San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
DISTRICTS SAY SCHOOLS CAN REOPEN SAFELY
San Diego County leaders and experts find few COVID-19 cases on campuses
Parents in the city of San Diego and South County, where COVID-19 has flourished, will have to wait until 2021 for their children to go back to district schools.
The prevailing fear is that it’s not yet safe enough in those communities and that reopening schools could lead to more COVID spread.
But in other parts of San Diego County, most school districts have opened and are finding few COVID-19 cases on their campuses, leading school officials and local experts to say that schools do not seem to be hotbeds of COVID-19.
“I don’t have any evidence that the opening of our schools has had any impact on the case rate here locally,” said Andy Johnsen, superintendent of Lakeside Union Elementary in East County.
After six weeks of being open, the district of 5,000 students has had one student and one staff COVID-19 case, Johnsen said.
Other districts in the county also are reporting small COVID-19 numbers.
Poway Unified, the county’s third-largest school district which is serving about 12,500 elementary students in person, has had 11
COVID-19 cases after one month of being open. Grossmont Union High, which serves only secondary students, has been open for a month and has seen 18 student cases and 27 employee cases, with 10,570 students attending in-person.
The number of cases detected in local schools so far is showing a mixed pattern, with some districts appearing to have higher rates than the countywide average, but others’ rates appear lower. It’s hard to draw conclusions based on the small sample sizes involved.
An aggregate total for all stu
dents, teachers and staff who have returned to in-person learning so far this year would be large enough to make a better comparison, but, at the moment, the county has no such number.
The county health department does list 247 coronavirus-positive people who visited K-12 campuses countywide from June 5 through Oct. 24, but that count is incomplete because it relies on information shared during contact-tracing interviews.
Those 247 cases represent 0.7 percent of all COVID-19 cases in the county for which interviews were completed. That’s lower than the 30 percent of cases potentially linked to workplaces and the 9 percent of cases potentially linked to bars and restaurants, according to county health data.
Dr. Eric Mcdonald, medical director of the county’s epidemiology department, said his department has been unable to reach and interview about 13 percent of those who test positive, meaning there are likely some kids who tested positive who are not included in the campus exposure count.
Plans are in the works, he said, to cobble together a complete picture, but there are 42 school districts in the county and each may communicate their data differently.
The need to reopen
Officials from five San Diego County school districts that have been open for at least a month said last week that they traced every student and staff COVID-19 infection and found that none were tied to another positive case at school. The evidence for all cases pointed to outside or community sources of infection, they said.
In every case, they said, they promptly sent home the affected students and staff and quarantined their teachers and immediate classmates if needed. They said the cases were minor, with either mild or no symptoms.
School districts are not testing everybody for COVID-19, so there could be asymptomatic spread of the coronavirus happening in schools without school officials’ knowledge.
Still, the leaders of these districts said their low case numbers prove their safety protocols are working and that schools can reopen safely.
“I do believe [COVID-19] is something we need to learn how to live with, and if we take the proper precautions, I think we are protecting staff and students,” said Grossmont Union High Superintendent Theresa Kemper.
Rich Newman, superintendent of Alpine Union, said he believes it is a “moral responsibility” of schools to reopen when it’s safe and possible.
Experts and school leaders overwhelmingly agree that the harms of school closures — which have deprived children of in-person learning, social interaction and health and emotional support — will have ripple effects on children for years to come.
“Keeping kids home is causing great harm to children and society, with a particularly deep impact on racial and ethnic minority groups,” wrote Jeannette Aldous, the clinical director of infectious disease for San Ysidro Health, in an August op-ed in the Union-tribune.
“Take a look at the baseline low engagement of children in online education, add the significant disparity for Black and Brown children, and you find that we have essentially decided not to educate these kids at all.”
School leaders and pediatricians say they have seen children’s mental health degrade without social interaction at school. They said children have fallen into depression, sometimes to the point of selfharm or suicidal thoughts. Pediatricians said more of their patients are becoming obese because they’re sitting at a computer screen to learn and are not playing during recess or P.E.
For months schools have been forced to weigh the risk of children and staff catching COVID-19 at school against the risk of children suffering in home isolation. Now that many schools have been able to reopen smoothly and without apparently spreading COVID, Johnsen said it’s clear to him which risk is more dire.
“I fear that keeping schools closed longer will cause irreparable damage socially, emotionally and academically for students, so for us … there’s risk either way,” Johnsen said. “At this point, after six weeks of being open, I would say that the risk of staying closed is much greater than the risk of opening.”
Making schools safe
Leaders of five school districts that reopened more than a month ago — Poway, Grossmont, Alpine, Lakeside and Santee Elementary — all said they have been successfully following safety measures.
Those include daily temperature and symptom checks before anybody enters campus or a school bus.
