Back to High School? I say No.

We’ve gone in circles for decades on how to stop school shootings: gun control, mental health funding, teachers with guns, police in schools with guns, active shooter drills — but perhaps this pandemic has presented us with a possible solution we haven’t really thought of yet: virtual high school. High school, in its current brick and mortar state, is a socially intense experience. Its eight hours a day, five days a week, and nine months a year — for four years, and to make matters worse … it is endured by teenagers. It’s not hard to believe that some of the mentally ill among these students, who are trapped in these schools for such long hours and weeks, might slip through the cracks of even the most vigilant and trained counseling staff, and reach a snapping point. So maybe we can keep students safer behind computer screens, and maybe fewer hours pent up in these buildings will prevent those troubled few from ever reaching that ‘snapping point.’ Understandably, many will argue that traditional high school is an important right-of-passage and useful socialization experience. But personally, I’ve never held a job anything like high school, and probably never will, and with more and more jobs becoming remote — capable, that will likely remain or become even more true in the future.

Now don’t get me wrong — I’m not interested in uploading the entirety of the high school experience. No one wants teenagers languishing at home on computers every school-day, and we don’t want to deprive them of physical participation in athletics, clubs, and dances. But those four years, if done completely in-person, add up to a lot of hours — so lets digitize a portion and see what happens. And similar to the pandemic graphs we’ve been so fixated on, where even the slightest of countermeasures have been shown to correlate with flattening, this other pre-existing public health issue might also see some graph-able progress. And that seems to be all we can ask for these days.