Return to full-time, in-school learning should happen now
In March, parents willingly educated their children at home, isolated from family and friends and masked in public with the expectation that a well-controlled coronavirus pandemic would allow their children to return to school in the fall. Now, even as public health metrics support full-time in-school learning, some public school districts are forging ahead with hybrid model education, losing the confidence of discerning, concerned parents.
I was an early advocate for lockdowns, and later a supporter of reopening the economy when adequate COVID-19 testing was in place. This summer, I volunteered as a member of the Health and Safety Advisory Committee to Reopen Schools in West Hartford. I was proud to lend my time alongside a team of outstanding individuals from the town and experts in our community. We developed protocols based on the best available recommendations from the CDC, state and local authorities, as well as pediatrician and public health expert opinion, in order to minimize the risk to students and staff.
I felt confident we could deliver on this charge because it had been done before under much more difficult circumstances. Starting in March, when positive test rates reached 30%, radical changes including universal masking and distancing were implemented in hospitals across the state.
Despite absorbing the surge in April and managing a steady stream of COVID-19 patients ever since, hospital workers were infected at the same rate as the general public during that period.
Cases of transmission within hospitals have certainly been rare — I am not aware of any in our area. Notably, hospitals achieved this feat without implementing mandatory surveillance COVID19 testing, which likely enhances outbreak mitigation but is neither necessary nor sufficient.
Many schools have gone further even than hospitals: one-way hallways, decentralized arrival and dismissal to reinforce cohorting, plexiglass shields for mask breaks, strict no-visitor policies, and maximizing outdoor time. We should feel confident that students and their teachers are in an environment that is very inhospitable for viral transmission and that schools are poised to replicate the results achieved by area hospitals.
Indeed, in our district, there have been no cases of transmission among the approximately 8,000 students in our schools, despite six new COVID19 cases between the start of school and the time of this writing. This is very reassuring and adds to the mounting evidence that universal indoor masking with other mitigation measures prevents the spread of coronavirus. With newly adopted measures in place, a school does not appear to be a superspreader venue.
Since May, public health metrics have supported full time in-person learning outlined in guidance from the state. Why then, do we continue to pursue a hybrid learning model?
Various explanations have been offered. Initially, there was concern about a potential teacher shortage, as many understandably wanted to reduce their infection risk and opted out of the classroom altogether and into overseeing remote learning. Later, we were told we would start the school year with one month of hybrid as a transitional period to ensure everyone was comfortable with the new mitigation measures.
Last week, it was suggested that COVID-19 testing access and cost for teachers is a barrier to fully opening schools.
And now, shockingly, we’re told hybrid learning will continue for the foreseeable future because cases in the community have increased, even though the metrics still land in a category that supports full-time in-classroom learning.
As a result, parents increasingly perceive administrators as playing “hide the ball” with opaque rationale for continuing the hybrid model. Unamused, they struggle to piece together the disjointed ends of a screen-time-heavy remote learning curriculum borne from the early days of pandemic uncertainty, all while trying to uphold their own work obligations. It is a circus act of spinning plates.
Despite the shifting explanations, one fact is clear: the rationale for keeping kids home in a hybrid model is not fully supported at this time by real-time objective public health data and guidance from the state. This has led to a crisis of confidence among parents of public school children, the consequences of which may be deep and long-lasting.
For parents who have seen their kids not just fail to ascend but actually regress since schools closed in March, the stakes could not be higher. For kids who come from underprivileged households, what used to be an education disparity gap is now looking like a yawning chasm.
Clear-eyed leadership and creative solutions are long overdue. If teachers have concerns about cost and access to COVID-19 testing, direct them to the numerous free options in the area.
If there is a teacher shortage and full time school would result in over-crowded classrooms, administrators should utilize other spaces in schools like cafeterias and gyms with paraprofessional supervision. If unions won’t allow paraprofessionals to replace teachers, find money in the town budget to hire more teachers. If there is no money in the town budget for teachers, why is the town spending money on cutting grass in parks and not educating its children?
We should be proud to see an overgrown landscape as a symbol of prioritizing investing in education during a pandemic.
Instead of cases per 100,000 people and percent positive tests, imperfect measures that we now see are subject to moving goalposts by administrators, we should evaluate concrete evidence like episodes of transmission in schools. In those cases, the cohort should be closed and mitigation reviewed for evidence of lapses. This is how we get smarter and excel in a crisis.
The problem with undermining the value of using public health metrics to guide policy goes much deeper than schools. If parents are conditioned to disregard the metrics, we cannot expect them to once again quarantine their family if a second wave threatens to overwhelm hospitals this winter. This crisis only deepens in the absence of credible messaging.
Public schools, like hospitals, are institutional pillars embedded in the social fabric. It is past time for transparency and adaptive leadership.
So long as they don’t accelerate outbreaks, schools should be open fulltime to properly educate the next generation of leaders.