|
|
|
The views expressed on this page are
solely
those of the author and do not
necessarily represent the views of County
News Online
|
|
Karen Ducey/Getty Images
NPR Ed
When It Comes To Reopening Schools, 'The Devil's In The Details,' Educators Say
July 9, 2020
Anya Kamanetz
Jeanne Norris is a teacher, the wife of a teacher and the mother of an
8-year-old in St. Louis. She'd love to send her son back to school in
August. But, she says, "I feel like my government and my fellow
citizens have put me in a position where it's not really in the best
interests of our family."
Norris has a long list of reasons why. She says she has taught in
buildings where ventilation systems are outdated and malfunctioning,
and even soap for hand-washing is in short supply.
In June, Missouri cut K-12 education funding by more than $100 million
amid the pandemic-induced recession. The Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities anticipates state budget shortfalls of 25% this fiscal year
as a result of that recession. Education leaders have said schools may
need more than $200 billion in new federal education funding to stop
these gaps and meet the new need. The House passed a bill in May with
$58 billion for school districts, and the Republican-controlled Senate
has not yet acted on it, though the president has recently weighed in
heavily in favor of reopening schools.
Norris says she's disappointed by her state's response to the virus,
and she's worried about the risk to her son's teachers, too.
"You know, a third of teachers are over the age of 50, I believe. ...
You want to talk about social-emotional impacts? Thinking about my
child experiencing somebody die because of coronavirus? Sounds like a
pretty heavy burden to bear."
Dozens of teachers, parents and district leaders around the country
told NPR that the back-to-school season — that beloved annual ritual —
has fogged over with confusion. States, districts and the federal
government are pushing and pulling in different directions. Scientists
are updating their advice to reflect emerging research and the changing
course of the pandemic. And parents and educators are finding it hard
to make decisions in the murk.
What's at stake: An unknown number of lives, the futures of tens of
millions of children, the livelihoods of their caregivers, the working
conditions of millions of educators and people's trust in a fundamental
American institution.
Thomas Jefferson, the scribe of the Declaration of Independence, was
among the first Americans to propose a system of universal, publicly
funded education in 1779. Since then, besides providing an education,
public schools became by far the physically safest places for the
nation's more than 50 million schoolchildren. They fed about 30 million
children meals they might have missed otherwise, and offered crucial
assistance with housing, health care and mental health.
Until this past spring.
Schools closed abruptly amid the coronavirus pandemic, in the U.S. and
almost everywhere. At one point, 90% of the world's schoolchildren were
out of class. Now, across Europe and Asia, dozens of school systems
have already reopened, with precautions in place, and few virus spikes
have been seen as a result. But in the U.S., where the pandemic
continues to rage, that version of normal is not being contemplated in
most places.
One notable exception, Florida, has just ordered schools to start back
with full-time in-person instruction at least five days a week. This,
in a state with one of the worst outbreaks in the country.
"To be perfectly honest, it's terrifying," says Kirk Hansen, a middle
school social studies teacher in Lakeland, Fla. "We've worked with very
little before. The story of public education is inadequate funding. And
we are supposed to come back to an environment where we don't know
what's happening and we're supposed to do it on limited funds. And I
think it's just — it's going to be a fiasco."
Back to school, not back to normal
Many parents and teachers echoed Hansen's anxiety. Across the United
States, each district is making its own decisions based on guidance —
not directives — from the federal government, states, experts,
educators, parents and local health authorities.
Guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls for
social distancing, and grouping kids into small pods, to limit the
spread of a potential infection. That means a drastic reduction in
class sizes everywhere. In the absence of funds for more space and more
staff, that's driving schools to cut back on in-person class time. The
state of California, for example, recommends splitting up students into
smaller cohorts that attend two days a week, every other week, or
mornings and afternoons, while offering remote instruction the rest of
the time. We're hearing versions of this limited-time plan everywhere
from New York City — the nation's largest school district — to Omaha,
Neb., Seattle and West Bloomfield, Mich.
At the same time, districts are surveying parents and teachers to find
out if they are willing to go back at all. One national survey by the
American Federation of Teachers found about 1 in 4 educators were not
willing to come back even with precautions, and a survey of parents
found two-thirds were nervous about the prospect. That means many
districts are offering remote learning at the same time, which is
essentially a whole other job for schools and teachers.
Meanwhile, the pandemic is spiking in some parts of the country, while
other places like New York are vigilant based on past experience.
Districts are taking time to sort through all the information. The
delays in communication, in turn, make it harder for families to make
plans.
