The early August deadline is looming for school districts to submit their opening plans to the State of New York. Based on what we have seen thus far, it will not be an easy decision.

Some school districts have shared some idea of what they propose, while awaiting more feedback from parents and guardians. The decision weighing heavily on school administrators is whether to bring students back into the classrooms or continue on-line classes. Most plans are likely to offer some combination of the two, with half the students in a particular class in school one day, while the other half is doing work from home. The next day - or perhaps the next week - the roles would be reversed.

The plan announced Sunday by the Pine Bush School District has K-8 students in the classroom every other day. On any given day, half of the students will physically attend school while half stay home. The next day, it switches and those who were home the previous day will attend school while those who were in the classroom the previous day will be home.On the days when students are in the building, they will be given their assigned work to do independently the following day when they are learning from home. High School students in Pine Bush, however, will not be in the classrooms at the start of the year. There are simply too many of them, we are told, to effectively maintain effective social distancing.

Opinions among students also appear mixed. In a survey on July 7, Brainly.com asked 4,552 students in middle and high school what they would do, given the responsibility of making decisions for their school this fall. Only 31 percent of the respondents would fully re-open their school. The remaining 69 percent were divided between virtual leaning, and some hybrid of in-school and virtual learning.

The Pine Bush plan does give parents the option of choosing an all-virtual curriculum for their children. In short, no one who doesn’t feel safe in sending a child into a school building should be compelled to do so. Given the current status of the pandemic and our fears, that should be the option everywhere.