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With known COVID-19 infections rising recently in our state, many parents are concerned with what their children’s public education looks like in August and beyond.

Our keiki are anxious too. Clearly, online learning isn’t as beneficial to most young students as class time is. Current plans to reopen schools in August are reasonable and well thought out, but could use a bit more out-of-the-box thinking.

The primary limitation to offering full-time classroom instruction to all the students is limited physical space. Adding more space would take time and be costly. But we can very easily increase the time that space is available. Currently classrooms were empty two whole days out of seven.

Yes, I am writing about Saturdays and Sundays. What a waste of scarce resources.

Having the schools partially open one or two more days a week should alleviate most of the physical distancing/safety issues. In addition, we could also make the school day the same length as a work day, including time for exercise and socializing.

Another “time” factor is to decrease seasonal breaks so that the new school year will have just as many classroom hours, or more, as the norm before COVID-19. Time matters.

We could offer four days a week of classroom instruction for every student if schools were open seven days a week, but a compromise would be to just have partial services offered on Saturdays so that every student could be offered three days of classroom instruction. Current plans offer only two days a week to some students.

That is unacceptable. We can safely offer every keiki three days of classroom instruction if we temporarily progress past the five-day work week that unions have burdened us with.

Hire More Temps

Of course, to minimize the costs we will need more temporary teacher assistants too. This would enable the teachers who are too scared to teach to volunteer to be furloughed or to handle the distant learning side.

The teacher assistants should still have basic background checks and suitable educational credentials for the grade and subject matter, but shouldn’t be required to be certified.

We don’t have the time and such certifications have always been more about restricting the supply of teachers than insuring quality. It is win-win as it will help get some people off unemployment until tourism sporadically regains strength.

We can do better by our keiki than the current proposals.

Hopefully, some will decide to become teachers or otherwise become involved in the educational system as a career.

Another benefit as Hawaii continues to be short of teachers, especially “locally grown” ones. Current certified teachers should have increased supervisory roles and thus should be granted bonuses if they volunteer to do so. Longer hours should also be compensated.

We can do better by our keiki than the current proposals. Why leave our valuable classroom space empty two days a week during a pandemic? Either it is a crisis that necessitates changes to how we go about our daily lives or it is not.