Schools wrestle with reopening as Covid cases mount
What happened
Teachers threatened walkouts and school districts scrambled to rewrite Covid-19 safety rules this week after hundreds of students and staff were potentially exposed to coronavirus and told to quarantine just days into the new school year. About 15 percent of American children restart school in early August, sparking ferocious debate about the danger to students on the heels of a report that 97,000 U.S. kids tested positive in the last two weeks of July alone. Georgia’s back-to-school bullishness highlighted the risk of outbreaks: In Cherokee County, 925 students and staff were ordered to quarantine, and after a student in Dallas, Ga., posted a photo of her crowded, mostly unmasked high school, six students and three staffers tested positive.
As the U.S. passed 5 million cases and 161,000 coronavirus deaths, schools made vastly different plans for outbreaks. California will let schools stay open if no more than 5 percent of students and staff test positive, which could mean dozens of cases at bigger schools. Seventeen of the country’s 20 largest K-12 districts, including Los Angeles and Chicago, plan a fully remote start to the school year, while New York City will pursue a hybrid learning system. With President Trump pressuring governors to “Open the schools!” Texas and Florida initially ordered schools to reopen, before delegating the decision to local officials. Molly Ball of Woodstock, Ga., says her two teenage sons feel unsafe at their high school. “What am I supposed to say?” Ball asked. “This is worse than I imagined, times 10.”
What the columnists said
“There are no good choices,” said Barbara Kantrowitz in CNN .com. Indefinite remote learning risks stunting students’ intellectual and social development and puts a brutal strain on parents who can’t secure child care. It hurts students with special needs, and could turn the gap between rich and poor students into “an unbridgeable chasm.” But cash-strapped schools can’t spend millions on tests, plexiglass dividers, and other safety needs, nor can students be trusted to wear masks and practice social distancing.
The American Academy of Pediatricians “strongly advocates” reopening schools, said Rich Lowry in NationalReview.com. But as states pour resources into doing that safely, teachers’ unions “have offered endless excuses why they can’t even do a simulacrum of their job.” They’re fighting against in-person and remote learning. As firefighters, doctors, and other essential workers bravely show up to keep the country running, teachers’ “first and last thought has been of their own interests.”
“Essential workers have every right to insist” on safeguards, said Amy Davidson Sorkin in NewYorker.com, and teachers are being ordered to risk their lives while their schools balk at making teenagers wear masks. The U.S. is unwisely emulating Israel, where school reopenings fueled an outbreak across the population. We “wasted the summer,” rushing to reopen “restaurants and shops” instead of curbing cases. Forget the fall—to reopen schools by spring, “a rapid change of course is necessary.”