Germ Factories | Covid-19 Containment

Gotta get this out there! Schools as we have known them are germ factories. Why are we even discussing returning children to some sanitized horror factory of what they used to be? Let's not talk about trying to do schools as close to what they used to be to contain the virus. Let's talk about containment.

The reason our current school systems are such germ factories is that there are simply too many children in one place. One kid gets sick and the whole community gets sick because that child spreads it to every family in the school. Let's limit the exposure. Why not restructure our schools, or at least our classes. One-room schoolhouses were once the norm in our nation for the elementary grades. Let's return to that. Imagine classes of 15 to 20 students with one teacher and one aide composed of 2 to 7 families of children. In this way, if one child gets sick, he/she only infects a small number of people in the community. Then, those families can take precautions to contain the spread. In the long run, having separate facilities for each class would be ideal, however, we could continue to use our current buildings. Think of the classrooms as apartments. Deliver meals to the classrooms from the cafeteria and teach the children to sanitize outside play equipment before use.

This system would be greatly beneficial in other ways as well. 

Children need consistency to thrive. In our current system, kids and teachers barely get to know one another, and just because an arbitrary 9 month period has passed, the whole apple cart is dumped and the process has to begin again. How is a teacher supposed to get to know each child's strengths and weaknesses and address them in such a short time? The reason homeschools tend to turn out children with higher test scores is that those children have a teacher who knows them, and not just a record. 

Children would also have the opportunity to teach younger children, reinforcing the things they have learned. Younger children would have the benefit of having more older models to look up to and imitate. 

Children need to be able to play and spending all day in masks is just unhealthy for a growing child. Let's think out of the big box most of us have grown up in and find some workable solutions!