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The Light at the End of the Tunnel

  • By Matt Jones
  • 05/01/21

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 [email protected].

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