Teachers Prepare to Face Questions About COVID-19 as School Returns

As COVID-19 guidelines vary across school districts, teachers may be faced with tough questions about the pandemic.

Missouri State Teachers Association Director of Communication, Todd Fuller, said districts should be prepared.

“I believe most school districts are going to have conversations and they’re going to have meetings, especially during these first couple weeks,” Fuller said.

Some teachers said they are choosing to embrace the questions as best as they can.

Eureka Springs High School Science Teacher, Shawna Miller, said she pushes her students to find out if a certain COVID-19 related topic is valid.

She said she does this by allowing research and experiments to take place inside her classroom.

“I’ll put a smell on one side of the room, like cologne or something, and we’ll talk about how long it takes to get through the entire room,” Miller said. “How good are like maybe the face shields working, do you think the air’s getting behind that?”

Miller said this type of experimentation seems to go a long way.

“Understanding what are the risks and what is the science behind things like the vaccine, or things like the social distance,” Miller said.

Fuller said teachers statewide have also voiced the need to be focused on getting things back to normal in the classroom.

“I think if you were to ask any teacher in the state about what they want to talk about, they want to talk about curriculum and they want to talk about what they can do to help students, especially if they think a lot of their students are just trying to get back into, what we consider, the traditional learning process,” Fuller said.

Miller said she hopes the research that takes place inside her classroom about COVID-19 might also be forwarded to parents.

(Story by Christina Randall and Ashley Eddy, Ozarks First)