On March 10 of this year, I was giving a reading workshop at an elementary school. While we worked together, teachers were expressing their concerns about this coronavirus that had begun to be on the news, with teachers trying to figure out how they could safely hold parent conferences and the book fair later in the week.

Those questions were swiftly rendered moot when schools across the state closed two days later, a situation that went from a two-week closure to a closure for the rest of the academic year. State achievement tests were canceled. Regents were canceled. And teachers had to instantly retool to teach their students remotely.

Talk about your steep learning curves.

Now the pressing question is what school will look like in the fall. There is much speculation about this, with many harried parents dearly hoping that their children's academic lives will return to some kind of on-site experience of normalcy.

Scenarios include some variation of groups of students taking turns attending school followed by remote instruction. One week on, one week off, with followed by one week of remote learning for all. Or letting some students attend school on Monday and Wednesday, other groups on Tuesday and Thursday, with Friday for remote learning. The possibilities are dizzying. And for working parents, these schedules present another whole set of difficulties.

Other concerns are limiting the movement of students within a school to minimize the amount of contact they have in shared spaces. What then becomes of those special subjects such as physical education, music, and art? Do those teachers all travel to classrooms to teach their subjects? Do kids eat lunch in their classrooms? This new world is presenting with unprecedented challenges for education.

Teachers have done yeoman's work in trying to meet the academic and emotional needs of their students these past few months. Teachers talk of students who seem to have fallen off the grid during this pandemic.

Some students have difficulty finding a Wi-Fi signal in order to attend classes or do homework. If there are several kids in the house, and mom or dad are also trying to work from home, the complications are obvious.

I talked to one dad, the father of six-year-old twins, who said with a bit of desperation in his voice, “Oh no, they have to go back to school in the fall.”

Other parents have expressed concern about sending their students back to school, given all the unknowns and the logistics of protecting a group of young people who may or may not understand social distancing and mask-wearing.

And then there are the teachers. How can they be protected? One middle school teacher in Florida told me that one plan was for teachers to disinfect their entire room between classes, wiping down every desk and chair in the four minutes between classes. That seems patently ridiculous and completely undoable.

There are many decisions to be made by educators and their leaders in the coming months that will impact all our children, their teachers, and their families this fall. May they be granted wisdom and clarity of purpose as they make their plans.