Your stomach hurts to think about fall because the unknowns are so unsettling. As you are just one week from finishing the most difficult school year of your 30 years of teaching you try to imagine what the options for the start of next school year may be. Those parents who want to send kids to school can, and they will join the teachers who will certainly want to return to the classroom because the benefits outweigh the risks. In comparison, those parents who want to continue the madness of homeschooling can because there will certainly be teachers who do not feel comfortable being at school and they could then have the option of remote teaching.
With a possible division into these two groups, the social distancing becomes easier in the buildings because of fewer people attending. You know that you definitely cannot go through the trauma of the last nine weeks again. Your boys will go to preschool part time starting next week. And while this was a hard decision, this stuck at home lifestyle is not sustainable.
Every day you pray for some outside-the-box thinking from those in charge since this is a marathon you are in for. You realize that the consecutive cloudy days are getting to you, and you hope that when the sunshine returns so, too, will your hopefulness.
Big Decisions Lie Ahead for Educators
As school districts continue working nearly around the clock to prepare for what the 2020-2021 school year might look like, there are plenty of people on both sides of the discussion. The Covid-19 pandemic is demanding a new play book as parents, teachers, administrators, and school boards prepare for the different scenarios they may face in the fall. And while it may be easier for a business to make the quick decision to create smaller campuses of modular office buildings to keep work teams separated, it is also easier to understand how the work from home model can function for adults.
Schools, of course, are different. And even though there is a possibility that retrofitting modular office building designs and creating more space in some cities, the fact of the matter is their are large city schools that simply have no where to grow.
Elementary schedules may be easier to create a self contained classroom that will limit the transmission of the virus until a vaccine is found, but middle and high school plans will be more complicated. Will warehouse partitioning systems by used in large gyms to create a more suitable physical education space for older athletes? Will students have to attend school in two to three shifts? Or will students attend every other day or week?
In addition to rethinking the physical spaces issues, of course, there will also be much need for redoing teacher and student schedules so that students stay in certain “pods” for learning. The option of having separate morning and afternoon sessions, and the use of the newest modular office building spaces might make the cleaning between the groups easier to manage.
As some schools consider block scheduling where students have three classes a quarter creating less movement, there are also many school districts that were already dealing with aging facilities. Of course, in addition to providing mental health care for teachers, there are also many other considerations when it comes to rethinking the way that districts will approach classrooms next year. It is for all of these reasons, of course, that so many parents and educators alike feel stressed, unable to relax, and unsure of what to do next.
Engineers have known modular office building construction jobs reduce energy consumption during the building process by around 67%, as well as reduces energy costs later on for occupants. These kinds of savings, however, will become even more important as school districts fear that they will be operating on reduced budgets. Few answers in the next dew weeks, months, and possibly years will be easy, but it is important to know that the best plans will involve the top building options that are already in place. Permanent and relocatable, the two main types of modular construction, will likely both be needed as schools and other businesses move forward.