High schools have been shut down in Chicago for almost exactly a year now. This was apparently an impressive milestone for Chicago Public Schools, as they are now planning on wrapping the whole thing up and are working with the Chicago Teachers Union to find a hybrid instruction schedule. However, the tricky word in that sentence is “planning”: What will the final schedule be, and how will it help as many students as possible? Obviously there must be some distance and preventative measures maintained to keep students safe, but even with this consideration there are many ideas and each have their merits. However, the plan that I personally favor and the one that stands out as the clear front-runner is known as the Hourly Daily Rotation Schedule.

Let’s break down the Rotation Schedule, with help from Arnold Arnoldson, lead Schedule Creator And Reasonably Intelligent Strategizer for CPS. He lays it out pretty simply: “Well, uh… basically… so you’ve got students, right? And so we plan on rotating them to school. Hourly Daily. So, uh… right?” For those less technically minded, Mr. Arnoldson describes a plan in which every single student attends school every day for two periods of one hour each, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. The upsides of this plan are numerous: daily instruction from teachers, hours reasonably spaced out over the day, and probably a couple other things. Students are thrilled with this plan. Steve Russell ’22 chimes in: “What? That doesn’t even make sense. Logistically, how does that make sense?” I’m not certain what Steve means (those were some big words), but that is all the more reason why we must be bold and try it.

While this plan is almost necessarily the way to go, an experimental schedule is being considered in which schools have one student in the building at a time, for a period of about 13 seconds each day (figuring with 2000 students in a 7 hour school day). This plan hasn’t been entirely discarded, and may gain support as discussions continue from those with a mind towards safety. As an advocate for cautious reopening famously said, “I think we should probably be cautious about reopening. Let’s do it safely.” For more information on this plan and others, this Youtube video might shed some light on the debate.