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