kept spreading and getting worse. At the time the schools had no way to implement school from home because some students did not have devices at their homes.
It wasn’t until the following school year that they were able to give all students a Chromebook and came up with virtual classes through Google Classroom and Google Meet. This did not mean school was back to normal; there were still some significant issues, like encouraging students to log in to class. This caused many students to fall behind.
This method continued until Wake County gave the option in the second semester of 2020-2021 to come back to school. This didn't mean everything would return to normal, but it was progressing. The system was broken into four blocks: A, B, C, and D. Group D would continue to be virtual while one of the other three groups would come to school for a week and the other groups would be virtual. Every week the groups would rotate.
This system was effective, gave students a choice for whichever method worked best for them, and limited exposure greatly. This method continued until summer break. Once summer break ended, the Wake County school system decided to get rid of the A, B, C, and D groups and just have two groups: in-person and virtual. This was a difficult decision especially because of the new Covid variant and according to the superintendent for wake county public schools only about 40% of high school students had been vaccinated. Middle and elementary schools have an even lower percentage.
West Area Superintendent Seydric Williams states, “This pandemic with Covid-19 has been the most challenging aspect of teaching and learning that we’ve experienced through my career and throughout the past 50 years when it comes down to trying to have students in seats in classrooms. We’ve made efforts to try to get students back in school and put parameters to prevent the need to go back to full remote learning. The goal is that numbers will start coming down. We hope people will start getting vaccinated to make this goal a reality.”
Based on the superintendent's thoughts I think the only way to have schools stay open is if we as a community come together and get vaccinated. If we do not see a difference in the number of people vaccinated then the number of cases and clusters will only increase, and none of us wants to go back to virtual learning.