Editor’s note: This column is the first of what will be a regular series of columns focused on education, written by educator and professor Doug Selwyn, chair of the Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution education task force.

Why do we have schools? What do we want our children to take away from their experiences at school? How will we know if our children have learned what we want them to learn? Who should pay for schools and how much?

These are questions I would pose to teacher education students on the first day of their program, and they would look at me blankly, at a loss for how to respond. While they are obvious and crucial questions to ask if we care about public education, the soon-to-be teachers had rarely considered them.

Schools are so much a part of our regular day-to-day world that we don’t think about them any more than we think about how our refrigerators work; we only stop to consider them when they stop working. We in Greenfield had a significant occasion to ask questions about our schools a few years ago with the arrival of COVID, which made it impossible for us to carry out school as usual.

COVID arrived in the U.S. in early 2020. At the time, we did not know for sure what it was, what caused it, how it was passed on, who was most vulnerable to it, or how serious it was (though people were dying or on ventilators in alarming and rapidly rising numbers). There was panic, fear, and a realization that no one really knew how to protect ourselves and our loved ones. There was also pressure to both keep our towns open and running, and to close down places that people gathered to keep the disease from spreading.

Among the many challenges facing towns and cities was what to do about the schools. We were terrified that sending our children into buildings filled with hundreds of bodies might be sentencing them to death. What to do? The district decided to close down in-person schooling for the rest of the 2019-2020 school year and limped to the end of the school year remotely.

We were all aware that what was happening was not “education,” but we needed to somehow get to the end of the school year safely, hoping that by that time COVID would have burned itself out or moved on, or that a cure would be found so that we could go back to school as usual in the fall. We know that is not what happened.

Over the summer of 2020 a group of approximately 30 teachers, administrators, family members, health officials and others in Greenfield worked together to plan for the opening of the coming school year. COVID was still raging and there was no vaccine yet, and we had to make choices about whether to have in-person schooling, a hybrid model that had children in schools some of the week and learning remotely the rest of the week, or to conduct school entirely remotely, at least to start.

The state was offering few guidelines, and those that they did offer were staggering. If we followed distancing, air quality and cleaning requirements, we could not educate all of our students at the same time in the building. The remote option would require families to have an adult at home watching and helping the children, making sure all families had computers and reliable Internet access and quiet, secure places to work. It would require young children to try to learn while sitting in front of computers several hours a day. A hybrid model would feature few benefits and all of the drawbacks of the other two models.

We were so overwhelmed by logistical challenges that we had no ability to consider the quality of the education the children would be receiving.

Several things became clear as we considered each option. First, there might be no institution as central to and inextricably bound to the community than schools. Any decision we made would reverberate through the community, with consequences for families, for businesses, for virtually every aspect of town life. It also meant that what was happening in the community would have significant consequences for what was happening in the schools.

Second, it was clear that what we already knew — that there was (and is) significant inequality across Greenfield — was even more prevalent and more consequential than we had realized, and that this inequality was something we had to respond to and consider in our planning.

And third, our schools were already severely underfunded and under-resourced before COVID, with the district badly in need of resources, supplies, updated infrastructure, and qualified, skilled, and adequately compensated faculty and staff. The arrival of COVID made things even worse, stretching resources beyond the breaking point, which made realistic planning all but impossible because there was no way to really do what needed to be done.

I am still haunted by the horrors brought on by COVID and the impossible task we faced that summer, knowing that we had no adequate response to the pandemic.

I am deeply concerned that we have failed to learn anything from that crisis, leaving us just as vulnerable and unprepared for the next crisis.

We can’t afford to go back to “how it was.”

In future columns, I intend to focus on questions such as those I posed at the beginning of this piece, and those questions contain many more questions once we start looking at them in depth. I also want to explore questions or issues that readers suggest, so I encourage you to let me know what’s on your mind. Education is crucial to all of us, whether we have children in the system or not. Our future well-being and our very survival depend on it. It deserves a public conversation. Let’s have that conversation here.

Doug Selwyn taught at K-12 public schools from 1985 until 2000 and then at university as a professor of education until he retired in 2017.  He is the chair of the Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution education task force. You can reach him at dougselwyn12@gmail.com.