What experts are saying about opening schools amid COVID-19

Enlarge / COVID-19 has really shifted the academic world in 2020 (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

For parents and teachers in the US, August usually means getting ready for the school year to start-finalizing lesson plans, making sure all the school supplies are on hand, and possibly buying a rapidly growing kid a new wardrobe. In the face of a global pandemic, however, getting ready for school means something entirely different. It starts today with buying face masks and checking whether the school buildings have been reworked to enable socially distanced learning.

That's assuming the schools reopen at all, of course. Under the best of circumstances, that would be a difficult decision, involving weighing the availability of extra staff, funding for facilities changes, and competing interests in child development and physical health. But the whole question has now become a partisan political issue, driven by an ill-informed president making a big push to reopen schools.

With all that noise, it's undoubtedly difficult for parents to even figure out what factors they should consider when making decisions for their children. To try to help, we've looked over guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, National Academies of Science, the World Health Organization, and other expert groups, and we've found there's a general consistency in their advice. What follows is an attempt to summarize both the considerations that motivate this advice, as well as the factors these experts suggest people keep in mind when making decisions about in-person learning this fall.

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