Schools are closing again for millions of kids
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio welcomes students back to schools Sept. 29. The city’s public schools shut down again Thursday.
After weeks or months of operating in person, schools are shifting students back to remote learning as the nation grapples with soaring COVID-19 infections. Starting Monday, millions more students will be connected to their teachers only by whatever internet or phone connection they can secure.
In many cases, schools are closing because too many teachers are quarantined or infected with COVID-19. Others are responding to high rates of virus transmission in their communities.
Already, just over 40% of schoolchildren are attending only virtual classes, a figure that has risen from 36.9% on Sunday, according to Burbio, a company that aggregates school calendars.
The metrics used for closure, and the scope of the shutdowns, diverge wildly, sometimes even within the same county.
Many of the closure announcements are facing political pushback, including from the White House and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kentucky’s Democratic governor on Wednesday ordered all public and private schools to shutter classrooms starting Monday, a move that drew criticism from the Republican leader of the state Senate. Also this week, Michigan’s Democratic governor ordered all high school and college classrooms to close for three weeks.
New York City’s schools – the largest district in the country – shifted to allremote learning Thursday because the rate of positive tests for COVID-19 hit the 3% threshold set locally to trigger a shutdown. Critics said it didn’t make sense to close schools when bars and gyms could stay open. What’s more, the virus rate transmission within New York City’s public school buildings had stayed very low, around 0.22%, according to the latest in-school testing results. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, defended the decision. But he also said he’d be meeting with the state to revise those standards for closure and would make a new announcement before Thanksgiving, according to an interview Thursday on “CBS This Morning.”
Still, as COVID-19 cases skyrocket, some East Coast governors – including New York’s – are hoping to keep schools operating in person, as long as rates of transmission within schools themselves stay low. The governors of New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts released a joint, bipartisan statement Thursday backing the importance of continuing in-person education with the appropriate safety protocols.
“In-person learning is the best possible scenario for children, especially those with special needs and from lowincome families,” it said. “There is also growing evidence that the more time children spend outside of school increases the risk of mental health harm and affects their ability to truly learn.”
Vice President Mike Pence and CDC Director Robert Redfield said Thursday they do not recommend closing schools.
Infections identified in schools “were actually acquired within the community and the household,” Redfield said during the White House coronavirus task force briefing.
For months, schools have lacked consistent guidance about how rates of virus transmission should affect decisions to hold in-person classes. That’s part of why there’s so much debate among parents and politicians, and why, in many cases, superintendents and individual school leaders have made the calls on their own.
Some school closure decisions have come down to one factor: whether there’s enough staff to operate classrooms. Districts are experiencing staffing shortages because of employees being out sick themselves or quarantining because of exposure to other infected people.
In Indiana, Hamilton Southeastern Schools, a suburban Indianapolis district of nearly 22,000 students, started last week by moving middle and high schoolers to e-learning for the rest of the semester. The district planned to redirect some staff and substitutes to lower grades to keep those schools open. By Tuesday, after more than 90 staffers needed substitutes and more than 20 of those were unfilled, the Hamilton Southeastern school board voted to move lower grades to virtual learning through Dec. 4. It’s the only school district in Hamilton County to make that move.
A few miles south, the health department in Indianapolis has ordered all schools in Marion County, both public and private, to shift to virtual learning by Nov. 30. That move will affect roughly 200,000 students.