Success so far in schools’ opening
Feared outbreaks not erupting on campuses
Rewind one year: Fresh finger-paintings dry inside silent classrooms. Halfread books gather dust on shelves. The plant on the teacher’s desk is starting to wilt.
If we knew then what we know now, schools wouldn’t have closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic — or at least, not for very long, said George Rutherford, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UC San Francisco.
“We were working on the playbook for Influenza A — the first things to close are elementary schools because children are huge amplifiers,” Rutherford said. “But that’s just not the case here.”
As many of California’s sleeping giant school dis
tricts lumber toward April campus reopenings — after more than a year in the suspended animation of distance learning — some parents and teachers have that queasy feeling in the pit of their stomachs. They worry about safety, despite myriad studies showing that open schools don’t result in significant spread of COVID-19.
Only about 35% of elementary schoolchildren in the Los Angeles Unified School District are expected to return to campus, along with just 22% of middle-schoolers and just 14% of high-schoolers, according to its latest parent survey. This, even as dozens of schools in nearby Orange County have been open since September.
In Oakland Unified School District, 54% of families in transitional kindergarten through fifth grade said they would send their kids to a hybrid inperson learning that starts Tuesday. Its middle and high school students are still distance learning for now.
Santa Ana residents Sara Greene and her husband have been vaccinated, but she’s concerned about her 6-year-old. “I was thinking that we should send him back, but recent news about the variants has me secondguessing,” Greene said.
“It’s possible to open schools safely — it’s being done,” said Grace Lee, professor of pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief medical officer for practice innovation and infectious diseases physician at Stanford Children’s Health. “It all goes back to the Swiss cheese model.”
For the uninitiated, the Swiss cheese model involves overlapping layers of protection — proper masking, sanitation, physical
distancing, air filtration, keeping social “bubbles” as small as possible, ensuring children don’t show up at school when they’re sick. Lee likens it to Swiss cheese because there are holes in any one of the layers, but piled atop one another, none of those holes show through.
“Me and my family — we’re eagerly embracing having our kids be in school, and we’re also maintaining our other strategies,” said Lee, who has children in middle school and high school. “We keep our bubbles tight. No big trips planned. We wear masks and keep our distance — and I’m vaccinated!”
Might more virulent virus variants break through the layers of protection? Variants are a concern in the big picture, but schools haven’t proven to be big viral incubators as long as
precautions are taken, she said.
“Adults in educational settings have been vaccinated, mitigating transmission there,” she said. “And everyone will still be taking precautions like masks and distancing.”
With case counts and hospitalizations plummeting, and with teachers and school workers getting vaccinated, the continuation of distance learning isn’t so much about COVID-19 fears as about asking kids to adapt to yet another disruption with only one quarter left to the school year.
The San Bernardino City Unified School District, the state’s sixth-largest with 57,000 students, is one of them. In the Bay Area, Gilroy Unified’s board voted to continue distance learning in middle and high schools, and Oakland Unified has said that is a possibility
for the majority of its middle and high school students, too.
California is one of the slowest states in the nation to reopen schools, according to federal data. All schools in Florida offer inperson learning. In Connecticut, 62% of schools do. In California, only 18% do.
The majority of middle and high schools, and a significant number of elementary schools, remain closed to in-person classes, according to state data. And some frustrated parents point out that “reopening” isn’t as grand as it sounds: A great many of the schools welcoming kids back to campus will only host classes for a few hours a day, or for a few days a week.
“It’s a constitutional right for students in K-12 to get in-person instruction at school,” said Ginny Merrifield, executive director
of the Parent Association, which is pushing to reopen schools in California. “You can’t negotiate that away.”
The California Teachers Association, meanwhile, polled registered voters and found that most think safety — not speed — should guide reopenings.
But the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Scientists aren’t completely sure why children usually escape severe illness when they get COVID-19 — Rutherford jokes it might be because they’re short — but they have some good ideas.
“One of the things we know about the COVID-19 virus is that it has a receptor that allows it to get into our airways,” said Sandra R. Hernández, president and CEO of the California Health Care Foundation, on a panel for the Public Policy Institute of California.
“Kids under 12 just have many fewer of these receptors.”
Rutherford said these receptors sort of “bloom” after age 10 — or, more precisely, the gene for the receptors is expressed — and by the time children turn 18, they’ve reached adult levels. That fits the observation that cases are more common among high school students.
Transmission in schools appears to be primarily from teacher to teacher, then from teacher to student, but almost never from student to teacher, Rutherford said.
That has been Marin County’s experience. Schools there partially reopened in September and celebrated 1 million combined “student-days” of inclassroom instruction last month. There were only 10 cases of suspected inschool transmission of COVID-19 as of early February. Of those 10, half were student-to-student, three were adult-to-adult and two were adult-to-student. There have been no studentto-adult transmissions in school, the county health department said.
Palo Alto Unified, which brought its first students back to campus last fall, has had a total of 21 students and 31 employees involved with in-person learning test positive for COVID-19 but has not had any cases since mid-february. The vast majority of those infections were not acquired on campus.
Lee of Stanford doesn’t downplay COVID-19 among kids. But she believes the Swiss cheese model, practiced well, has proved protective. “The more layers you put in, the better,” she said. “The greater risk is that people get overconfident, expand social bubbles too quickly and drop protective measures at the same time.”