Hands up, masks on: High school students face whole new year

LONDON (AP) — Henry Holness said he had to sleep on it.

Having found out just two days ago that he had secured a place at his first choice of high school, the 11-year-old and his parents clearly had a big decision to make.

A day later, he decided to accept the offer from Kingsdale Foundation School in southeast London, joining about 400 other seventh-grade children embarking on the next — and perhaps most crucial — period in their learning, as many schools in England on Thursday restarted in-class lessons.

“It was really a lot of fun, and it was really great to see so many people again,” said the soccer-mad Holness.

Like countless others, he has been hungry for more human contact over the past few months during the coronavirus lockdown.

“Though COVID has clearly added complications to starting back at school, it's important for Henry and all the other kids to get back into a normal routine,” said his mother, Liz Holness.

The coronavirus pandemic requires a lot from schools, which were closed in March as part of the lockdown imposed by the British government and are slowly reopening through next week.

One-way travel systems, hand sanitizing stations, temperature checks and the donning of face masks in communal areas such as corridors and stairwells are just some of the changes. Like all schools, Kingsdale has had to re-imagine how it safely delivers education in the coronavirus era.

No easy task, especially since Britain's Conservative government has offered meandering or contradictory advice about how best to tame the pandemic that has killed at least 41,600 people in the country, the worst virus death toll in Europe.

Kingsdale, a turnaround school that is now consistently rated as outstanding and considered one of the British capital's best, is...