What will happen this fall for schools and companies?

Many are deeply uncertain or confused about the fall.

Happy to share here some news articles I carefully curated to send my employees. Since school and company leaders must decide ahead of time, and those decisions dictate life, this may be one way to look into the future even if we cannot know the virus future.

SCHOOLS:

Maryland Schools - Restart Plan (Main takeaways: They may do only 1 day per week in the classroom and the rest online; or 2 days; or week-on--week-off shifts.)

Gov Cuomo says remote schooling may be new norm. (Main takeaways: He says remote learning could replace the old model of education. Big announcement coming from New York.)

Jeb Bush says it is time to embrace distance learning. (The ex-governor and ex-president's-brother made a public statement that the time is now, and not just because of Covid.)

MIT to reopen in waves, with masks. (MIT has been very actively working to figure out a re-open plan. They were one of the first entities to break the silence about the fall and to suggest that it won't be a simple re-opening. Plans are still in flux, but likely a staged, partial opening. Likely mandatory masks.)

California State Superintendent interview. (Districts will make their own decisions; fall return will involve a mix including digital; kids and teachers likely wearing masks; wants to close the digital divide finally for the state.)

Future of College Education, by a futurist business prof. (This is like an ice age - it will kill off the weak. The top-brand universities (e.g. the ones near Brain Power!) may flourish highly while the next tiers languish painfully. Future seems blended: mix of online and in-person.)

Spain Extends State of Emergency - (Country lockdown will continue at least until May 24, even though the opposition to the ruling party says a state of emergency that long is illegal.)

COMPANIES

Google says most employees will work from home until 2021. (They had previously said June. Now it is the whole year.)

Facebook says its employees can work from home until 2021. (Facebook has 45,000 employees. Google has 120,000.)

Twitter CEO says its employees can work from home forever. (Twitter has only 4,500 employees, compared to the biggies above, and of course they make no hardware and always had a pretty distributed culture. Then again it is notable that the CEO has made this permanent.)

What happens to Manhattan if most companies shift to work-from-home. (His prediction: Real estate crashes. By the way, it is kind of interesting when you think about one set of skyrise piles of cubes (apartments) housing New Yorkers at night, and another set of skyrise piles of cubes (offices) holding them during the day. Kind of redundant! Especially in NYC where high-rise offices are obviously not factories - most are jobs that really can be done remotely. And certainly if one set of piles of cub(icles) largely shuts, there will be a serious real estate issue.)

Broadway is closed until at least September. All of it.

Return to work won't be return to normal. This article quotes Tim Rowe and asserts that in Massachusetts a return to work may mean at most 30% of officer workers returning, and people filling the building at one person per elevator. That will take an awful long time!

Uber is requiring everyone to wear masks, and drivers to take a selfie to prove it! This is a major announcement. Uber bought 23 million masks this week for their drivers.

CIC: Internal policy document emailed to heads of companies at the CIC, and the public-facing summary document. In summary: people returning to work at the CIC will have to wear masks all day, avoid touching most anything, and take temperature each morning.

Covid won't kill the office but will change it forever. An article positing that we will forever work differently.

200 CEO's talk about Covid. This is basically just one-liner comments from each of 200 top CEOs, but some of them are interesting. The biggest summary is that they generally seem to think that things have changed fundamentally.

Grieving Life before Covid. This reflection piece voices aspects of what many feel. I also believe that whole societies are in a process of grief.

Additionally, I believe that massive numbers of people are in the process of laying down the wounds and scars in their brains that will later be PTSD.

The articles above capture a snapshot of the zeitgeist at this moment in time. It is a proxy to understand what people my team aims to serve will be facing, and will be feeling (as both a mental health and an education company).

These are drastic changes to patterns of life, and these are being predicted even before we see any evidence of a resurgent virus spike in the Nov-Mar timeframe. These are complicated years, and my goal is to be on the helping side of the transformation of the educational system!