Education Week - January 19, 2022 - 2

Biden Administration
Sending More Tests
For COVID to Schools
The law of supply and demand is not on the Biden
administration's side.
Even though it's increasing federal support for
COVID-19 testing for schools in a bid to keep them
open amid the omicron surge, what that amounts to
is a drop in the bucket of what's needed.
The White House announced last week that the administration
is making a dedicated stream of 5 million
rapid tests and 5 million lab-based PCR tests available
to schools starting this month to ease shortages and
promote the safe reopening of schools. That's on top
of more than $10 billion devoted to school-based
tests authorized in the COVID-19 relief law and about
$130 billion earmarked in that law to keep children
in school.
The new initiative comes as the White House faces
mounting criticism over long lines and supply shortages
for testing and after the nation's third-largest
public school system, in Chicago, closed for days
after an impasse between teachers and officials over
reopening policies. The closure was a black eye for
President Joe Biden, who made reopening schools-
and keeping them open-a priority.
" We're doing everything we can to make sure that
our children have an opportunity to stay in school, "
U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said on
" CBS Mornings. " " That's where they need to be, and
we know we can do it safely. "
The new crop of tests, though, is enough to cover
only a small fraction of the more than 50 million
students and educators in the nation's schools. The
administration hopes the tests will fill critical shortfalls
in schools that are having difficulty securing tests
through existing federal funding or are facing outbreaks
of the more transmissible COVID-19 variant.
States will be able to request the tests immediately,
says the White House, and the tests will be available
for use by the end of the month.
The administration is also working to target other
federally backed testing sites to support school testing
programs, including locating Federal Emergency
Management Agency sites at schools.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention was set to release new guidance last week
to help schools implement " test-to-stay " policies, in
which schools use rapid tests to keep those who test
positive in the classroom.
Awaiting Entry
Students arrive at
Jordan Community
Public School in
Chicago last week.
Following a week of
canceled classes, they
resumed in person
after the district and
teachers' union
negotiated a deal
to upgrade safety
protocols in the face
of the highly infectious
omicron variant.
Both in School and Online, Bullying Drops Off
As Students Spend Less Time in Class in Person
The long periods of remote learning during the pandemic
may have one silver lining: The physical distance appears to
have prevented student harassment.
New research from Boston University using internet-search
data suggests bullying declined during the pandemic-not just
in schools but online as well-and harassment hasn't entirely
returned even after students started to come back to campus.
In a typical year, the internet sees a spike in people looking
for information on bullying at the beginning of a school
year, which then drops over time, with lulls particularly over
the winter and summer breaks. By comparing the monthby-month
search patterns of millions of Google users from
March 2020 to February 2021, researchers got a glimpse of
how school and online harassment may have changed when
students were at home, beyond school reports and surveys.
During the pandemic, searches related to school bullying
were 33 percent lower than expected based on historical
trends; those related to cyberbullying were 27 percent lower.
The drops were driven by changes in in-person learning during
the school year. Lead author Andrew Bacher-Hicks and
his colleagues found that searches related to bullying stayed
about the same in summer before and during the pandemic.
Bacher-Hicks said he was surprised that there was a significant
drop in online as well as in-person harassment during the
pandemic-considering students were spending more time socializing
online. But the findings bear out the results of other
studies that suggest " cyberbullying rarely occurs independently
of in-person bullying, " he said.
" There might be some event or interaction that's going to
create a cycle of both in-person [bullying] and then spill over
into cyberbullying, " Bacher-Hicks said. " And so when that
initial event doesn't happen, not only is in-person bullying less
likely to happen, but so is cyberbullying. "
He suggested that when students attended school remotely-and
returned to strict social distancing-there was
less time moving between classes and other unstructured
periods in which students could have an initial falling out in
person that could lead to later bullying on campus and online.
With New Restrictions, Lawmakers In Some States
Pile Worries on LGBTQ Youth
As if they needed more strife in their lives, along come national
political fights over transgender youth rights.
Based on the results of a new poll, it seems apparent that
LGBTQ teenagers and young adults are receiving the message
that they aren't welcome. And that, combined with the pandemic,
has taken a toll on the mental health of many of them.
Two-thirds of LGBTQ teenagers and young adults say that recent
high-profile debates and state legislation restricting transgender
youth participation in school sports, among other related
issues, have been hard on their well-being, according to the poll
conducted by Morning Consult for the Trevor Project, a national
suicide-prevention organization for LGBTQ youth.
The impact of these political debates is felt even more keenly
among transgender and nonbinary youth, 85 percent of whom say
such discussions and legislative activity have negatively affected
their mental health.
" These results underscore how recent politics and ongoing crises
facing the globe can have a real, negative impact on LGBTQ
young people, a group consistently found to be at significantly
increased risk for depression, anxiety, and attempting suicide because
of how they are mistreated and stigmatized in society, " said
Amit Paley, the CEO and executive director of the Trevor Project.
The survey asked LGBTQ youth how they felt-angry, nervous,
stressed, scared, sad, excited, or happy-about three policies in
particular: bans on transgender girls playing on girls' sports teams
and transgender boys playing on boys' teams; prohibitions on doctors
prescribing gender-affirming medical care to transgender
youth; and mandates on schools to tell parents if their children
are using different names or pronouns at school or are identifying
as LGBTQ.
Anger, stress, sadness, and nervousness were the most commonly
reported emotions. Policies requiring schools to inform
parents about their children's gender and sexual identities made
LGBTQ students particularly stressed and nervous.
" It's clear that lawmakers should be taking an intersectional
approach to public policy, not working overtime to target the most
marginalized young people, particularly those who are transgender
or nonbinary, for partisan political points, " said Paley.
BRIEFLY STATED CONTRIBUTORS: Associated Press, Evie Blad, Alyson Klein, Arianna Prothero, and Sarah D. Sparks. Edited by Karen Diegmueller.
2 | EDUCATION WEEK | January 19, 2022 | www.edweek.org
Ashlee Rezin /Chicago Sun-Times via AP

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - January 19, 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - January 19, 2022