Governor Gavin Newsom has just announced he may trim summer break for millions of K-12 students across California. His working proposal, as he explains it, is to reopen some campuses in July or start the fall semester early to compensate for class time lost to pandemic-driven school closures.
I applaud the governor’s overall handling of the Covid-19 crisis, but this latest spitball is – to put it politely — a bureaucrat’s answer to issues that go way beyond recouping missed learning opportunities
Many kids who have worked diligently to keep up with virtual classwork these past two months are exhausted and desperately in need of a breathing spell. The terror, uncertainties and social dislocations unleashed by the coronavirus have left us all reeling. But for K-12 students the psychological impact has been amplified by the chaos of first-ever on-line instruction and the often-crushing off-line work levied by teachers trying to make up for what they can’t stuff into their virtual lectures.
Often, even in the best of times, teachers handling classes at the same grade level, especially in the last two years of high school, are too overworked to determine if their combined course curricula and homework assignments amount to overload. For lack of any such perspective their tendency – bless them — is to pile it on. Multiply that several times over under current circumstances.
While I have infinite respect for all teachers and school officials trying to navigate these vexing times, I worry that my own high schooler — who often gets less than four hours of sleep a night because of over-ample homework and the taxing novelties of online instruction — may have to continue this regime through the summer with no respite or merely a few days off.
Her overstress and agonies are scarcely atypical. Check online chat rooms for echoes among her contemporaries nationwide.
And it isn’t just losing out on normal classroom experience that takes a toll. Add to that all the other corollaries to the pandemic – fear for vulnerable loved ones, separation from pals and peers, loss of confidence-building extracurricular sports and leadership activities, and exacerbation of all the insecurities that normally come with youth — and you have a psyche unlike any we could ever have imagined for ourselves, let alone for our children.
When I was my daughter’s age, I was beginning to visit prospective colleges and think about the “personal statement” that would put me in the running for my first choices. There was some hope for scholarships if the grades held steady. I was thrilled by the prospect of finally being able to kick the traces and set off on my own.
None of that works the same way for my daughter. None of it is a safe bet for anybody looking beyond high school towards a middle distance blighted by Covid-19.
In these conditions, even the most well-adjusted kid, even the most conscientious student, is teetering on the brittle edge.
State planners, parents and teachers need to think twice, and very carefully, before writing off summer break or reducing it to a blip in the name of playing catch up. The cost could outweigh any improvement in the empty stats used to determine whether our K-12 schools are cranking out what some bureaucrat defines as an acceptable quota of warm bodies.