The Hypothesis

Nearly every morning on his way into school, Chris Eide records a short voice memo addressed to his friend Latif Nasser, mainly to capture what is happening at the school with regards to COVID-19 and school opening. This week is particularly significant, mainly because the count of students happened on October 14, which determines funding for the next year (particularly important in the face of likely budget cuts),  Kindergarten is planning to open up to in-person hybrid learning on Tuesday, October 20, and COVID-19 cases are at an all-time high in New Mexico.

Tune in to this short episode to listen in on Chris' voice memo from Thursday, October 15.

Brought to you by Protect the Pack Productions at Turquoise Trail Charter School, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Original music brought to you by a Turquoise Trail student. 

The art and science of keeping students and teachers as safe as possible is a mindset that extends to every nook and cranny of a school and its operations. In this episode, we focus on the classroom, the hallways that connect the classrooms, and the school building itself.

Consider the question of how many students may safely fit in any classroom in our current context. Is it enough to divide the total square footage by 28.26 (the area of a circle, 6 ft. in diameter)? Not even close.

In this episode, we go into the complexity of that question. How do you consider the impact of furniture, pedagogy, the movement of students in a room given their age and grade not just on the final calculation of how many students can fit in a room, but in a hallway? A school?

We introduce the notion of a "pod" to address the issue of humans interacting with one another above the constraints of space in a school. You will meet Peter Nguyen, our Facilities Manager, and again from Danielle Garcia, our Director of Operations, who did the math and economics to solve these problems for our school building.

The Hypothesis is the ongoing story of a school with the ability to decide whether or not to open amid this global pandemic, and if so, how. Short episodes released every Tuesday. Brought to you by Protect the Pack Productions at Turquoise Trail Charter School, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

This week, as allergy season continues to bloom and the resulting symptoms become confused with COVID-19 symptoms, many students are out from child care at the school, forcing the decision of how to treat this occurrence. Treat it as COVID-19 and alert the school community of a possible outbreak? Ask students to stay home as a precaution? The former risks the spread of the idea that the school is unsafe, when in fact, it is among the safest places that people can visit right now.
 
In this episode, you'll meet Danielle Garcia, the architect of our safety and operations plan in response to the virus, and go into how the school manages not just the epidemiology of the virus, but the perceived threat that is constantly lying just underneath.

Brought to you by Protect the Pack Productions at Turquoise Trail Charter School, Santa Fe, New Mexico.  

Before we delve in to the challenge of designing school in a hybrid model and then making decisions around whether to open up school in that model, it's important to begin to understand the context. In this episode, you'll learn a little about our school, what it means to be a charter school, and the context that we find ourselves in at the moment.

Brought to you by Protect the Pack Productions at Turquoise Trail Charter School in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

The global outbreak of COVID-19 has caused schools to make decisions that they have never had to make before and to change the way in which students are educated. This podcast offers you access into a school that, like many schools across the world, is walking the fine line between public education and public health in an evolving context.

New Mexico has been among the most restrictive states in the country with regard to COVID-19, and is treating the opening of schools with an abundance of caution. This caution has led to increasing uncertainty around school opening, mounting guidelines, and tension between school leaders and the state.

In this introductory episode, you will get a brief overview of the podcast and episodes to come.

Presented by Turquoise Trail Charter School in Santa Fe, New Mexico.