To School or Not to School: Making Decisions in Uncertain Times

It is critical for schools to open as safely and as quickly as possible for in-person learning. Schools play an important role in children’s educational achievement, health, and wellbeing. Working with state, tribal, local, and territorial health officials, schools can also play an important role in slowing the spread of COVID-19 while ensuring that children have a safe and healthy learning environment.

As a parent, guardian or caregiver, Preschool San Diego ensures you may have the option to choose between the in-person, virtual, or a hybrid mode of learning for your kid. You can review your preschool plans to understand the steps they are taking to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and to support your child’s education. See CDC’s Considerations for Schools to learn more about potential strategies schools may implement to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Here are the Helpful Things You Should Consider:

1. Safety is the foremost Priority:

It’s true with most viruses that kids come into school and spread them to each other and their teachers. But for a variety of reasons – some of which we understand, some of which we don’t – the virus that causes COVID-19 doesn’t seem to behave that way. Kids do not seem to be major spreaders, particularly younger kids.

One reason is that the virus that causes COVID enters the body via structures which children produce fewer of than adults do.

Elementary school kids produce fewer than middle-schoolers do, and high-schoolers and older teens produce fewer than adults do. If the virus has fewer doorways into your body, you’re less likely to develop COVID. And when you have the disease, it’s not as severe.

2. Development Factor:

Skills such as naming colors, showing affection, and hopping on one foot are called developmental milestones. Developmental milestones are things most children can do by a certain age. Children reach milestones in how they play, learn, speak, behave, and move (like crawling, walking, or jumping). The pandemic has already made so many physical boundations which is a very big disadvantage to the learning and development factor.

As children grow into early childhood, their world will begin to open up. They will become more independent and begin to focus more on adults and children outside of the family. They will want to explore and ask about the things around them even more. Their interactions with family and those around them will help to shape their personality and their own ways of thinking and moving. During this stage, children should be able to ride a tricycle, use safety scissors, notice a difference between girls and boys, help to dress and undress themselves, play with other children, recall part of a story, and sing a song.

3. Biggest Key To Safe Reopening:

Make the mask as necessary like fresh air. When school staff are eating lunch in the break room, for example, they might let their guard down, thinking that their colleagues would never get them sick on purpose. No, of course they wouldn’t. But one of them may have an asymptomatic case of COVID. So keep your mask on. Similarly, make your kids aware about the situation, and they will definitely listen.

Should You Send them To School Now?

You should entrust the school for sending the kid. At Preschool San Diego, we make sure that the safety protocols are in place. At my kids’ school, they’re doing the right thing in terms of planning. But local school districts are chronically underfunded, so it’s understandable that teachers might not trust that they’re going to get the personal protective equipment and everything else they need to feel safe. We have to make sure that we are investing in what’s necessary and that we emphasize the importance of symptom

screening. In the past, parents sent kids to school with a cough and runny nose all the time. We have to communicate clearly that they can’t do that now so teachers and families have trust. We need to understand that we’re all in this together.