Education Week - March 10, 2021 - 16

OPINION

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Vaccinating Teachers Is Just
One Part of the Reopening Puzzle
We can't ignore the role of parent trust

ast week, President Biden
announced an ambitious plan
to partially vaccinate all K-12
teachers and child-care workers by the end of this month.
In the meantime, facts are
changing on the ground.
Even before the president's announcement, a
majority of states were already including school
staff among those currently eligible for vaccine,
with some, like California, earmarking specific
doses just for educators. Although demand from
all eligible groups continues to outstrip supply,
more and more teachers are able to sign up for
vaccine and are getting vaccinated. The question
of whether teachers should be prioritized for
vaccines is fast becoming moot, but that won't
be enough to get every student back into the
classroom.
In some localities, where teachers' fears about
returning to school buildings have been a major
reason why districts have been partially or fully
shuttered, vaccinating teachers may make a
real difference. But it is not only teachers who
have fears; it is also many parents. Vaccinating
teachers does little to address the concerns
of some parents who continue to feel that the
school building is not safe for their children and
their families.
Even as evidence builds about how in-person
instruction can happen safely and concerns
grow about the deleterious academic and
mental-health impact for some children who
are not physically in a classroom, a significant
number of parents are not sending their children
to in-person school, even when that option is
available. Chicago saw fewer than 1 in 5 students
eligible for in-person learning return to the
classroom, a reflection of parent concerns.

Philadelphia has seen the same, with only
one-third of eligible families electing in-person
learning, when it's available.
While parents who are keeping their
children at home come from all ethnic groups
and income brackets, parents of color are
disproportionately more likely to do so. In one
national survey conducted in July and cited
by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, 46 percent of Black parents and 50
percent of Hispanic parents agreed that schools
should reopen in person for all students last fall,
compared with 62 percent of white parents. In
that same survey, Black parents were also more
concerned than white parents about compliance
with mitigation practices in schools, about their
child contracting COVID-19, and about their
child bringing COVID-19 home from school.
And parents of color are acting on these
fears. In another survey that was conducted
November through December, parents of Black
and Hispanic students eligible for in-person
instruction elected for this option 20 percent
and 9 percent less often, respectively, than white
parents. In the District of Columbia, parents in
the city's poorest-and predominantly African
American-ward were twice as likely as parents
in the city's wealthiest, predominantly white
ward to reject an offer to send their child to inperson elementary school.
There are likely many reasons why this is
the case. But at least some of those reasons
are rooted in the same history and ongoing
experience of structural racism that provide good
reasons now for communities of color to broadly
distrust government institutions, including
public education. If parents believed that public
schools were not doing right by many children of
color before the pandemic, why should parents

now feel confident that these same schools can
adequately protect their children now? And
perhaps especially now, when their communities
have seen so much more death and suffering
from the pandemic, and police brutality and
racial hatred are in full display.
As Sarah Carpenter, the executive director
of Memphis Lift, a parent-advocacy group in
Tennessee, put it in a recent New York Times
article, " For generations, these public schools
have failed us and prepared us for prison, and
now it's like they're preparing us to pass away.
We know that our kids have lost a lot, but we'd
rather our kids be out of school than dead. "
Vaccinating teachers will not alone allay
the fears of these parents. Ensuring that
their children's schools satisfy the Biden
administration's benchmarks for universal
masking, hand washing, physical distancing,
contact tracing, cleaning, and ventilation would
likely help. However, even with a much needed
infusion of federal dollars, it will be hard for
at least some of these schools-those that
are old, overcrowded, and have substandard
infrastructures-to make the grade. Moreover,
another critical Biden administration benchmark
for safe school reopenings, that rates of
COVID-19 infection in the community be very
low, may not be reached in many communities
of color before this school year ends.
One of the emerging conversations around
school reopenings suggests that some parents
may choose not to return their children to public
school classrooms even when the United States
reaches full teacher vaccination status. For some
families, the continuation of virtual learning
has meant that they have created alternatives
such as microschools, unschools, and learning
pods to provide education for their children

throughout the duration of the pandemic and
that they may be loath to return, however many
teachers are vaccinated. Other families have
chosen to enroll their children in independent
schools that have already reopened for inperson learning.
For all these reasons, even as more school
buildings open over the coming months,
sizable numbers of public school children
are likely not to be in attendance. For these
children, and perhaps for all children, we
should be keeping our eyes not on what
remains of the current academic year but on
getting off to the best possible start of the new
school year, in the fall.
Soon, and certainly in time for next fall,
vaccine should be widely available to parents
and even older students. For some parents,
knowing that they and their children, as well
as older relatives, are all vaccinated should
address COVID-19 fears. Of course, for some
of the same structurally unjust reasons that
some parents of color distrust public schools,
they also distrust public-health institutions
and the COVID-19 vaccine. In African
American communities, both access to the
vaccine and uptake of the vaccine lag behind
rates in white communities. Intensive, equityspecific vaccination efforts are now underway,
however; and there are reasons to think that
vaccination rates in communities of color are
rising and will continue to increase.
Let's focus now on what else needs to be
done to make sure that in the fall every school
building will be a safe and healthy place for
every child. And not just COVID-19-safe and
healthy but broadly safe and healthy. How else
to earn the trust of all parents that being back in
school is the best place for their kids to be?

By Ruth Faden, Matthew A. Crane, Annette Anderson, & Megan Collins
FADEN is the founder of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and a co-founder of the eSchools+ Initiative. CRANE is a medical student at the Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine and a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. ANDERSON is the deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe
and Healthy Schools and an assistant professor and faculty lead in the university's School of Education. COLLINS is a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Wilmer Eye Institute
and Berman Institute of Bioethics and a co-director of the Consortium for School-Based Health Solutions.
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Education Week - March 10, 2021

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