Education Week - September 22, 2021 - 18

Why School Districts
Are Unprepared
For COVID-19
younger in Pierce County testing positive for
COVID-19 mostly remained below 20 cases
per 100,000 people.
The downside, though, was that hybrid learnDisruptions,
Again
Exhaustion, misplaced optimism,
and bad state policies led districts to shelve
last year's hybrid learning models
By Benjamin Herold
As August vanished and the new school year
loomed, Principal Delonna Halliday lay coughing
in her bed, recovering from a breakthrough
case of COVID-19, which she and her husband
had both contracted despite being vaccinated.
The highly contagious Delta variant was all
over the news. More than 300 people in Pierce
County, Wash., were testing positive for the
virus each day. Children under 12 were still ineligible
for vaccines, leading to a spike in pediatric
COVID cases around scenic Gig Harbor, the
affluent suburb on Puget Sound where Halliday
heads Discovery Elementary School.
But misplaced early-summer optimism and
the sometimes-dubious priorities of state education
officials left Halliday among the thousands
of U.S. school leaders whose focus was
elsewhere as the pandemic shifted and surged,
threatening to derail a third consecutive academic
year. Rather than refining the complicated,
two-days-in-person-and-three-days-athome
hybrid-learning model that Discovery
used last year to limit the virus's spread, Halliday
spent her summer implementing plans to
welcome hundreds of children back to fully inperson
learning while also scrambling to open a
new full-time online school.
" We're going full speed ahead on in-person
learning, with a virtual option for some families, "
she said. " If at some point we have to go
back to hybrid, we will tackle that as it comes. "
School systems all over the country have made
similar choices. Just 10 percent of educators say
their district started this school year using a hybrid-learning
model that mixes in-person and
remote instruction, compared with 69 percent
of educators who said their district used such a
model during 2020-21, according to a new nationally
representative survey of 1,241 educators
administered online by the EdWeek Research
Center in late August and early September.
The early returns on that approach are alarming.
By early September, at least 1,000 schools
across 35 states had closed to in-person learning
due to COVID-19 outbreaks, catching a small
but growing number educators all over the
country flat-footed. In Hillsborough County,
Fla., about 3 percent of the district 220,000
students remain quarantined on any given day,
but they can't participate in their classrooms remotely
because district officials scrapped last
year's hybrid learning model. The same dynamic
was at play in San Antonio, Texas, where
district leaders ditched hybrid learning just
months after touting millions of dollars' worth
of new classroom technology as a long-term investment
in the model's future. Nationally, just
7 percent of teachers said they were teaching
a mix of in-person and remote students at the
start of 2021-22, according to the new EdWeek
Research Center survey results.
Add it all up, said Michael K. Barbour, an expert
on virtual learning at Touro University California,
and many of America's K-12 leaders were
somewhere between foolish and irresponsible in
preparing for this academic year.
" The fact that school systems haven't been
making plans for continued disruption boggles
the mind, " he said.
Early optimism prompted districts to
ditch hybrid learning models
At any given point during the 2020-21 school
year, about two-thirds of U.S. district leaders
said their schools were using a hybrid learning
model, according to regular surveys
administered by the EdWeek Research
Center. Split-schedule
approaches in which
children alternated
between in-person
and online learning
were more popular
in the fall. By spring,
more districts were forcing
families to choose between fullyin-person
and fully-remote options, with
teachers sometimes instructing both groups
of children simultaneously.
The variety of approaches was made
possible by state education departments
granting districts emergency flexibility
around such issues as attendance, funding, and
seat-time requirements.
In Gig Harbor, for example, Peninsula School
District 401 took advantage of Washington
state's earlier " Continuous Learning 2.0 " guidance,
which urged districts during the 2020-21
school year to focus on flexibility and " plans for
rapid transitions between face-to-face and continuous
remote learning. "
Discovery Elementary responded by limiting
most 3rd through 5th graders to four half-days
of in-person instruction per week. One group of
children received face-to-face instruction in the
morning, then had " asynchronous time " for independent
work at home in the afternoons. The
other group did the opposite, and all students
learned remotely on Wednesdays. The setup allowed
the school to keep children six feet apart
while giving staff time to continually review
state academic standards to ensure that the most
important material was being taught.
" We really pared things down to the essentials, "
Halliday said.
All things considered, the results were
positive. Ninety-plus percent of Discovery
students regularly logged in and submitted
work last year, and the rate of children 11 or Illustration by Laura Baker/Education Week and Getty
18 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 22, 2021 | www.edweek.org
ing was widely regarded as a pale imitation of
regular school. It also placed extraordinary new
burdens on both educators and families.
The resulting exhaustion was one reason why
momentum for a return to fully in-person learning
began to grow in early summer. Relaxed
social-distancing guidelines from the federal
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
also contributed. So did the optimism generated
by rising vaccination rates and plummeting
case counts, both of which helped fuel national
determination to return children to their
physical classrooms full-time for the 2021-22
school year.
By early June, only about 3 percent of educators
were saying their districts planned to use a
split-schedule hybrid-learning model this year.
Instead, survey respondents indicated, a new
approach was taking root: As they prepared for
five days a week of fully in-person instruction,
educators in districts like PSD 401 were
also rushing to stand up full-time virtual
schools. The idea was to invest
in building a long-term
option for families who
preferred remote learning,
rather than preparing shortterm
strategies to accommodate
COVID-19 outbreaks
and other emergencies.
" We started our summer
planning with the premise that
we were in a different place in
the pandemic, " said Superintendent
Krestin Bahr.
That view was consistent with
the new Continuous Learning
2.0+ guidance issued in late May
by Washington's Office of the Superintendent
for Public Instruction, which
represented a significant shift in direction
from the state's earlier advice.
But the new guidance contained a glaring hole.
In early September, a week before Discovery
Elementary was slated to reopen, as the highly
contagious Delta variant raged and vaccine hesitancy
among some adults lingered and fights
about making children wear masks to school
broke out all over the nation, Education Week
asked the state education department how
it was advising Washington districts to keep
learning going in the event of fresh COVID-19
outbreaks.
" That's a good question that I don't have an
answer for, " said Rhett Nelson, the director of
alternative learning for the state education department.
Some
policies undermined
preparation for new outbreaks
Such poor guidance from states led to choppy
planning all over the country.
South Carolina was one of several states
to cut funding for students receiving virtual
instruction. In Florida and eight other states,
leaders initially pressed districts to return to
full-time in-person learning while prohibiting
mask mandates, creating conditions that potentially
encouraged the spread of the virus.
Texas lawmakers missed a summer deadline
to provide districts money for online learning,
then passed legislation in the fall that critics

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Education Week - September 22, 2021

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