From August 10, 2020: Problems vs. Dilemmas during COVID

Our world is being torn up, much as the yard in our Makerspace, which are related in unhappy ways. We're tearing up and regrading the Makerspace yard so that we can use it for outdoor classrooms, which is a problem solved. We need outdoor classrooms with lots of ventilation, we spend money and work to solve the problem. Or at least that problem. The larger problem is what's causing us to do this, the spread of COVID-19 throughout the state and country, which has not been solved. While many are spending money and working hard to solve this problem, efforts to control the virus have been disjointed and erratic, leaving us not much better off than we were last spring. Thus the dilemma that school leaders find themselves trying to manage, how to meet the needs of students, teachers, families, and our communities. Dilemmas don't have solutions, they must be managed, coped with, wrestled, worked around, lived through. Competing interests, competing goods, valid viewpoints abound. There is no right answer, there are many right answers, there are many wrong answers. We're faced with a 4-D decision making matrix: safety of students, safety of teachers, social emotional health of students, workload of teachers, community spread, cleaning protocols, physical distance in classrooms, wearing masks for hours, good ventilation, air filtration, physical activity, fast internet access, chronic health problems, child care issues, county guidance, state guidance... and the 4th dimension, the 7-day and 14-day rolling averages of cases per 100,000 residents in the community, and the percentage of positive cases in the community.

Problems have solutions, dilemmas must be coped with. There are no "right" answers, just various degrees of responses. Six months into this pandemic so much is uncertain, we need to give each other, and ourselves, a great deal of grace in the months ahead.