The Light at the End of the Tunnel
At long last, life appears to be inching back toward
normalcy. The COVID-19 vaccine is widely available. States are
lifting mask mandates. Businesses and offices are re-opening.
And K–12 schools, colleges and universities are in different stages
of returning to in-person learning. It feels like decades ago—a
quaint, simpler time—when schools announced in March 2020
that they’d be closing for “a week or two” as the pandemic began
to spread across the United States. Few could have imagined
the shadow COVID would cast over the rest of the 2019-2020
academic year, let alone the entirety of the current one.
And yet, life went on—a common theme you’ll see across
many pieces in this spring’s issue of Spaces4Learning. One thing
we’ve discovered is that maintaining high indoor air quality in
crowded spaces is invaluable. Another is that the resiliency of
people united against a common foe knows no bounds. It might
be a little premature to begin smiling wistfully at the lessons we
learned along the way. But the COVID-19 pandemic did reveal a
wide array of gaps and flaws in the day-to-day operations of many
educational institutions. And now that the storm is starting to
pass, we can begin brainstorming and implementing concrete fixes
to weak spots we otherwise wouldn’t have known existed.
This magazine, by the way, is only one medium where you
can read about how K–12 and higher education institutions are
bouncing back. Our website, Spaces4Learning.com, is another.
Our twice-weekly newsletters bring the latest education space
news straight to your email inbox. Our webinars, DemoCasts, and
monthly Schools in Focus podcasts take deeper dives into some of
the timeliest issues facing the industry. Whether the news comes
in print, digitally, visually, audibly, in bite-sized chunks, or via
longer and more thoughtful explorations, S4L covers it all.
We want to thank you for letting us keep you up-to-date during
one of the craziest, most unpredictable years in recent memory.
Hopefully soon, we can talk about how nice it is to live in “precedented
times” again.
This article originally appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of Spaces4Learning.
About the Author
Matt Jones is senior editor of Spaces4Learning. He can be reached at mjones@1105media.com.