On Sept. 17, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper announced that students in Kindergarten through Grade 5 could go back to in-person learning as soon as Oct. 5. This announcement came after an increasing number of critics have denounced Cooper’s social distancing mandates as unnecessary and ineffectual. Currently, all students are in either a fully virtual classroom, or in a mix of virtual and in-person classes. Cooper’s announcement means that students will be able to return to school under Plan A, a minimal social distancing plan.
Before this announcement, the State had mandated that schools reopen under Plan B, which required that schools only have fifty percent of their max capacity at any given time. If school boards felt that this was not safe enough, they could keep their schools totally closed physically and focus only on remote learning under Plan C. No school had been allowed to reopen fully.
Why the change in policy? Dr. Mandy Cohen, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, stated that the change was based on science, and not opinion. She added that the state is only allowing Plan A for K-5 students because there is a lower health risk and greater reward for sending them back to school.
“As we look at the risk, there also seems to be just a different way that the virus is interacting with our younger kids,” Cohen said. “They seem to get COVID less often, they get less severely sick and they transmit it less often.”
This move has drawn praise from the Republicans in the State Senate. Republican Leader Phil Berger has been critical of Cooper’s previous quarantine plans. He has called virtual learning “a slow-motion trainwreck” and acknowledged the governor’s move as “a step in the right direction.”
This move has also drawn criticism from the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE), a major organization of teachers in the state. The president of the group, Tamika Walker Kelley, described the announcement as “flirting with danger.”
“Maintaining a minimum six-foot social distance at all times is a critical safety measure for both educators and students, and we will not recommend for any educator to enter a non-distancing classroom without a properly fitted N-95 mask to protect their health, and the health of everyone around them,” Kelley added.
Currently, Chatham County Schools is under Plan C, with no in-person learning, for the first nine weeks of school. As of Sept. 23, the school board passed a 4-1 vote to extend online schooling until Jan. 15, the end of the first semester.
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