COVID-19 robs classrooms of teachers

Losses lead to hard decisions about schools staying open

MISSION, Kan.— In July, fourth grade teacher Susanne Michael was ecstatic as she celebrated the adoption of a former student from a troubled home and twoof thegirl’s brothers. For the festivities, Michael dressed them and her other children in matching Tshirts that read “Gotcha FOREVER.”

By October, the 47-yearold Jonesboro, Arkansas, woman was dead — one of an estimated nearly 300 school employees killed by the coronavirus in the country since the outbreak took hold.

“She just basically would eat, sleep and drink teaching. She loved it,” said her husband, Keith Michael, who is now left to raise the three new additions, ages 3,

8 and 13, along with the couple’s two other children,

16 and 22.

Across the country, the deaths of educators have torn at the fabric of the school experience, taking the lives of teachers, principals, superintendents, coaches, a middle school secretary, a security guard. The losses have forced school boards to make hard decisions ofwhether to keep classrooms open and have left students and staff members grief-stricken.

OnWednesday, NewYork City announced it was shutting schools to try to stop the renewed spread of the coronavirus. The nation’s largest public school system will halt in-person learning Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a tweet.

Harrisburg Elementary, where Michael taught, remainedopenafterher death, but 14 counselors descended onthe school thenextmorning to help distraught students and teachers.

“I can honestly tell you now, none of us would have made the day if it were not for them,” Harrisburg School Superintendent Chris Ferrell recalled, choking up.

At home, Michael’s death has been particularly hard for her toddler. “He will just point to the sky and say, ‘Mama is up there,’ ” her husband said.

His wife had diabetes, was a uterine cancer survivor and had just one kidney. Therein lies the main challenge of operating schools: While children generally have mild cases or no symptoms at all, about 1 in 4 of their teachers— nearly 1.5 million of them — have a condition that raises their risk of getting seriously ill from the coronavirus, according to theKaiser Family Foundation.

Early research suggested that children are unlikely to contract or spread the coronavirus — an idea that influenced school reopenings in some communities. But Laura Garabedian, a professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School, saidmuch of that research was conducted during lockdowns when children were home and testingwasn’t being done on those with mild or symptomless cases.

“I think the key question is whether being at school puts teachers at increased risk of getting COVID. I don’t think we know that,” she said. But she added: “There are kids who definitely transmit it, and we knowthat.”

With community spread rampant across much of the country and contact tracers

overwhelmed, it is is often hard to tell where teachers are becoming infected.

When cases canbe traced back to their source, it is often an informal gathering, a restaurant or a sporting event, not a classroom, said Emily Oster, a Brown University economics professor whose analysis of in-school infection data from all 50 states found that bringing students together in schools doesnotappear tobedriving the spread.

“I don’t think anyone would claim that no one has gotten COVID at a school. That would be unrealistic,” she said. “But in most of the cases we are seeing among people who are affiliated with schools, the actual case was not acquired at a school.”

Her database identified 17 cases per 100,000 students

and 26 per 100,000 staff members as of Friday. She said the staff rate is slightly higher than the general rate in the community.

“There are people who would say if even one teacher acquiresCOVID at a school and dies, then it would not have been worth it to open schools,” Oster said. “I think that argument is complicated because people are going to suffer tremendously from schools being closed, but that is a tricky calculus.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has kept count of educators killed by the virus, said the stories “break your heart.”

They include 71-year-old South Carolina first grade teacher Margie Kidd and 53-year-old Iowa special education assistant Jennifer

Crawford. Their families said they suspect the two were infected at school.

A district in Phoenix lost special education worker Nawaialoha Keli’imahiai Kalai to COVID-19 this month and began its board meeting with a moment of silence before deciding to keep classrooms open. There, too, grief counselors provided support.

“I am devastated by the fact that remote education is not an effective substitute. And I want probably as much as anybody else to reopen school buildings for children,” Weingarten said.

“But here is the caveat: You have to have the safeguards that the CDC recommends, and you can’t have a spike going on at the same time. And you have to have the testing, and all of that is expensive.”

ADRIAN SAINZ/AP KeithMichael, left, seen with his children, lost his wife to COVID-19. Susanne Michael, a fourth grade teacher, was 47 when she died in October.