A new school year signals fresh beginnings and unlimited hope as students reengage with teachers and peers to face exciting new opportunities and challenges. Learning and growing alongside others in their school environments, Maine students will discover their individual strengths, sharpen their skills and interests and develop important understandings that will help them to build successful, satisfying lives. Throughout the school year, they will make enormous strides toward becoming independent problem solvers, compelling communicators and critical thinkers; they will be inspired as creators, makers and doers. Students will test and try out their different potential identities and roles, practicing as both soloists and as team members in the safe, supportive context of a school community.

Throughout our last school year, Maine schools (like schools across the nation) faced unprecedented challenges because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We entered the school year with many unanswered questions, many unknowns and no way to predict the obstacles that would lie ahead. Our school leaders and staff members rose to every challenge, opening their doors to allow in-person opportunities to all students, albeit often in a diminished capacity with hybrid schedules to accommodate required social distancing.

Teachers double-planned their lessons and units to engage both remote and in-person students. Food services workers made extra preparations to serve those at school and those at home. Building and district leaders made excruciatingly difficult decisions and courageously revised these decisions as new information became available. Families also stepped up as true partners in the education of their children, weathering the challenges of work interruptions, at-home learning and ever-evolving health and safety guidance. It was a year unlike any other for our education system.  

Thanks to the diligence and hard work of our educators, school leaders, staff and school health professionals, Maine schools were safer and healthier than schools in most other states, with fewer school-based cases and outbreaks. Our schools were also among the safest environments here in Maine – with significantly lower COVID transmission in schools than in the general community. Together, we all learned a lot throughout that extraordinary school year. For example, we learned patience, compassion and resilience; we learned to hate the word “pivot”; we learned which of the health and safety measures recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided best protection against the spread of the coronavirus, and we learned the value of full time, in person, education.

As we approach this new school year, we are equipped with far more knowledge and experience and we have new, highly effective tools for keeping students and staff safe.  COVID vaccines have proven to be far more effective than we had imagined possible, and the “pooled testing” program offered to schools for free has the potential to quickly prevent spread of the virus at schools. We also know that face coverings should be worn indoors at school to provide a safe, healthy, uninterrupted start to this school year.

Our students are counting on us. They need and deserve a full-time educational experience without lengthy quarantines or school closures due to outbreaks. We are starting this new school year in the context of an ongoing pandemic, and we have no realistic control over global or national transmission of the virus or over the proliferation of variant strains. We do, however, have the power to limit COVID’s impact on Maine schools. Vaccination, engagement in testing programs and indoor masks at schools reduce risk and provide students with flexibility from the quarantine requirements should they be exposed to a positive case at school.

We owe it to our children to make decisions that are not driven by politics or personal preference but instead by a collective and relentless focus on ensuring full-time in-person learning for every Maine student. With so much potential and promise – and with so much at stake – I urge the people of Maine to support your local schools in implementing the health and safety measures that will provide our students with the best chance of uninterrupted in-person learning this year.