San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Schools plan for worst with virus
But they may run short on teachers, lose funding
On Thursday around 11 a.m., nearly 300 fifth-graders waited patiently for their turn at the lunch line at Savannah Heights Intermediate School — every single one of them wearing a mask.
“Listen up, listen up!” a staff member shouted, and the fifthgraders started clapping in rhythm. The principal, Cynthia Gamez, pointed at a row and through her own sparkly mask said, “Stand up! Let’s go!”
Only after carrying lunch back to their seats were the students told they could pull down their masks. Some pulled them back up between bites.
In the battle to stop the surging coronavirus pandemic from getting its grip on classroom learning, Somerset Independent School District officials are confident they’re doing everything right. But other school leaders across Bexar County are worried.
They’re planning out worstcase scenarios and hearing the talk about schools and possibly entire districts closing in outlying counties, where mask-wearing has been optional since the start of the school year — and far less practiced.
They can work to keep schools safe, but if they have to quarantine students or staff in large numbers,
they might not have enough teachers. If they can’t teach quarantined students or are forced to close schools, they’ll lose state funding.
Somerset recently switched from “masks required” to “masks optional” to stay on the cautious side of recent contradictory rulings by the Texas Supreme Court, which upheld Gov. Greg Abbott’s order banning face covering mandates yet also exempted schools from it.
That change had no apparent effect on the cafeteria routine at Savannah Heights, which teaches fifth- and sixth-graders. And the same orchestrated COVID-19 safety dance is performed in the library, where classes are split up to keep everyone socially distant.
“It has been like second nature. Our students are all wearing masks,” said Tabitha Grohman, a science teacher who has twins in fifth grade at the school. “They absorb everything we (as teachers) are doing,”
Voluntary testing for the coronavirus is done every Monday, which contributes to the “sense of safety,” she said.
In summer 2020, Somerset ISD became the first school district in the area to conduct regular mass testing, which allowed more parents to feel comfortable with an earlier return to its classrooms — and eventually resulted in better state test scores.
Superintendent Saul Hinojosa points to the continued virus testing as a defense against possible school closures. At the beginning of August, the district had 20 students and staff in its athletic program test positive. After quarantining them, the next Monday it had 10 positive cases. A week later, it was down to one.
But other school districts in Bexar County that managed to keep fewer than 2 percent of their enrollment from a coronavirus infection during the 2020-2021 school year are already at higher proportions just weeks into the new school year.
In neighboring counties, COVID-19 outbreaks — or exposures that have landed large numbers of students or staff in quarantine — are getting worse.
Medina ISD in Bandera County closed its sole school, which serves the district’s 260 students, to keep key school staff under quarantine. The closure is slated to end Tuesday.
Floresville ISD officials extended the Labor Day holiday weekend to include Friday and Tuesday in order to address rising coronavirus cases at its campuses. On Friday, Seguin ISD urgently asked for more voluntary maskwearing and said the entire school district might have to close if its case numbers don’t improve.
Unlike last year, when Southside ISD was allowed by state guidelines to close a campus simply as a precautionary measure, any new closures must come in response to outbreaks or large-scale exposures, said its superintendent, Rolando Ramirez.
“We do not have the discretion to say, ‘You know what, there’s already 30 kids that tested positive in this campus, so we are going to close down that campus,’” he said. “We have to continue with the school open until we get to that point where everyone has to be in quarantine.”
‘Funding hit’
This year has changed how school leaders think about the pandemic.
For one thing, children — especially those too young to get vaccinated — have been more susceptible to the coronavirus delta variant. Last year, the virus was rapidly spreading mainly among adults.
But even with that risk, Abbott has not altered a July 28 order, now contested by lawsuits, forbidding mask mandates. Other state restrictions have crimped local control over school closures and virtual learning alternatives.
The latest guidance by the Texas Education Agency allows districts to provide remote instruction for up to 20 days to students who must stay home because of a documented medical condition, a positive coronavirus test or exposure to someone with the virus.
To receive funding to teach quarantined students, school districts “must not be taught by a teacher who is also teaching inperson students at the same time,” TEA guidance states.
