Education Week - March 18, 2020 - 8

Weighing the School-Closing Call on Coronavirus
cation, so we need to find as many and
as creative ways for students to continue their instruction."

Superintendents
face a complex
decision process

Communications Key

With COVID-19 continuing to
spread throughout the United States,
thousands of superintendents are
suddenly becoming fluent in a peculiar new idiom: that of "social distancing" and "flattening the curve"
of infection to prevent overhwleming
medical facilities. Increasingly, they're
faced with the tough decision of if and
when they should decide to close their
schools to stave off transmission.
A growing list of states have moved
to close all their schools. In other
states, absent a direct order fom
public-health agencies, the decision
of whether, and how long, to shutter
schools technically falls to superintendents. Many interviewed by Education Week say, though, that they coordinate with other health and safety
agencies to gauge impact on their
communities at large before making
the call.
"At the end of the day, we'd never
make that decision unilaterally," said
Bondy Shay Gibson, the superintendent of the Jefferson County district
in West Virginia's panhandle. "We'd
work with the health department,
the sheriff's department, the county
homeland-security department, and
say to them: Tell us what you think-is
there anything we're not considering?"
Still, as they work through the possible scenarios for doing so, the superintendents say they're balancing a host
of competing considerations, as well
as trying to make contingency plans if
they do have to close.
They're worried about who will supervise children in families in which
both parents must work or about children going hungry without school
assistance. They're facing logistical
challenges about how to keep payroll
running and prepare learning plans
for students. External pressures are
present, too, with frightened parents
in some communities urging schools
to close.
All that makes for a thorny decision
tree.
Take the Douglas district in Box
Elder, S.D. Its context, like many districts', poses a unique and specific conundrum for its leaders.
The district is located near the Ellsworth Air Force base, and about 45
percent of students are dependents of
military personnel, including some
who have recently returned from duty
in Italy and South Korea, two countries heavily hit by the virus. On top of
that, the district's teaching force skews
older, with the average teacher having
20 years of experience and at least 50
teachers with 30-plus years, pushing
them toward the demographic that data
suggest is more vulnerable to the virus.
"And so with that, we have some
with compromised immune systems.

Courtesy of Karen Corona/Schenectady City School District

By Stephen Sawchuk

Schenectady, N.Y. Superintendent
Laurence T. Spring, third from left,
and his cabinet examine a map of
coronavirus cases as they review the
district's plans for responding to the
pandemic.

I think we're pretty vulnerable in that
area," said Superintendent Alan Kerr.
"That's part of the calculus, too: day
care, and the economic strain it's
going to put on the parents. And another aspect we have to look at, that
most schools don't, is that we sometimes have families with two parents
deployed," which means some students are staying with other relatives,
including grandparents.

We can make
the best-laid
plans, but we
don't control
any of the
triggers..."
BONDY SHAY GIBSON
School Superintendent,
Jefferson County, W.Va.

There's a variety of conflicting information on the efficacy of closing
schools, which is making a tough call
even tougher.
Research on the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 points to pre-emptive
closures as an effective way to limit
outbreaks, even as others note differences in how COVID-19 and the
demographics of the affected population compare with those of the earlier
pandemic.

8 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 18, 2020 | www.edweek.org

At the time of this writing, thousands of schools had been closed or
were scheduled to close because of
COVID-19, affecting millions of students, but those numbers continue
to change rapidly. (Visit Education
Week's map for the latest statistics.)
The World Health Organization,
which earlier this week declared the
coronavirus a global pandemic, declined to issue recommendations
about school closings, saying each
country must weigh risk factors and
capacity based on its own context.
Some U.S. districts, like Chicago,
which closed one high school last
week, are explicitly deferring to
health agencies; the nation's third
largest school district has held its
press conferences in tandem with
them. At one this week, Chicago's
public-health deputy commissioner,
Jennifer Layden, defended the city's
decision not to close schools en
masse, stressing that sustained person-to-person contact is necessary for
transmission.
"It takes close, direct contact with
someone who has a case to be considered exposed to the virus," she said.
In Schenectady, N.Y., the district is
also taking its cues from health agencies. But as it's worked to re-evaluate
its own emergency plans, the district
is discovering ways in which they don't
quite line up with the fast-changing realities of COVID-19.
Closing a school for one day to
scrub it down is a far different response from what would need to happen if health agencies determine that
everyone in one of its schools needs
to self-isolate for 14 days, noted Superintendent Laurence Spring. And
those pose different scenarios for the
district to map out.
"How good do we think our records
are in terms of who's set foot in the
building in the last 14 days?" he noted.
"If the mailman is coming in to drop
off a package, and he's all the way into
the building, he doesn't necessarily

