For the past two months, both public and private schools have wrestled with the various ways they can approach learning this coming fall. In most cases, the hope has been to try some form of in-person system with appropriate safety precautions for both students and adults. But as the pandemic continues to spread throughout the United States, and is now on the rise again, including in some states that were trending in the right direction a few weeks ago, an increasing number of schools are focusing on opening with distance learning as the first option — with only the slimmest hope that this might change at some point in the fall.

 This is a smart move. While few students and educators prefer distance learning to in-person learning, and many parents desperately want or need their children to be back in school, at this point the best way to ensure student and teacher safety, and the safety of the broader community, is to start remotely — with improvements to the systems instituted last March. 

Many schools have no choice but to open remotely. The majority of public and private schools in California, as of this writing, are required to open with distance learning. As of early August, the California rule is that a school can consider opening for in-person learning only if the county in which the school is located has been off the state’s high-risk watch list for 14 consecutive days. Many major urban school districts are also requiring distance learning for the fall (though New York State has given New York City the green light, if it so chooses).

For those schools that have the option of opening this fall, the tendency is to focus on finding a way to open safely. I have read about schools that are planning to open their campuses with a plethora of precautions and systems designed to reduce social interactions. I’ve read about boarding schools that are planning to open their campuses to students but also require that all academic classes start online and that students adhere to strict social-distancing rules. I’ve also read about schools that seem to be engaging in a form of wishful thinking — such as an independent school in a currently high-risk state that says it is opening later this month and not requiring either the wearing of masks or social distancing unless mandated by the state.

Most schools have a distance-learning model cued up and ready to go, if needed. The deciding factor for many is the state and CDC guides. If the state or region is at high-risk, the shift to online learning will likely kick in. But it strikes me now — here in mid-August when the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths are on the rise just about everywhere — that it makes most sense to plan to start with distance learning and use the remaining time to prepare in a way that will improve the online educational experience all around. With 4.6 million cases and 155,333 deaths in the U.S. — and rising — it’s hard to imagine how schools that open their campus can possibly contain the virus that seems to find every opportunity to spread. In other professional fields, such as Major League Baseball, efforts at early restarts have proven problematic. And a public school in Indiana that tried opening in late July had to close after one day when a student tested positive. Indeed, a July 31 New York Times article argues that “large parts of the country would likely see infected students if classrooms opened now.” With the danger of infection ever present, it makes little sense to endanger students and teachers in this way or to subject them to such a high possibility of infection or to the trauma of constant worry and fear.

 The call for continued distance learning this fall is also getting a significant push from teacher-generated petitions asking schools to halt efforts to start in person this fall — prioritizing health and safety over all other considerations.  Meanwhile, an increasing number of colleges and universities are also deciding to start with distance learning, include Johns Hopkins University. Others are opening only to a small percentage of students and requiring adherence to a long list of social-distancing and health rules. 

 At the moment, my thinking is aligned with these teachers who are petitioning for distance learning and those institutions that, even with a choice, are starting the fall online. I would argue that making the decision to start with an online program now — with the exception of communities that clearly have had no new cases of the virus for the past two weeks — means that schools can take much of the anxiety that comes with uncertainty off of the table. For one, distance learning in the fall improves the odds of everyone’s health, which helps with the national effort to shut this virus down. This decision also means that teachers can start their planning now to make remote learning as engaging and effective as possible, and that families can also begin planning how to manage their days. 

 To my way of thinking, it’s not really a time to worry about testing or checking off every box on the list of national learning standards. This crisis is a time to think more carefully about what children truly need in order to engage in learning. While it’s clearly best to work with most children in in-person settings, if we stop thinking of schooling as some kind of academic treadmill on which students need to keep churning out worksheets, papers, quizzes, tests, and the like and think more in terms of engaging students in high-quality, project-based learning that leads to outcomes the students are proud of and that mean something to them, distance learning this fall can be leveraged to drive the sort of needed changes in learning that can help shake up the system in a way that benefits everyone. 

 From brain science research, we know that children need strong social-emotional connections to adults and other students in order to learn anything well. We know from the spring experiment in distance learning that such social-emotional engagement can be supported with low teacher-student ratios and with schoolwork that matters to students. It’s not just about asking teachers to keep kids emotionally safe. As Ron Berger, author of An Ethic of Excellence, notes, it’s a matter of asking teachers to both help keep kids emotionally safe while engaging them in high-quality learning that matters to them. If we can focus on both issues this fall — without worrying about standards or testing or competing with other nations or the supposed needs the job market — we can actually make the fall an interesting time for teachers and students. 

 I know that none of this will be easy for parents — most of whom need to work. I won’t pretend that I have any general answer to that solving that problem other than asking Congress to continue with the additional monthly funding along with unemployment benefits. I only know that we need to stop this pandemic as soon as we can — and that this means we should keep most school buildings closed a little longer. Doing so, we’ll likely save thousands of lives, keep children safe, and help get the world back to some kind of normal faster if we stop trying to pretend we can open up our communities while the virus is clearly spreading.

 I also encourage Congress to create and fund a temporary WPA-like program that will enable young adults and retired adults to work with public teachers in a supporting role — taking part in synchronous distance-learning classes as “classroom aides” and being responsible for supporting a small group of students during the time and afterward. This is a way to drive down the student-teacher ratio and enable students to have more adult contact points. Those adults in the program could also help ensure that kids stay engaged in learning in asynchronous learning projects with daily check-ins.

If you are a parent with young children and you are currently feeling like you’re at wit’s end and just want to your kids back in school for their sake and yours, I get that you would disagree with my suggestion here. My essential argument, though, is that we’ll get back to the semi-normal world quicker if we dig in now — accept a few more months of restrictions, refocus distance learning more toward project-based learning, and then open up the community without the fear of a resurgent virus. 

Note: For schools looking for successful projects in a distance-learning environment, El Education offers numerous good examples at the organization’s Projects at Home webpage.