Underwater Math

What if we don't go back in September?

School districts need to start planning for the 2020-2021 school year now. I know many school districts are still in survival mode trying to manage this disaster of a school year with the thought that any learning losses from this year can be remediated in September when we go back to school normally [1] but it looks ever more unlikely that it will be possible to return to normal before there is a vaccine. A recent article in Science predicted that any one-time social-distancing scenario would lead to our healthcare system being overwhelmed in the next wave of the infection, which in some cases was predicted to be worse than the first round [2]. While it is not advisable to fully re-open our schools, we do need to recognize that although a return to school puts children and teachers at risk from coronavirus, for some students, staying at home may be more dangerous [3]. There are a host of problems facing vulnerable students while at home. Rates of child abuse have increased [4]. Homeless students do not have a home in which to shelter in place. Some students rely on schools for food [5]. While many schools are offering meals for children during this lockdown, in some cases, meals must be picked up daily. One can easily imagine that some parents have work during food distribution times or do not have reliable transportation and thus may not be able to get to these food distribution centers every day, leaving students hungry. Additionally, essential workers are left to make impossible choices when trying to figure out childcare and keeping their job in an uncertain economy. Older children are left home alone while parents work, children as young as six are watching younger siblings while parents sleep after working a night shift, and children are being watched by caretakers who are not certified in childcare, in some cases elderly relatives who are more susceptible to the virus. In order to provide childcare and stability for students, as well as a proper education, schools will need to consider re-opening in some capacity. New York City currently has family care centers open to the children of essential workers and there has been a push for the city to expand these centers to also accept homeless and other vulnerable students [6]. The fact that families are utilizing these centers shows that there is a need for schools to care for children. This need is not unique to New York.

We need to remember when shelter-in-place orders are lifted or relaxed that it is not because the virus has been conquered and no one else will die, it is because the virus is circulating at low enough levels that we are not worried about overwhelming our healthcare system. However, this means that a return to school poses a risk to students, school staff, and their families. For most students, staff, and families the risk will be low. But some of these individuals, especially those who are immunocompromised, older, or have other health conditions, will die. This is not hypothetical. In New York City schools, 50 staff members died of Covid-19 [7]. While it is impossible to determine whether these staff members were infected at school, students and teachers who are more at risk from Covid-19 should not have to endanger their lives and return to the physical school building. Some parents, even if no one in their family is at increased risk of death from Covid-19, will choose not to accept the risk of contracting the virus and will choose to keep their children home until there is a vaccine. However, once more parts of the economy open up and more people have to go back to work to pay the rent or the mortgage, parents may not have any choice but to send their children to school. Higher socioeconomic status families may be better positioned to keep their children out of the school building since they are more likely to able to work from home. It is clear to me that our students and teachers who are immunocompromised themselves or have immunocompromised family members must be allowed or even encouraged to continue virtual learning. And, I believe all families should have this option. While local schools have always had the option to opt out in the form of choosing to completely homeschool, now is not the time to force parents to completely pull their children from the school system and come up with a rigorous, coherent curriculum on their own. Districts will need to respect that not all students can return until there is a vaccine and, therefore, schools must maintain a virtual learning option. Some may argue that in late March many schools were still in session while coronavirus was circulating and no students were given the choice to learn virtually. However, at that time, we as a society did not fully understand the epidemic. Now that we know how dangerous Covid-19 is, all students should be supported in learning from home, should they make that choice, until there is a vaccine. For teachers, the same risk applies. I do not think that any teacher who is immunocompromised or has an immunocompromised family member should be required to return to in-person teaching and risk their life or the lives of their loved ones. We also know that older adults are particularly vulnerable. School districts may need to offer their more senior employees the option of retiring early or taking a furlough year without a penalty to their pensions (this would need to be done on a state level), or the option to continue teaching remotely to serve students who do not return to the school building.

Additionally, schools will need to run in a way to support social distancing. This means minimizing the overall number of human-to-human interactions, reducing class sizes, and implementing hygiene protocols. Some of these measures will be relatively easy—eliminating school-wide assemblies comes to mind as a simple way to avoid having hundreds or thousands of people in the same room. Some of these measures will be excruciating—such as the possibility of keeping high schools remote. In the lunch room and in the hallways between periods, hundreds of students are in close contact with one another and schools will need to find alternatives. Schools can add more lunch periods so that there are fewer students in the cafeteria at a time or have students eat in their classrooms. In the morning, students can report straight to their classrooms instead of into the gym or cafeteria. To eliminate the crush of students in the hallways in middle school and high school, students could remain in their classrooms all day and have teachers rotate as is common in some Asian countries. How this plays out in a school where students stay with the same group of students all day and change teachers only (such as my own middle school) will be noticeably simpler than schools were students do not stay as a group and may have a different cohort in their Honors English class versus their A.P. Calculus class. This will be a difficult issue and will take lots of thought when creating class schedules. Another way to reduce the number of human interactions in schools is to reduce the proportion of students attending physical school buildings. Sweden, which so far has been successful at managing the epidemic, has kept K-8 schools open while closing secondary schools, colleges, and universities [8]. I assume this strategy was chosen in part to provide childcare to students who need it, educate the students who are least likely to be able to learn through a digital curriculum (the technological burden on our youngest students is especially high) while allowing older students who are better equipped to learn on their own to continue learning virtually, thus reducing interactions between a large segment of the population. Part of the reasoning is also due to children not being thought to be a major source of infection [9]. Year-round schooling could also reduce the number of students in the building at once [10]. For example, having cohorts of students in school following a nine weeks on, three weeks off schedule with staggered cohorts could allow schools to reduce the number of students in the building by 25% at a time.

