It’s always so much easier to make a good plan when you can look at the work other people are doing, then follow their good work and avoid their mistakes. So as we are all urgently interested in opening up schools this fall, it’s definitely worth looking at other countries to see how things are going for them. It’s not perfect in terms of giving us information that will directly apply to us; but it’s better than nothing!

Check out our excerpt of this article below, and you can read the whole thing right here.

“But countries that have resumed classes already have found that it’s easier and cheaper to welcome all students back to their classrooms than it is to devise complicated schedules with multiple shifts or to find new space.

Creating ‘bubbles’ within schools may be more important

In Israel, hypervigilant public health officials mandated that an entire school close any time a single coronavirus case was detected among students or staff.

By contrast, in Germany, when a student tested positive, that class was put into a mandatory two-week quarantine, but the rest of the school continued on.

Clearly, the German model is less disruptive. Some health experts have thus come to advocate that more important than social distancing within a classroom are efforts to create bubbles within schools, to limit potential contamination and the need to shut everything down.

England started sending some grades back on a voluntary basis in June. But when schools fully reopen in September for mandatory, full-time, in-person classes, elementary school students will be in “class bubbles” of up to 30 and high school students in “year bubbles” of up to 240.

Quebec, the Canadian province hit hardest by the coronavirus, experimented with various means of social distancing when it reopened elementary schools outside Montreal in May. Classes were limited to 15 students. Libraries remained closed. Recess times were staggered. Some schools painted green dots on schoolyard grounds to mark sufficient separation.

Bubbles will be introduced when elementary and high schools reopen for compulsory in-class instruction in the fall. Within classrooms, students will form groups of up to six students who won’t have to maintain social distancing. Bubbles must keep a one-meter distance from each other and two meters from teachers.

Helve, the Finnish infectious-disease specialist, noted that bubbles may be especially valuable in societies with high infection rates, such as the United States, where it may be inevitable that a student or teacher shows up with the virus at some point.

“How do you minimize the impact on the school?” he said. “The more cases you have in a society, the more likely it is that you will have an outbreak at a school, or that you will have a teacher or a parent or a child who brings the virus to the school.””

There are a lot of other examples in this article, from all across the globe. Read the rest of it right here.