My child goes to a small-ish catholic school and coming up with plans for childcare and other services have been a big focus, at least on a contingency basis as everyone expects that school will not remain open in-person for long. Utilizing PTOs and such have been a big part of that.
It's tough that school districts and municipal gov are all on their own to plan things, and the lack of consistency makes it impossible to collaborate.
I see the lack of consistency (diversity) to be a good thing. This is a unique situation, doesn't it make sense to try many things and then converge on what works?
Education has been mostly unchanged over the last 100+ years, it's probably time to try some new ideas.
There will be 2 separate subgroups of "diverse" approaches.
One group of approaches will be used by people with money who spend it on innovative small group supplemental learning/childcare pods via hired tutors.
The other group of approaches will those used by those with very limited means scraping together whatever childcare they can afford with little ability to tend to academics or social development.
Which group of approaches would you want your child in?
We’re only likely to get the diversity, not the convergence. Just gathering and analyzing the data from how thousands of school districts handle this will take many years, and this will be long over by then.
Then the solution should not be to expect the federal government to come up with a plan. That's one of the few entities with even more stakeholders than schools.
It's tough that school districts and municipal gov are all on their own to plan things, and the lack of consistency makes it impossible to collaborate.