US pediatricians call for in-person school this fall

I'm not qualified enough to answer that question conclusively, but whatever the best option is, we have to think outside the box. Literally. The coronavirus is less likely to spread between individuals who are outdoors than indoors, and I think that this is one of the keys to any serious nationwide solution to the pandemic. Ventilation is better when you aren't stuck in a small room with 30 other people, and being outside naturally offers more space. Most schools in the United States have some sort of open area for recreation—"open" relative to a classroom, whether this space is indoors or outdoors—such as a basketball gym or a football field. Some even have several; my (public) high school had a soccer/lacrosse field, baseball field, and two indoor basketball gyms (one too small to be of much use here, but another that could easily fit the whole school, even socially distancing). I don't think that's typical, but even clearing out a parking lot would be an option. The point is that we have to get creative; our number one step should be to invite students back to campus in spaces that are quantitatively safer than small classrooms wherever possible.

Obviously this is an incomplete solution, and there are also a number of challenging associated logistical details. Urban schools rarely have the space that their suburban or rural counterparts do, leaving already-underfunded inner-city districts with comparatively few options. Indoor gyms get loud very quickly, necessitating some sort of sound barriers and/or a limited number of students sent at any given time (perhaps an alternating A/B schedule). Some climates are also less or more suited for long-term outdoor presence; most students in suburban New York wouldn't particularly mind being in the open air until maybe October, November if it's warm, but there's no realistic way to hold school outdoors from December through March. Conversely, the winter is the time when most Texans would prefer to be outside (at least insofar as the heat is concerned; not sure about humidity!). Outdoor areas would need shelter from the weather (like large wedding tents), or else school couldn't be held on rainy days. When I was a high school sophomore (I think), we ate under one of these for several weeks at the beginning of the year while the cafeteria was undergoing renovations. It wasn't anything special, but it worked.

Any large-scale solutions would require a lot of creative thinking and also some amount of capital, but a certain amount of the latter would probably be saved by not running the air conditioning/heat in a large building during the months where it's bearable to be outside. I would expect the government to offer support, or at least hope that it would, especially for poorer districts. But as long as you have chairs, a whiteboard, and a large-ish tent, that's a perfectly acceptable way to learn. When I was in the Boy Scouts, the summer camp I went to had counselors teaching merit badges (often pretty academic ones, like environmental science, not all hands-on) in similar structures—these were definitely sturdier (and permanent), but still barebones; just a bit of wood on concrete (no walls) and a basic roof. Even on the wettest days, the actual educational area was fine. We didn't use a lot of paper. I'm certain that schools would be able to find a way to get electricity to a field adjacent to the building if that's required for a class or type of activity, charging personal laptops or whatever.

The pandemic requires a full-scale structural re-evaluation of the whole educational system, from kindergarten to undergraduate and beyond. My suggestion wouldn't be to return to an identical form of schooling as the one we're familiar with, because that's clearly untenable. In addition to requiring mask usage among all students and teachers (for kids who have the ability), students could just electronically send their instructors what they write rather than handing in physical, potentially germy documents. Cafeterias would have to be something more like take-out. I'm not sure how shared equipment would work, but it would involve a lot of cleaning. Contract tracing could be employed where feasible, especially for staff. There are obviously other little issues too, but few of them are fundamentally unsolvable. In areas where case rates are on the decline and it's reasonably safe to be in a room with other people again, I'd have no problem with a more typical school day. That can't happen everywhere, though it's better if it happens in some places than absolutely nowhere in the United States. I also suspect quite strongly that students' mental health would improve a lot if they spent less time indoors, but that's a topic for another time.

If necessary, it wouldn't be the end of the world to transition to fully online school for the cold winter months, or in other situations where any sort of in-person learning is literally impossible. But that can't just be the default that we turn to. We've never had to deal with a pandemic in these circumstances before, so obviously ideas like the ones above are going to sound a bit crazy at first. But we need some sort of innovation right now, not an immediate return to the status quo. And I'm not even suggesting that this is the only potential solution; what I propose is naturally something that I can imagine, and someone with a different set of experiences could imagine a better alternative. The important part is not to prevent kids from openly interacting with each other in person for a straight year or more, and to actually sit down and think hard about ways to make this happen.