Good News: In The Debate About School Re-opening, There Are A Few Things Schools Don’t Actually Need To Do

By: Asaf Bitton, MD, MPH; Evan Benjamin, MD, MS, FACP; Margaret Ben-Or, MPH

As schools across the United States near the end of the year, teachers, leaders, and students are grappling with the challenges associated with a variety of teaching and learning modalities, ranging from in-person instruction to hybrid and fully remote learning. Planning for any of these models has been difficult and complex for all stakeholders across the school community.

Compounding these challenges, school leaders must grapple with the nuances centered on the health and wellbeing of students and staff, given the local context of the school community. The good news is that studies and evidence collected over the recent months have revealed an emerging list of things we know that schools DO NOT need to do to stay safe. By busting a few of these myths, school leaders can focus on effectively allocating scarce resources in order to implement a core public health playbook for COVID-19.

Dig into practices like deep cleaning, the use of plexiglass, and more in this full article, published on Medium.