Welcome to a special episode of mom and dad are fighting for Thursday, July 16th,

the mom and dad are fighting teacher roundtable.

We're doing something a little bit different this week.

Jemila and Elizabeth are off, and it's just me.

I'm Dan Coise.

I'm a writer at Slate, the author of the book How to Be a Family,

I'm the dad of Lyra, who's 15, and Harper who's 12,

we live in Arlington, Virginia.

If you're looking for Triumph and Fails, we're moving those to the Slate Plus segment this week,

because this week our whole episode is devoted to the coming school year.

We're basically T-9us four weeks until some kids start going back to school in some fashion.

But what will school look like? It's still extremely up in the air. Some districts are tempting

business as usual. LA among others has gone all virtual. Some places are

giving parents options. The messaging is all over the place. My school district made one announcement in June and just an hour ago sent everyone an email completely changing their minds.

Obviously many parents want their kids to go back to school. We want them to learn, we want them to see

their friends, we want them to be out of the fucking house so we can work.

At this point, even a lot of kids are bored and ready to get back to normal or however close

to normal we can get.

But we're also scared for their health, for our health,

for everyone's health, and we're angry that the country

hasn't done the shit it needs to do to make school a priority.

The Trump administration has made it clear how they feel about the issue, from the President's

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