We're approaching a year since New York City closed down for the pandemic. Along with the terrible health and economic crisis, we've also seen an educational crisis for the 1.1 million students in New York's schools. Despite huge efforts by teachers and administrators, the tenacity of our families, and the resilience of our students, remote and hybrid education are just not as developmentally appropriate or successful for the vast majority of our kids.

We need to get back to five-day-a-week in-person school this fall. But it won’t happen on its own, it won’t work by decree and it can’t happen chaotically. We need a plan to get there, regular updates on that plan, citywide buy-in — and every elected official and candidate for office discussing it constantly to make it the priority it absolutely must be.

Early learners shouldn't be learning from screens. Middle and high school students need peer contact. Attendance is irregular and engagement even worse.

Increasingly, public health data shows us that we can return to schools safely — if we invest in our safety in smart, impactful ways, ensure adequate COVID tests, increase vaccination rates among teachers and families, and create better home-based options for students who can’t return.

Most critically, it will require building trust in the DOE and city leadership across the city, especially in communities of color, in which many families know it’s not yet safe to send their kids back and don’t believe the system is listening to them.

We need to see the vigorous work to listen to concerns and address them — with a citywide mobilization of resources and with transparency, clear communication and community engagement that can begin to rebuild trust.

Many New Yorkers imagine that we'll be back to normal, full-time, in-person school in the fall. Maybe we will be—but not without a real aggressive plan. It can't wait until the summer to debate what that plan will look like—we need that discussion now, with teachers, administrators, parents, guardians, students, and city leaders at the table, laying out the criteria that will ensure a safe and successful return.

And as candidates compete for municipal office in the June primaries and November elections, every candidate should be discussing their commitment to this vision and their plan to get there—not as an afterthought but as a center of their campaigns.

Meanwhile, the city should adopt other measures to make this year as successful as it can be that parents, advocates and teachers are already fighting for — including steps to close the digital divide, invest in additional tutors and teacher aides, ensure multilingual communications about schooling and more.

As we make this plan to reopen, let's not just ask how we get back to March 13, 2020—the last day pre-shutdown. The pre-pandemic school system was already a segregated and underfunded labyrinth of inequality. Let's rebuild and reopen better, adopting some of the lessons from this year around investing in smaller cohort opportunities, digital learning, and outdoor education.

We've always been told it's hard to transform such a massive, complicated system. Well, we did transform it on Monday, March 16, 2020. Now, instead of reinventing it in a moment of acute crisis, let's reimagine and rebuild it with priorities of equity, accessibility, and excellent, and the resources and citywide prioritization to match.