For K-12 schools, Fall 2021 will set the new normal. With students and educators vaccinated and masks set aside, what we do in Fall 2021 will affect how schools operate for many years to come.
Fall 2021 will be The Great Reset.
And while Fall 2021 seems a long way off right now, decisions made this coming spring will lay the foundation for what schools look like in the fall.
To start with, a great deal of effort and resources will be devoted to dealing with learning loss, reengaging students who became discouraged or lost, and addressing mental health issues. That is how it should be.
But what will be deemphasized or even cannibalized to provide for these needs? That will depend on several things.
Of course, it will depend in part on how our state’s legislature deals with the 2021-22 state budget. It is almost certain that funding for the K-12 public schools will be reduced from the 2020-21 level – legislative leaders have said as much. But how much funding will be reduced matters a great deal, as will any strings that the legislators tie to the money they choose to spend on the schools.
But legislators aren’t the only ones who will be making decisions that will profoundly affect Florida’s public K-12 schools. This spring, parents and students will be selecting courses for Fall 2021. What they select will set the template for future years. If parents and students decide that AP Calculus is too stressful, then AP Calculus will not be offered by the school in the fall – and probably not in the following years, either. If parents and students decide that the engineering course is quite enough and that adding physics to the schedule would be too much, then there will not be any physics class – and that school’s students will head to college to major in engineering without the high school physics course that the American Society for Engineering Education says they should have.
Interest in attending medical school is spiking among young people. If those newly interested young people are steered into high school “pre-med” courses and away from foundational courses in chemistry and physics, then those science courses will disappear from that school’s course offerings and those aspiring physicians are likely to be unsuccessful in pursuing their medical careers.
Teachers, counselors and administrators are exhausted. The stress of dealing with hybrid classrooms – teaching face-to-face and online students simultaneously – has been layered on top of the undercurrent of fear of being exposed to COVID at school. Nobody really wants to hear me talk about getting students signed up for upper level high school math and science courses for the fall. But it is important.
Before the pandemic, Florida was already far behind the nation in the rates at which students took courses in chemistry, physics and calculus. That is, even before the pandemic our state’s students were poorly prepared to pursue careers in fields like engineering, biomedical sciences, physical sciences, computer science and medicine. If parents and students flee from challenging upper level math and science courses because of their emotional exhaustion, it will not only negatively impact the future opportunities for those students – it will also impact the opportunities their schools can offer in the future.
Somehow, we need to keep as many Florida students as possible on track for careers in engineering, biomedical and physical sciences, computer science and medicine. These conversations with parents and students will require patience and empathy, but they have to happen. The futures of our students – and the future of our state – depends on those conversations.
Bridge to Tomorrow 