COVID-19: A Learning Crisis

12/21/21

WHS has 20 new confirmed COVID-19 cases today which doubles the average cases per day for the previous month.

Four days before winter break, COVID-19 cases in WHS have been on a sharp rise in recent days with the introduction of  the Omicron strand and a loosened sense of urgency among students. Just this week, restrictions on crowds at sports games have been put back in place and some teams are close to being shut down due to new cases. 

Questions about the resilience of the school’s COVID-19 restrictions have started to spring back up in conversation with the rise of cases as the schools leaders cling to their original plan of reducing transmission by simply wearing masks. The aforementioned loosened sense of urgency among the student body and a lack of enforcement has led to many cases of students not properly wearing face coverings, and a seemingly inevitable lack of physical space has reduced any hopes of physical distancing to merely gilded dreams. A general feeling of uneasiness has fallen over the student body and staff as we enter the holiday season. 

COVID-19 not only affects the students’ abilities to come to school but also the staffs’. In recent weeks, the average amount of staff absences has increased by 80%, even hitting 23% teacher absence on 12/17. Although some of these are not due to COVID-19, the facts remain the same: our school is facing a teacher shortage. When members of our press team conducted a census, we found that due to teacher absences, there were 106 students who were in the cafe, lecture hall, and library (63, 19, and 25 respectively) while there was only one staff member in each of those rooms. These staff members aren’t all just teachers either, for example, in the library, the librarian was the only staff member our team found. This presents a larger problem: babysitting students isn’t their job. They have other important responsibilities that they have to perform to keep the school running. 

On top of students not being able to have class time face to face with their teacher, in many cases, students aren’t even face to face with their course work. Through personal experience and surveying, there are times when students who are left to work in the cafeteria might not even be assigned any work for the class they are missing or they might be asked to “continue working” on what they finished last class. When our press team was in the lecture hall, we found that internet access was also a problem as people struggled to load their work or used hotspots to access google classroom. This is both unacceptable and unequitable as some students don’t have access to outside resources like wifi hotspots. This presents a question we must seriously consider: Why are we taking the risks to go back to the school building if the learning isn’t improving from online schooling? 

The future of the 2021-22 school year is uncertain as we head into christmas break but if students and staff truly feel that the risks of in person learning outway the negatives of learning online, we must make an effort to reduce transmission this holiday season as much as possible, get the vax, and wear your masks. Covid-19 is not behind us and as a school community we need to regain our sense of urgency if we want to finish the year in person. 

Bibliography:

– https://www.walthampublicschools.org/parents/covid-19/

– (Daily ABSENCE news letter, Ms. Hughes)