How to safely reopen schools
Test more, and vaccinate all on staff
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, too many of America’s 51 million public school students have lost out. While educators and school staff have been Herculean, remote learning is not a substitute for in-school instruction: Up to 30% of students lack reliable Internet access in this country.
As a result, too many elementary and middle school students are falling behind; absences are up, and academic performance is down.
Even worse than the negative impact on learning, without a school’s support and services, more children are going hungry, are socially isolated and are suffering abuse or neglect at home. With each week out of school, the social and emotional costs increase, especially for low-income and minority children.
The latest COVID-19 surge is a clear cause for concern, and it must be addressed before schools reopen for inperson instruction. Despite the devastating rise in cases, there is some good news when it comes to children and schools, particularly young children.
Data from the United States and abroad suggest that because of strong mitigation measures, schools are some of the safest places in a community, particularly with testing in place. Widespread, regular testing remains critical to school reopening, and combined with the right steps and federal support — even before the new vaccines are widely available — the nation’s more than 98,000 public schools could open soon, getting students back to in-person learning.
Together, we have spent months issuing plans, studying guidance, surveying stakeholders, lobbying Congress and other legislators, and supporting cities, suburbs and rural communities alike in their effort to reopen safely and equitably. Understandably, given the past year’s absence of federal leadership on this issue and pervasive mistrust of science in many U.S. communities, data alone is not enough to convince parents, educators or students that they’ll be safe in schools.
For those who need a special accommodation to continue remote learning, they should have the option to do so.
The importance of testing
Testing, expected to cost about $22.7 billion for the spring semester, will give us the option to reopen some primary public school buildings safely for those who can and want to be there. With the benefits of recent data and experience, we know we can make elementary and middle schools far safer, although high schools might take more time. By leveraging breakthroughs in test production, investing in protocols and infrastructure, and of course, prioritizing getting teachers vaccinated, we can minimize risks enough for everyone to trust being back in a classroom:
h COVID-19 testing must become a way of life in schools. We need to test regularly and rapidly. Testing is an early warning system, particularly for a virus that transmits asymptomatically. Even after effective and safe vaccines become more widely available, regular testing is going to be needed to avoid outbreaks and protect children, and their families, because children do not yet have a vaccine approved for use. Based on what we’re seeing, a riskbased protocol could involve testing as frequently as twice a week for teachers and staff, and once a week for students.
Testing teachers has been one of the reasons Colorado has been able to open schools: More than 100,000 tests have been administered and found a 0.5% positivity rate among teachers, compared with a 4% rate statewide for most of last fall.
New York City has used a similar model, successfully closing and reopening schools based on test results.
To open the nation’s primary schools, the United States will need over 200 million tests each month. Thanks to advances in technology and test production, more than that number will be available starting March 1, though several regional and national laboratories will need to be ramped up to get test results reliably and regularly back to schools within 24 hours.
h In New York, community positivity rates were more than 10 times those in schools this fall. That was due in part to schools’ masking, periodic testing, class size and social distancing protocols — and upgrades to administrative support, cleaning supplies and sanitizer, and ventilation.
These types of safety protocols should be standard in every classroom in America, based on advice from public health experts.
h We need to get educators and everyone working in schools vaccinated as quickly as possible. Our nearly 9 million teachers and school staff are linchpins in our communities, performing so many essential tasks — educator, child care, mentoring, counseling and more — their true value defies categorization. States should see that teachers can be vaccinated with other essential workers before next month.
For our children, our future
The costs of such a plan are considerable, but the investment will be worth it.
This plan will get students re-engaged, stemming further academic setbacks and starting the process of building back from the past year. It will also get teachers back in front of the classroom where they belong and want to be. And the plan will get parents — especially health care professionals and essential workers — back to work, or at least able to better focus on it. As a result, opening schools could add back, according to some estimates, at least $350 billion in lost revenue and growth.
More than a student’s academic achievement and a working parent’s interruption-free Zoom meeting, reopening our public schools will be a reinvestment in and recommitment to America’s public education system and the next generation it prepares.
There are too many things about this pandemic we cannot control or stop. Let’s get our children back in the classroom where they belong and all of us need them to be.