Newly passed legislation awaiting Abbott’s signature would provide state funding to extend virtual
learning to up to 10 percent of districts’ enrollments through 2023, but it would not allow districts to order teachers to handle virtual classes or require them to teach both virtual and in-person classes.
This leaves districts — already having a hard time filling teaching positions — in a staffing pickle. If the number of quarantined students increases sharply, they must find a way to place students with different virtual teachers and assign teaching staff to virtual classes only.
“I don’t think there’s a school district that has staff just there waiting to see if there’s a need for remote instruction. We all have teachers that have to be servicing the students at all times,” Ramirez said.
Southside ISD, which has about 6,000 students on 10 campuses, has identified teachers willing to work during quarantines, including some who have tested positive or been exposed. If they feel well enough, they have agreed to teach a grade level across the district virtually, Ramirez said.
“We’ve experienced issues with substitutes that maybe don’t want to come in to work due to COVID,” he said. “We’re scrambling to find staff members to come and assist. We have instructional coaches that have taken the place of teachers, we’ve had assistant principals cover classes.”
The district is ready to also pull central office staff “to go take care of classrooms if need be,” Ramirez said. “We don’t have a choice on the matter.”
Somerset and North East ISDs also have groups of teachers “on call,” ready to conduct remote classes. At North East, they include retired teachers and some who didn’t feel comfortable teaching in-person this year, district spokeswoman Aubrey Chancellor said.
Losing per-student state funding from school closures or quarantines will be financially damaging to any school district and perhaps impossible for smaller ones.
Every district has been doing some worst-case math.
Ramirez estimates that losing 30 days of funding for half of Southside ISD’s student population could take a $15 million bite out of his budget.
At San Antonio ISD, which has 48,000 students across 98 schools, Superintendent Pedro Ramirez warned the board of trustees to be ready to forgo state funding when quarantining students.
Federal funds from this year’s pandemic relief bill are available
to school districts to help pick up the slack — but only if districts can find teachers, he said.
“We have probably the largest teacher shortage in our nation’s history today,” Martinez said. “We are doing better than most districts. … (But) the people are not there.”
Splitting teachers between virtual-only and classroom-only is not realistic, he said. Anticipating the need to cut itself away from state funding and its requirements, SAISD has asked teachers to continue virtual instruction
with their own students in case of quarantine.
That would provide continuity for students who are just now getting readjusted to the school environment, officials said. The majority of SAISD students stayed in remote learning for most of last year.
“Our schools are the safest places for students to be, whether it is for their mental health, academically, their social and emotional well-being,” Martinez said in an interview last month.
“It’s important for us that we are not going to compromise the safety of our children, even though I hate the fact that we are going to take a funding hit.”
When to close?
Educators agree that classrooms are the best place to learn for most students. They’ve pleaded with the state for more control over safety measures to increase the odds of keeping classrooms open.
Martinez said he is confident that SAISD’s masking requirements, a vaccination requirement for staff (which so far has survived a state lawsuit), vaccine clinics for families and other measures are enough to keep schools safe.
He said he has made it clear to the district that school closures won’t happen unless mandated by citywide shutdowns, perhaps the ultimate worse case.
The San Antonio Metropolitan Health District’s medical director, Dr. Junda Woo, said in a recent interview that decisions to close schools are not made by the health authority but by the school districts themselves. They are in the best position to determine the “functionality” of a campus based on possible virus outbreaks or staff shortages, added Rita Espinoza, the chief of epidemiology for Metro Health.
In case of large-scale quarantines, most districts are now wellversed and equipped to take on virtual learning again for as long as needed — assuming they can fund it. The recently passed legislation expanding state funding for virtual learning wouldn’t do that in a big way, and it limits student eligibility even for small-scale programs.
“We’ve been proactive in asking that all of our students have a device, a Chromebook, that all teachers have access to the curriculum from home… in the event that there’s an exposure, in the event that there’s a positive case, that we would be able to go remote,” Ramirez said.
But this is yet another year in which districts are hoping for the best but can’t predict the worst.
“There is not a hard and fast rule or metrics to give, to say whether we would close a school,” North East ISD’s Chancellor said. “It is like last year, it really depends on a case-by-case basis. It is hard to say ‘X amount of cases and then the school shuts down’ because if there are cases that aren’t related to one another, that wouldn’t warrant a school closure.”