The City of Boston is looking at a variety of options for returning students to school in September and expects to announce a plan in the next week to 10 days, Boston Mayor Martin Walsh said Friday.
“Right now, we’re in the midst of working on different models of what schools could look like coming back in September. A lot of people have a lot of concerns,” he said during a Friday press conference. “There’s a portion of people that don’t think we should open in September, there’s a bigger part of the community, I think, that thinks we should open some type of school in September, and there’s some people that quite aren’t sure how to format a plan yet.”
Guidance from state education officials instructed districts to prepare for in-person education, a hybrid model and a fully-remote learning model for the new school year this fall. Walsh said that Boston is conducting a survey of teachers and parents to incorporate their feedback into the city’s plan.
Walsh noted that if students return to the classroom on Sept. 10 as scheduled, it will have been six months that they were outside of a physical school building.
“And if something doesn’t happen where we get our kids back into a classroom, that’s going to have effects, potentially long-term effects, on their education,” he said. “But again, I’ll talk more about that as we move forward.”
Walsh also said “there’s no question about it that opening school this year is going to cost more” and added that he has “no intention of laying anyone off” from the school system as other cities and towns have done.
“But in saying that, you know, having support from the federal government will be helpful,” Walsh added.
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