This convoluted, decentralized process around reopening schools is also
pitting stakeholders against each other. In San Mateo, in the Bay Area,
some teachers want to start the year remote-only, while parents and
administrators are pushing for more face time. Jinna Hwang, who teaches
math at San Mateo High School, says she can't create a warm, accepting
classroom culture when everyone is wearing masks and she must enforce
physical distancing. Face masks will also be an obstacle for English
language learners, Hwang says. She's not sure how she'll find time to
teach her in-person lessons — multiple times over, to different cohorts
of students — while also planning and executing remote teaching at the
same time.
On the other hand, she says, if schools stick with remote-only, "What
do you do with kids who have difficulty learning online? What do you do
about kids who are entering depression and need their wellness
counselor?"
Questions like these abound. After New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy released
that state's "Restart and Recovery Plan for Education," educators
crowdsourced a list of nearly 400 unanswered questions and concerns.
Among them: How can we safely toilet train students with autism? How
can students in band play a trumpet with a mask on? Will substitute
teachers get paid more since their job is now high risk, and who pays
for their health insurance if they get sick on the job?
"The devil's in the details," sums up Hwang.
Reopening followed by re-closing?
As difficult as reopening plans are, they are just the beginning. As
Dr. Anthony Fauci emphasized in recent Senate testimony, local
coronavirus infection rates are a key factor driving schools' ability
to not just open up, but to stay open.
Mike Looney, the superintendent of Fulton County Schools, a large
district in the Atlanta area, has been grappling with the uncertainty
around reopening. His schools are set to open Aug. 17, and he says he's
been letting parents know: The rest is in their hands.
"I have been doing my very best to communicate to our families that
they really are in control of whether or not the school district opens
up as planned — because the school district has to respond to the
community spread."
Looney's district is unusual in having already released not just a
reopening plan but a detailed re-closing decision matrix. It gives 12
options for how long to close a school if someone at the school tests
positive for the coronavirus. For example, explains Looney, if there is
low community spread and one person at a school tests positive, that
school will close for up to 24 hours for cleaning and contact tracing.
But if there are more or rising cases throughout the community, the
closure for that single case will last for 72 hours. Conversely, even
with few cases in the broader community, if there are five or more
positive tests in a single school, that closure could last at least two
weeks to give people time to isolate and recover.
The math around contact tracing and risk reduction can be
head-spinning. And that's exactly why Michelle Hoffmann in High Bridge,
N.J., is planning to home-school her 6-year-old son this year.
Hoffmann has been working as a contact tracer, following up with people
who test positive for the coronavirus so that their close contacts can
be notified to try to stop the spread of the virus. She anticipates
schools closing down quickly and repeatedly after they open. And she
doesn't see the utility of rotating cohorts of students as long as they
share the same teacher.
"If a teacher came in and said, 'Hey, I just found out my sister tested
positive for COVID and we saw her over the weekend,' both groups of
students are going to have to stay home."
It might work better if each tiny group of students had a different
teacher, she says. "But again, who has the resources for that? There is
no unlimited supply of substitute teachers. That's just not a thing."
Hoffmann feels prepared to take on home-schooling. For one thing, her
wife is an educator who may be laid off — New Jersey, too, is cutting
hundreds of millions of dollars from education this year. Hoffmann's
mother has been teaching her son Korean. And she has friends who work
in technical fields who are willing to pitch in, guiding her son with
science projects over Skype. All of which seems preferable to the
disruptions of repeated openings and re-closings, she says. "I don't
want to scramble. I'm very much a planner, so I want to have a plan in
place."
But many families don't have the resources to make a plan like this.
And online-only learning, the fallback option, isn't making many folks
happy either.
"We're all horrible teachers," Ashley Ruiz, a mother of two in south
Florida, says of her and her friends' experiences with remote learning.
Her 7-year-old son is on the autism spectrum, and relies on her school
for speech and social skills therapy, and help with reading, none of
which are really replicable online.
"We now all recognize that teachers need to be paid a million dollars in cash, tax-free, because of what they do," Ruiz says.
Nicol Turner Lee, an expert on educational technology and digital
divides at the Brookings Institution, is in frequent consultation with
districts around the country. She calls this past spring's attempt at
emergency remote learning "an abject failure for our children."
Research shows students who struggle tend to do even worse with
distance learning. Some districts are investing in training teachers to
raise the quality of remote teaching, and working to get special
education students and English language learners the support they need.
Yet simple access is still a big problem. Turner Lee says an estimated
12 to 15 million students still do not have broadband Internet at home.
And an estimated one-third of low-income students have to share devices
with family members.
Can schools do better this coming year? "I think we have run out of time," says Turner Lee.
Some localities, such as Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Maryland, are
working, sometimes with private donors, to get equipment and
connectivity to students at a larger scale. And public libraries are
boosting their Wi-Fi signals to allow students to gather and do their
homework in the parking lot. But, she says, these are ultimately
stopgaps, and they won't go far without massive federal aid. She says
overall, efforts to meet the challenges facing public schools are "a
day late and a dollar short."
|
|
|
|
