School Days, Summer Days, All In a Daze

Both of my kids love school. They didn’t get that from me. I enjoyed the camaraderie and relationships, and developed new interests when I made new friends. But a year of tumultuous bullying beat that passion out of me. My grades plummeted and only started to level out after we moved from New Jersey to Long Island and I came out of my haze, like a turtle whose shell got whacked with a stick.

My sons can’t wait to head out the door in the morning for their programs. The older one, an independent traveler, rides the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station, then either walks or takes the subway to his destination. The younger one excitedly plans the short walk to his elementary school, with an imaginary kids improv we’ve worked out called “Spec-Magical Day.”

Enter the novel coronavirus and exit the remainder of the academic school year. Google Classroom is where it’s at for “distance learning,” plus Zoom sessions for extra-curricular activities like piano lessons. Summer camps are likely kaput as well, cratering every moment of each day through September.

New York State is not alone in dealing with financial stress. “We have no state revenues to speak of,” Governor Andrew Cuomo said during a press conference last month. “We’re going to have to dramatically cut our state expenses. You can’t spend that which you don’t have.”

Those cuts will impact the education of tens of thousands of students, including my children. Prior to the crisis, Cuomo had pitched small increases in school budgeting. But state government passed a post-COVID $177B “wartime budget” in a nearly-empty legislative chamber that gives the Governor unprecedented power to withhold or reduce payments to schools and local governments as coronavirus hampers the state’s ability to collect taxes.

New York will likely follow the example of California this fall, staggering arrival times and meal times in cafeterias, promoting social distancing, ending assemblies, and changing the way students dress and undress for gym class. As schools brace for a second wave of COVID, families must also be prepared with mobile devices and working wi-fi.

UC Berkeley education professor Bruce Fuller made some reasonable suggestions about a return to normalcy — including starting with the…