Education Week - April 14, 2021 - 15

In situations where these strategies
are not in place, or are followed more
loosely, the data are less clear, said
Mario Ramirez, an emergency medicine physician who previously served
as the acting director for the Office of
Pandemic and Emerging Threats at
the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services during the 2015 Ebola
outbreak in West Africa.
" There have been random and sporadic outbreaks that have led to clusters, " said Ramirez, who is currently
a managing director at Opportunity
Labs, a consulting group that works
on education issues. While some of
these clusters occurred in schools that
weren't taking precautions, there are
also examples of schools that took imperfect protective measures and didn't
see any outbreaks, he said.
There may be undetected asymptomatic spread in these schools, said
Dominique Heinke, an epidemiologist in North Carolina. School numbers are " heavily dependent " on
testing, so if schools aren't testing,
or students aren't electing to test,
they're likely to miss cases, she said.
But it's also possible that schools not
following precautions, and not seeing a high number of cases, might
be protected against spread through
other means.
If students are staying home most
of the time they're not at school, for
example, it's less likely they'll bring
the virus into the building. Conversely,
if most students at a school have a lot
of exposure to the community, either
because parents are working in person
or for other reasons, it could be that the
majority have already been infected,
and the virus has fewer possible additional hosts, which could limit spread,
Heinke said.
On the other hand, " it's entirely plausible that the combinations of these
many measures, though imperfect, are
keeping in-school transmission to very
low levels in many schools, " said Powers of UNC.
In its guidance for schools, the CDC
has emphasized layered mitigation,
sometimes talked about as the " Swiss
cheese model, " said Greta Massetti, a
senior scientist at the CDC and co-lead
of the Community Interventions and
Critical Populations Task Force for the
organization's COVID-19 response.
The idea is that no one strategy-like
distancing or masking-is infallible;
each has holes like a piece of Swiss
cheese. Layer the slices, or the strategies, on top of each other, and the
holes in one strategy will hopefully be
blocked by another. It's less likely the
virus will slip through.
" When some of those strategies fail,
the others are there to sort of step in
and provide protection, " Massetti said.
Schools can focus on what's
in their control

But just how many of those strategies can fail before the stack is all holes
and no cheese? Again, it's unclear, said
Ramirez.
" All of these questions that we're
asking are experiments that are taking place in an imperfect scenario, "
he said. In an ideal world, he said, researchers would be able to isolate one
variable at a time. If they wanted to see
how well a certain ventilation strategy

worked, for example, they would compare two schools where adherence to
every other mitigation measure was
exactly the same. But researchers don't
have that option right now, he said.
" What you have is thousands of
schools around the country that each
have 10 to 20 different variables that
are changing site to site. ... It's impossible to ascribe disease spread to any
particular intervention, or lack thereof.
What we are stuck doing is making broad strokes about how much
transmission there is in schools, " said
Ramirez.
Some experts argue for systemslevel solutions

Still, it's likely that a few small breakdowns in an otherwise well-adheredto policy is less of an issue than ongoing habits, said Lessler. If a couple of
students in the school refuse to wear
masks, but everyone else does, " that's
probably not going to be a huge problem, " he said. " If it's systemic, that no
one's wearing their mask, or hardly
anyone is wearing their mask, and
there's basically no other measures in
place to stop spread, then it's going to
be a huge problem. "
There's always the possibility that
people-teachers, children-will make
mistakes, or resist mandates. That's
why Donald Milton, a professor of environmental health at the University of
Maryland, argues that districts should
be focusing more on modifying the
school setting, rather than human behavior-especially when they're having trouble enforcing guidance that
requires students and staff to follow
new rules.
The concept is known as the " hierarchy of controls, " a framework used in
occupational health and safety. " What
you want to do first is controls that
don't require behavioral changes, that
don't require people to individually do
anything, but are rather built into their
daily environment, " Milton said. For
example, effective ventilation is key. So
are administrative choices-like moving lunchtime, one of the riskiest parts
of the day as students aren't wearing
masks, to an outdoor location.
As Education Week has reported,
at this stage in the pandemic and at
this point in the school year, many
schools aren't considering making
costly, large-scale infrastructure updates as a COVID-19 mitigation strategy. But enacting smaller changes-
purchasing portable air filtration
systems or asking teachers to take
students outside for lunch-doesn't
have to be prohibitively expensive,
Milton said.
While this may be an option some
schools choose going forward, it
still doesn't leave teachers or school
leaders clear answers on how much
adherence to how many mitigation
strategies they need to achieve the
same results as the schools studied
in reopening research.
" I think that this pandemic has highlighted a lot of inadequacies in the
funding and support for education,
for public health, in terms of our data
systems, " said Powers, the UNC associate professor. " It's been my hope that
coming out of this, we will build things
back in a way that's informed by all of
the challenges we've faced. "

Making Digital Literacy Skills a Priority:
An Administrator's Perspective
Learning loss,
differentiated learning,
core skills like reading and
math - educators have a
myriad of challenges and
critical issues that are all
competing for priority.
How can we ensure that
we're building students'
future-ready digital skills
in this environment?
Better yet, how do we
integrate these key
life and work skills into
our core initiatives?

Tuesday, April 20, 2021
2-3 PM ET
edw.link/DigitalLiteracy

Content provided by

GUESTS
ٚJILL HEYES, Instructional Technology
Coordinator, Cicero School District 99, Illinois
ٚABE TOVAR, District Instructional Coach,
Cicero School District 99, Illinois

MODERATORS
ٚKEITH OELRICH, CEO, Learning.com
ٚJIM SIDICK, Regional Partnership
Manager, Learning.com

How Districts Are Centering Relationships
and Systemic SEL for Back to School 21-22
Join this webinar to hear
from the Tangipahoa
Parish School District
(LA) team on cultivating
supportive relationships,
sense of belonging, and
cultural awareness and
action as the foundation
of students' SEL.

Monday, April 26, 2021
2-3 PM ET
edw.link/SystemicSEL

Content provided by

GUESTS
ٚBYRON HURST, Assistant Superintendent,
Tangipahoa Parish School District (LA)
ٚCRYSTAL HOOPER, School Counselor,
Tangipahoa Parish School District (LA)
ٚAMY FAIRCHILD, Social Worker, Tangipahoa
Parish School District (LA)

EDUCATION WEEK | April 14, 2021 | www.edweek.org | 15

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Education Week - April 14, 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - April 14, 2021