In-person learning, COVID-19 surge collide
More cases threaten plans for large school districts
The U.S. has entered a second round of in-person school reopenings, just as the coronavirus surges across the nation.
In smaller school districts, careful in-person reopenings in August and September didn’t lead to a rapid rise of COVID-19 cases. But the country’s largest school systems, which had largely eschewed in-person instruction, are venturing partially back into the classroom.
The majority of the 15 largest districts in the nation now have at least some students in school buildings. Only two of those districts had any form of in-person learning as of early September.
“Any district that hasn’t already introduced in-person learning is facing serious headwinds” to doing so soon, said Dennis Roche, president of Burbio, an organization that’s tracking school calendars and reopening plans nationwide.
District leaders, teachers and parents debated for months how safe it was to reopen schools. Teachers unions organized against in-person learning, and parents came down on both sides of the issue, concerned about a virus spread and their students’ well-being and learning loss.
The schools that jumped into reopening in August and September were largely smaller and wealthier than the nation’s largest districts. That didn’t give larger districts – which serve far more low-income families and people of color, for whom virus deaths have been higher – enough data to make decisions.
Even scientists were split on the issue, partly because there’s no federal effort to track COVID-19 cases in schools. But schools were determined to reopen if the community spread stayed manageable because keeping them closed, experts said, could harm children educationally and developmentally.
In many schools, reopening is going smoothly. Across the country, the number of students attending virtual-only school has decreased by 25 percentage points since Labor Day, according to Burbio.
But many of the largest districts that tiptoed into reopening in recent weeks have already reverted to online instruction because of rising infections.
Officials at the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s secondlargest school system, told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday that campuses are unlikely to reopen before January. The reason: a recent rise in COVID-19 infection rates – which are unlikely to drop in the next two months.
And Boston Public Schools announced Oct. 22 it was moving its nearly 50,000 students to remote learning because of a recent spike in COVID-19 cases in the city.
Contributing: Andrew Marra, Palm Beach Post