With spring break and many families’ travel plans right around the corner, I wanted the school to tell us exactly what to do afterwards in terms of sending kids back into the classroom.
I wanted a checklist or a flow chart — a series of boxes you could check or not check that would give you a definitive answer about (A) whether your own spring break plans posed enough of a COVID risk to keep your kids home in quarantine afterwards, and (B) whether kids returning to school in person could be assured that they were entering a relatively COVID-safe space.
The school gave me no such if/then schema. Instead, they asked me to do what they are asking our kids to do every day: to think.
“Nooooo,” you can imagine me wailing in disbelief. Seriously? They’re asking me to input a complex data set, process the information, research relevant factors, apply sound judgment, and output a thoughtful answer to my own question? Puh-lease. It’s like they expect me to be a lifelong learner or critical thinker or something.
There are so many factors to consider when considering spring break plans (if spring break is even a thing for you, which, if you don’t have school-age kids, it probably isn’t). On one side you have the desire to go somewhere different or do something different or see something different — a desire that is amplified this year after a COVID winter. And on the other side you have, well, COVID. COVID, and all the related factors that make traveling anything from a reasonably safe activity to a wildly irresponsible one: mode of transportation, sleeping and eating arrangements, vaccination status, crowds, testing.
Luckily the school nurse, Adriana Vanbianchi, with the help of the CDC, has put together a little Cliff Notes-style decision-making toolkit for us. Even better, she’s done it as a podcast, so we don’t even have to read — we can just listen and absorb. And in her abundant wisdom, she employed science teacher Matt Hinckley as a podcast host, which is appropriate because not only does Matt understand and believe in science, but he also has a voice that is better suited for podcasts than 87% of podcast hosts out there. (Find the podcast here: https://methow.org/2021/03/24/spring-break-during-a-pandemic-can-it-be-done-safely.)
In the podcast, Matt poses a few different spring break scenarios to Adriana and she talks through the factors that increase and decrease COVID transmission risks for each, using CDC guidelines to inform her answers.
Still, Adriana’s podcast doesn’t just spew out tidy solutions for each family’s situation. Like the International Baccalaureate program that provides a framework for Methow Valley students’ learning, the podcast focuses on getting parents to ask the right questions and think critically to solve problems and determine answers. If we ask that of our kids, I suppose it’s fair to ask it of ourselves as well.