Another important part of minimizing the number of human interactions in a school is to reduce class sizes. If enough students choose to remain learning digitally, then the students who come back to school can be spread out among different classes (goodbye class sizes of 30 and 40). However, this has shortfalls. A proportion of teachers will also need to stay working remotely to teach the remote learners. And if 40% of students stay home and 40% of teachers stay home, then class sizes remain the same. An obvious solution to this issue would be to hire more teachers. However, many districts are going to be cash-strapped due to losses of funding from income tax, sales tax, and property taxes [11]. Federal lawmakers could help finance schools by putting a large sum of money in a new coronavirus relief bill aimed towards local education systems. Another way to reduce class sizes would be split sessions where students either go to school half of each school day (this system is common in countries without the infrastructure to educate all students at the same time) or half of the week perhaps Monday-Wednesday or Thursday-Saturday. This would ultimately require much longer hours for teachers or an increase in hiring in order (again with state and federal relief dollars needed) to keep teachers from working 50 hour weeks. To prevent students from falling further behind, it is possible that these split sessions could be done in a hybrid model where students learn on-campus some of the time and virtually some of the time. Schools in Denmark reopened using aides and specials teachers to divide classes into two or three sub-sections [12]. This strategy would also require legislation at the state level to allow classroom aides to teach and specials teachers to teach outside their content area. Additionally, this puts an extra burden on teachers who lose their planning periods since all teachers are being used to cover the newly smaller classes.

I am not arguing for school districts to remain completely remote nor am I arguing for schools to start opening back up. I believe these decisions will need to be made by state and local health authorities. I am urging state and federal authorities to provide guidance to schools so they can begin planning. For example, if states set guidelines such as capping class sizes at ten or keeping high schools closed for the foreseeable future, administrators could begin to design a strategy for how this would work in their district. Even in the absence of state and federal guidance, schools need to acknowledge that it may be a year or more before schools return to normal and we cannot count on filling in gaps from this year’s remote learning in September. Currently, some schools are doing only review work in order to be equitable for students that do not have access to devices or internet. While I would support this review-only policy if we were able to make up the missed content in the next school year, I question this policy if the next school year may look the same as this one. Instead, I think schools should focus on the access portion of this equity issue and do everything in their power to get devices to students who need them. Yes, some devices will be lost. Yes, some devices will be broken. But right now, these schools are holding hostage the learning of low-income students for the price of a Chromebook. The upcoming decisions will be hard and in some cases, excruciatingly so—hard for administrators who are left planning in the absence of guidance from state and federal governments, hard for teachers who may be working longer hours with fewer breaks, and hard for students who want to return to school and the social life it represents. Maybe none of these plans will need to be implemented. Maybe there is larger herd immunity than we currently think, maybe a massive increase in testing will allow us to successfully contain the virus, or maybe there will be a drug to treat Covid-19 that turns out to be a game-changer. I certainly hope this is the case but currently the U.S. is testing at far too low levels [13] and even many countries with successful containment strategies have had to implement stricter social distancing protocols [14]. Right now, schools can’t afford to base their policies on hopes and dreams and, instead, need to start making difficult decisions about how to continue educating our youth while keeping students, staff, and communities healthy.

1. https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-reopening-schools-will-be-harder-20200414-mh2rsowupbfqzjapbfwinybtti-story.html

2. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/14/science.abb5793

3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(20)30105-X/fulltext#.Xpm6btsd5Xk

4. https://www.newsweek.com/texas-hospital-child-abuse-cases-rise-covid-19-outbreak-1493642

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/us/coronavirus-poverty-school-lunch.html

6. https://chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2020/03/20/heres-the-latest-on-nycs-child-care-centers-opening-monday-amid-a-citywide-school-shutdown-due-to-coronavirus/

7. https://chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2020/04/13/nycs-teachers-aides-hardest-hit-by-coronavirus-deaths-new-education-department-figures-show/

8. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/can-you-beat-covid-19-without-a-lockdown-sweden-is-trying

9. https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/06/were-learning-a-lot-about-the-coronavirus-it-will-help-us-assess-risk/

10. https://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/year-round-schooling/index.html

11. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/business/economy/state-tax-revenue-debt-coronavirus.html

12. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/world/europe/denmark-schools-coronavirus.html