Alpine, Poway and Lakeside also are requiring all their students to wear masks, not just students in grades 3 and up, which is the state requirement for schools.
All five districts reopened with hybrid learning, where students go to school either for half-days or half-weeks. For Grossmont, students go only one day a week.
Hybrid learning has allowed districts to cut class sizes to no more than 12 to 17 students at a time, so students can be spaced 6 feet apart.
All five districts ramped up regular cleaning.
For example at Alpine, which doubled its custodial staff and brought in an outside firm to train them on COVID-19 cleaning, all bathrooms are cleaned every 90 minutes, classrooms are cleaned every day, and all rooms undergo special electrostatic cleaning twice a week. When Alpine learned there was a student COVID-19 case, that student’s classroom was electrostatic cleaned within half an hour, Newman said.
None of the districts are requiring that students or staff get tested for COVID-19 on a regular basis, but districts are recommending that staff get tested. Some district leaders said many staff have been voluntarily going to the county’s testing sites designated for school staff.
Not all teachers came back to work in person. Some have pre-existing health conditions or their family members do, Kemper said, while others didn’t return because their kids attend other schools that have not yet reopened, and they lack child care.
Several districts gave teachers the option of working from home and teaching students in distance learning. Poway, Grossmont and Santee have designated teachers who teach distance learning only, allowing their in-person teachers to focus only on the students in class. Districts also hired extra substitute teachers to fill in for the teachers who are working from home.
Not all students chose to come back to school either.
In Poway only 60 percent of students came back, and 68 percent of Grossmont students came back, while in Lakeside 80 percent did. All schools are offering students the option to remain in distance learning, since some families have health concerns or otherwise prefer their children to stay home.
For the students who did return, school leaders said it was clear that many were elated to be back.
“When I walk in and ask them how they’re doing, they always say, ‘I’m so happy to be at school,’” said Kimberlie Rens, executive director of learning support services at Poway Unified. “I’m really, really happy that we’re able to provide choice to our families and give opportunities to families and students who want to be on campus.”
COVID-19 disparities
Multiple local health experts said that K-12 schools are not appearing to be major spreaders of COVID-19, as long as they follow recommended safety measures such as mandating masks and physical distancing.
“We’re certainly not aware that schools seem to be driving the increase of disease in a whole community,” said Dr. Mark Sawyer, infectious disease specialist at Rady Children’s Hospital and professor of clinical pediatrics at UC San Diego.
Dr. Howard Taras, a UC San Diego pediatrician and consulting physician who is helping schools plan for reopening, said at Tuesday’s San Diego Unified School Board meeting that news of school reopenings across the country have been mixed, yet encouraging.
The schools that failed to follow safety standards have not fared well, Taras said, but the opposite was true for schools that adhered to safety measures.
“When they are adhered to, the schools can actually be a safer place than the general community,” Taras said.
Richard Barrera, vice president of the San Diego Unified School Board, said the low numbers of reported COVID cases among local schools are a good sign. San Diego Unified similarly has seen no COVID cases yet with its limited Phase One of reopening, in which schools have provided at least 4,000 in-person sessions to select students in need.
Barrera noted there is one advantage that the reopened school districts have over the school districts that remain closed — they have much less COVID-19 circulating in their communities.
“I do think that you see a pretty clear split, even in San Diego County, between the districts that are opening and the districts that are not opening, and a big factor there is how widespread is the virus in particular communities,” Barrera said.
Schools in areas with higher rates of COVID-19 can expect to have higher levels of COVID-19 show up in their classrooms, experts say.
COVID-19 has disproportionately flourished in communities with more essential workers, more lowincome families and more Blacks and Latinos — the communities whose children and families would likely especially benefit from having in-person school.
Most of the districts that are staying closed until 2021 are in San Diego or south San Diego County, where COVID-19 rates have been high.
The city of San Diego accounts for 44 percent of COVID-19 cases in the county so far, and South County’s Chula Vista has had 13 percent of the cases. Meanwhile Santee has had 1 percent, Lakeside has had 0.9 percent, Poway has had 0.7 percent, and Alpine has had 0.3 percent, according to county case data.
Barrera added that no one can know how much COVID-19 is potentially spreading on campuses, because many people who have it show no symptoms. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 40 percent of people with COVID-19 are asymptomatic.
That’s why San Diego Unified wants to figure out a regular COVID testing program for students and staff before it reopens schools for hybrid learning, which it calls Phase Two. The district said that may start in January.
The district will likely have to pay for such testing on its own, Barrera said.
Barrera also said that it’s harder in general for large school districts to reopen than smaller ones. San Diego Unified is the state’s secondlargest district with about 100,000 students, and leaders worry it could contribute to community spread if it reopens, because it is so big.