On the super plus side, Israel is doing great with coronavirus infection rates. "Spread of Covid-19 Halted" blared the headline of the Times of Israel two days ago. This great news, however, is leading to one of the next logical questions: "when can kids go back to school?" Which is odd to hear when my MA public school-teacher friend Kerry has just told me that there will be no more in-person school in Massachusetts this year.
Sometimes I feel like we're on different planets than everyone else--we locked down so much earlier and had such stronger restrictions on our movement (MA just announced that everyone has to wear masks starting mid-week. We've been at this for over three weeks as a law, and close to two months as a suggestion). But now Israel is opening up the economy and here we are talking about kids going back to school.
On Friday afternoon the government announced that, starting SUNDAY, many students would be returning to class. Given that a vast swath of the country is Sabbath-observant, this timing seemed INSANE to me. How on earth would they be able to get things ready (even basic things like covering the water fountains)?! This crazy timing led some mayors to rebel and refuse to open their schools on Sunday.
In the educational framework that Ilana's school is part of, the plan was to start with grades 6-8 (no explanation of how they chose those grades. And it can't be that the kids have to go back to school to get the parents back to work because the preschoolers aren't back yet, and the 6th-8th graders are a totally useful age to have at home, especially if there are younger kids). Ilana's school, however, said yesterday that they were planning to open the whole school (grades 1-8) this week and wanted to know how many students to plan for. Classes would be split into groups of 15 (which is about half of the normal class size in her school). I was asked to find out how many of the parents of her classmates were planning to send their kids back to school, and was pretty surprised to find out, after a day of talking with parents, that only 5 parents were planning to send their child back at this point, and 22 said an outright 'no' or that they would wait two weeks and see what was happening with the infection rates and then re-evaluate (that's the group I fall in). That seemed to be the upshot in the other grades as well, and, in the end, the school is going to remain "Zoom Schooling" for at least the next few weeks. WHEW.
However, then there's Penina's school. Her school is part of a different educational system with different grades being sent back (because why should the entire country be doing the same thing?!). In her school system, it's grades 1-3 going back and also 11-12, which includes her grade. I was hoping, hoping that maybe her school would also poll parents and find similar things to Ilana's school, but no such luck (Ilana's school is a private-public mix and Penina's is straight public, so the parents have less say and the government more/total say in Penina's school). Why grades 11 and 12? Because here the students have to pass a series of bagruyot. These matriculation exams are necessary for graduation from high school, and the government is concerned about getting off-track with the bagrut schedule (thus saith Penina, "they're teaching the students to value test scores over their lives"). The school just announced tonight that it is reopening Wednesday. Sigh. She will not be going back at this time. Parents are not required to send their child back to in-person classes, but the student will have to go in for the exams themselves. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
I really hate feeling that the children of this country are guinea pigs in a very big science experiment, and that someone high up in politics missed the class about "change one variable at a time". Okay, Israel--you want to open up most of the stores this past week, and let malls start opening on Thursday--FINE. You say we can now have weddings and funerals with 50 people rather than 10? GREAT! But can we please not do everything all at once and send a million children back to school the same week? Can we please just take this slow and see how things play out?
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