With help from Myah Ward BREAKING — Hope Hicks, a close Trump aide who flew on Air Force One on Tuesday with the president, has tested positive for coronavirus. GRADING THE SCHOOL YEAR — After POLITICO sent home its workforce in March, I got an invitation to a companywide Slack channel for parents: #remotewithkids. What started out as a place to share cute pictures, notes about baking projects or tips about entertaining children while they quarantine at home quickly turned into real talk: It’s hard to juggle working with parenting when school is out and everyone is stuck at home under one roof. As the fall approached, the room’s chatter turned to the new school year and how to wade through a menu of terrible options. We know we’re more privileged than most: mostly college-educated, lots of two-income households. But we’re still parents. Everyone at POLITICO follows politics and policy very closely, and on this topic, there’s no consensus: We’re not sure how to weigh the health risks of sending kids to school against, to be charitable, less than perfect virtual schooling. So this morning, I sent up a flare in the #remotewithkids channel asking POLITICOs to talk about what they’ve learned from the first month of Covid-2020 education. Almost everyone agreed that the school year has been a mess. A huge part of the problem has been the politicization of school reopenings. Many school districts have opened up even though they were in a community with high Covid spread, while others are staying shut when they should consider reopening — and there’s even a study to prove it. Some parents are settling into a remote school year. “The school district is screwing this up,” said Tanya Snyder, a transportation reporter who has children in kindergarten and the third grade in the Washington, D.C., schools. The district is not being upfront about health data or improving school buildings or hiring more teachers or working with the union, Tanya said. For now, the district is virtual through Nov. 9. She’s worried about the things her kids are missing: swim lessons, parkour class. But for the most part her homebody kids are getting along fine at home. She said it’s “bananas” that the city opened up other businesses before community transmission was under control, a key determinant of whether a school district can open up safely. Jessica Cuellar , editorial director for production and operations, has a third grader and a kindergartner in the public schools in Virginia’s Fairfax County, as well as a six-month-old at home. She and her husband opted for remote learning even though they knew the copious screen time would be a challenge. Then the district went all remote anyway. Her kids are doing OK, she admits, but “it’s not easy. I am relieved when we get to dinner.” Other parents are relieved to have the chance to send their kids to school in person. Jack Smith, our executive director for audience solutions, has four kids — 8-year-old twins, a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old — and a beach house in New Jersey. The family retreated to their beach house when Covid first hit, but had planned on sending the kids back to school in Arlington — until the school district started leaning toward a virtual school year. “The prospect of having four kids in the house doing virtual school, my wife managing this chaos, me working full time, it fundamentally would have broken our family,” Jack said. So they opted to send their kids to school in Avalon, N.J., where the district had orders of magnitude fewer kids and a plan to keep them socially distanced. Fernando Rodas, an operations manager, has been thrilled about his kindergartner starting in-person public school in New York this week, but adds that he’s “cautiously pessimistic.” As he put it, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we went fully virtual next week.” Two of Julie Kennedy’s older kids, in the fourth and second grades, are doing virtual public school in Charlottesville, Va. But her youngest is in an in-person pre-K program. Kennedy, executive director for product, and her husband struggled with whether to send the youngest to a school building, but decided it was worth the risk given the area’s low Covid prevalence rate and the school’s precautions. “Honestly every day when he walks out the door I have two feelings: I hope this is a good decision, and we are all jealous of him for being able to go to school,” she said. Parents of teens are coping differently with how the pandemic has shattered their year: Angela Greiling Keane , managing editor of states and Canada, has a 16-year-old in a Washington, D.C., public charter school. Given community spread, virtual education makes sense for her daughter’s school, Angela said. But she’s worried about college prep and all the social aspects of high school that her daughter is missing. Traci Schweikert, chief talent officer, has a middle schooler and a high schooler in Fairfax County schools, which are currently remote. The lack of social interaction has been hard on her kids. She worries about their mental health. The debate over school reopenings has opened up a broader discussion across the country: What’s the point of school? The pandemic has made it painfully clear, if it wasn’t already, that school isn’t just a place for education. It’s a place where they get fed, where they learn social skills, where they get counselling and screened for abuse. And without a plan for keeping teachers, staff and students safe, it can be a place where Covid spreads in the community. Sign up for the new Weekly Education: Coronavirus Special Edition newsletter, where we explore the debates of the day, and talk to movers and shakers about whether the changes ushered in to American education by the pandemic, from pre-K through grad school, are here to stay. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.
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