sign in nor [do] the guys who are delivering stuff for lunch. There are a
bunch of those places where we figured, 'Geez, I bet we wouldn't be at 90
percent accuracy if we need to provide
names to a disease investigator to map
back from a confirmed case.' "
The district is now tightening up
those procedures in its buildings. It's
also wrestling with how to provide
needed services to students if it must
close schools. The district has extra
Chromebooks to distribute to students, and with about 85 percent of
them qualifying for free or reducedprice lunch, it also will continue to deliver thousands of backpacks of food
to students.
But how can it get those into students' hands while not potentially
exposing more staff members to the
virus? Those are the technical details
the district's staff is now wrestling
with, Spring said.
Rob Anderson, the superintendent
of the Boulder Valley district in Colorado, described a similar scramble to
account for the flood of often conflicting reports leaders are receiving about
the virus.
Information about the virus "is
breaking in ways the decision matrix
that we set up never anticipated," he
said. "You find yourself just conversing and putting your heads together to
make the best decision you can."
And in Jefferson County, classes
were to end early March 13 so the
district can deep-clean schools and
teachers can assemble instructional
packets for students. The West Virginia district is asking each teacher to
prepare at least two weeks' worth of
activities, with accommodations for
those who don't have internet access.
District guidelines say they can't be
"busywork" and must link directly to
its curriculum.
"There is never going to be a piece
of paper or a computer that replaces a
teacher," Superintendent Gibson said.
"But we're here to deliver kids an edu-

As they weigh the options, the superintendents all said that accurately
communicating fast-changing circumstances was both crucial-and
challenging.
"There's a balance where you want
to inform but you don't want to panic
people, and sometimes when you
write guidelines, they're too broad,"
said Kerr of South Dakota.
"We can make the best-laid plans
but we don't control any of the triggers, and all of those unknowns create fear. Fearful people are sometimes
angry, or they're hurt, or they're upset
and they're not logical," said Gibson.
"So part of what we try to do is quell
fear through information. We communicate a lot. We answer questions."
Even inadvertent mixed messages
can cause frustration. Kerr said he got
some blowback because the district's
pandemic plan notes that teachers
will be paid if and when schools close,
while most hourly workers won't be,
with their days added to the end of the
school year. That's not a function of
status, he explained, but of employees'
different work contracts.
In Schenectady, Spring said some
parents were confused by New York
state's decision to declare a public
emergency. Usually, the state does
that because of a severe snowstorm-
and when that happens, staff and students alike don't come to schools, he
noted.
"This state of emergency was declared to [ease procurement rules] for
the state, and we needed to communicate that to parents," Spring said,
ticking off a list of topics he's included
in the district's daily updates. "It does
not change the fact that we still have
school. There aren't any recommendations about everyone staying home.
We do continue to pay close attention
to health updates. Hand-washing is
still really, really important."
Parents are understably concerned,
though, and they've been putting
pressure on districts to consider closing in some locations. In Montgomery
County, Md., more than 17,000 residents had signed a petition to move up
the district's spring break to prevent
transmission of the virus. The state of
Maryland has since moved to close all
schools through March 27.
In all, Spring said his district feels
like it's made progress on its plans
from a few weeks ago. But he acknowledged that most districts will probably
still face unexpected problems if and
when they have to close.
"There will still be things-and
things of reasonable significance, not
just minor details-that will be like,
'Nobody thought about that or how to
solve for that,' " he said. "There's this
black box in which the department of
health is saying, 'We become in control of the site, and we'll let you know.'
Well, 'we'll let you know' is a really
hard thing to plan for."

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Education Week - March 18, 2020

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