Three months ago, my daughter’s high school in New York unveiled a two-part plan to tackle Covid-19. Phase one, from September to Thanksgiving in late November, envisaged bringing the children into school if there were no Covid-19 outbreaks. Thus far, this has largely worked, albeit with a two-week break when a couple of cases were detected.
Phase two, after Thanksgiving, entails a return to online-only school for a few months. The reason? After examining the science in the summer, the school principals decided there was a good chance of a second Covid-19 wave in midwinter. So they tried to get ahead of the curve — as it were — by creating a plan. They kept the online option running in recent months for any pupils who needed it while also conducting random Covid-19 tests on students.
Is this strategy unusual? Not if you live in New York, where many other educational establishments have embraced similar measures, although with a profound — cruel — disparity in how effectively they can do it, since the gap in resources between some private schools and public ones is extraordinarily large.