Outdoor education: How we get kids back to school safely in the midst of coronavirus
I think most parents have become resigned to the fact that this school year is canceled but haven’t yet come to grips with the reality that the 2020–21 school year will also likely be remote UNLESS school administrators, political leaders, and parents are willing to be creative on a way to do school safely. While I’ve been disappointed in the lack of creativity shown by city and state leaders so far with respect to parks and streets policy, there’s an opportunity and perhaps more incentive to coming up with creative solutions for getting kids back in school this fall.
My proposal would be to introduce a significant outdoors component to the school curriculum. There seems to be growing consensus that risk of contagion is significantly lower outdoors than indoors, so the more you can do outdoors, the safer it is. American education was already significantly behind other countries in its value of play and outdoors time so this is also a unique opportunity to fix that problem. Here’s a Time Magazine article about the value of recess: https://time.com/4982061/recess-benefits-research-debate/
In terms of implementation, what this might look like could be some mix of 1) LOTS of field trips (via bus and local walking trips), 2) closing streets adjacent to the school to cars so kids can play/learn in them, 3) creating curriculum designed for the outdoors: using your environment to teach English, Science, Math, Social Studies, etc.
Having only half the school population indoors at any given time is a way to reducing crowding in the school building itself. For bused field trips, more school buses will be required so kids sit sufficiently apart from each other. The school district would need to work with the city to close streets to cars, reserve time at local/county parks; work with the state to reserve time at state parks to ensure school groups aren’t crowding them.
Rainy/snowy days will be challenging so maybe those will have to be stay-at-home days (but to be fair, there are very few days out of the year where it actually rains all day). Forcing kids outdoors during non-ideal weather is character-building! Also, addressing weather challenges is a good incentive to finally change the US school calendar to have longer breaks in the winter while keeping kids in school during the summer when it’ll be easier to do outdoor school.
I’m sure people can poke lots of holes in this proposal but it’s just an idea. I’m pretty sure most parents would be willing to experiment just so they can get the kids out of the house. As with parks and streets, our community can look at this problem two ways: 1) be resigned to status quo thinking and lock everyone in because we can’t imagine changing certain assumptions about life or 2) be open minded, be willing to throw everything we know about how to do school out the window and start from a blank slate to figure out how to make this work.
It’d be a unique opportunity to turn a bad situation into good by getting kids outside more, introducing more contextual and experiential learning, and giving teachers the creativity to actually teach instead of our previous focus on tests. This crisis may give our society the reason to make the transformational changes to our education system it needed, even without a pandemic.
