OUR VIEW

Herculean as the task may be, the time has come for summer break to end and students to return to school.

Different doesn’t even begin to get into just what this academic year will be like for students, their parents, teachers and administrators. COVID-19 has brought more societal change to America and our way of doing things than anything else in the last 20 years since the horror of 9/11 reshaped security and travel.

The two events are separate entirely, yet there’s a commonality between them that pushes us to believe in better days ahead. We are a resilient bunch, both as Americans and North Carolinians. Our inner fortitude shall see us through.

Bumpy will be the road we travel. Lord knows it already has been with restrictions left and right, opinions with and without basis being tossed to and fro, and a changing element of knowledge about the coronavirus that extends from the scientists, researchers and doctors to all of us absorbing the information.

Every move we make should be calculated for risk, for this is a deadly virus that knows no socioeconomic lines. It doesn’t reach everyone, and for many that it does reach it’s little more than a few days of illness that abates and goes away. Our society fully engages that wide spectrum.

So off to school we go, some having started this week and the majority come Monday. Bladen County Schools was going to render a controversial decision regardless, and it fell on the side of caution by choosing remote learning only.

It is a resumption of what the schools experienced from March 16 to the end of last school year, when proms and extracurricular activities were wiped out, graduation was altered, and pretty much nobody was happy. Nearly three months of unhappiness.

And the unknown.

We know a little more about the virus now. And schools know a little more about remote learning.

We’ll respect the decision to keep students out of buildings last spring, and we’ll respect the “on the fly” ways schools adapted and tried to continue teaching kids. They did their best in a tough situation.

But we’ll also recognize that, in a majority of circles when pressed for truly honest answers, the learning environment was close to nonexistent. State and local public school leaders say it will be different now, having gained some experience and made some tweaks.

We hope so. Remote learning isn’t new. Education institutions have been doing it for years.

Five months after the pandemic rerouted our world, there’s no reason for Bladen County Schools and the N.C. Department of Public Instruction not to be able to deliver quality instruction to our children each day for as long as they are out of the buildings.

In person instruction is better — there’s no question about that. But these are the variables we’re playing with today.

It is up to everyone involved to do their best, and to make it work. Our children are depending on it.