Education Week - October 20, 2021 - 18

Districts Are Leaning on Medical Advisers
To Help With COVID Policies. It's Paying Off
Expert panels help
some districts
with mitigation
plans and get
community buy-in
By Stephen Sawchuk
It's a Wednesday night, and the
DeKalb County, Ga., school district's
medical advisory committee is having
its debut moment, so to speak.
The committee has been working
with the district for about a year now,
helping to shape its back-to-school
plans, inform its upcoming decisions
about COVID-19 vaccinations
and testing, and increasingly, play a
public-information role, as embodied
by tonight's meeting.
When the Zoom public forum
goes live, the screen is a pleasing
cross-section of medical experts in
this diverse district: Doctors, disease
experts, pediatricians, academics-
younger and older, Black and white.
They're the same folks parents in
the district take their kids to, and
the same ones who work in nearby
hospitals.
The public meeting starts with
the basics-what is the COVID-19
virus, anyway? Why do masks seem
to prevent transmission?-but it will
conclude with much more specific
information and myth-busting for
parents, like what to do when a child
gets sniffly during the approaching
cold-and-flu season.
Some of the committee members'
responses are sobering reminders of
the seriousness of the pandemic.
" One myth that drives me crazy
is that kids don't get sick. They absolutely
can get sick, and some children
die from it, and they can have
serious illnesses even if they aren't
hospitalized, " warned Dr. Veda
Johnson, a professor of general academics
and pediatrics at Emory University
School of Medicine, midway
through the meeting.
As the weeks and months of the
pandemic have stretched into years,
more districts are relying on arrangements
like DeKalb's to help them answer
the ever-increasing number of
questions and to boost confidence
that their decisions find the right balance
between keeping kids safe and
keeping them learning.
Cheryl Watson-Harris, the DeKalb
superintendent, decided to set up the
medical advisory committee shortly
after assuming the reins at the suburban
Atlanta district in summer 2020.
Formerly in the No. 2 spot in the
huge New York City schools, she'd
witnessed the summer surge there
and the accompanying death and
hospitalization of students and staff.
She knew that her new district,
"
with more than 93,000 students,
was heading toward a similar situation,
and determined she would get
access to the best information she
could.
" In a district like mine that is so incredibly
and beautifully diverse, including
diversity of thought, I would
never be able to please everybody.
So as a superintendent, I felt it was
very important to have as much of a
scientific and clear way of decisionmaking
so that I wouldn't have to
float in the wind based on politics or
just the varying perspectives on what
should be done, " she said. " And I am
an educator; I am not a medical professional,
nor am I a scientist in that
regard. "
From big to small decisions,
medical advisory panels weigh in
The pandemic has put superintendents
in a near-impossible situation.
They have had to wrestle with
difficult health-related decisions on
masking, mitigation protocols, " test
to stay, " and vaccination policy. And
they've had to do it while sorting
through the morass of conflicting
or unfeasible government recommendations
and getting controversial
new policies through U.S. school
systems' delicate and slow-moving
arrangement of local board governance.
It's
unclear just how many districts
have formally established a medical
advisory committee to help them
with those difficult tasks, but those
that have detail a number of decisions
that they've relied on their
18 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 20, 2021 | www.edweek.org
panels to help with.
Take Massachusetts, where recently
issued state guidance says
if schools hit a vaccination rate of
80 percent, they can move to make
masking optional. It seems clear and
direct, but there are a multitude of
questions local leaders have to process
before they can act on it, said
David Fleishman, the superintendent
of the Newton, Mass., district.
" Well, what do you do with that?
Who do you consult? What about
the 10-15 percent of kids who are not
vaccinated, is that a sound thing to
do? I'm not in a position to make that
judgment, and depending on your
community, you can imagine people
are going to feel differently, " Fleishman
said. He set up his medical advisory
group in February of this year.
The panels serve a different function
from the more typical community
advisory groups comprised of
parents, teachers, and other local
constituents. They're designed to
weigh in on research and districts'
mitigation plans with the kind of professional
knowledge laypeople don't
possess. They often have access to
the newest research on COVID-19
coupled with the analytical backgrounds
to make sense of it. Sometimes,
too, they're the ones who remind
school leaders that there are
questions about COVID-19 that just
don't have clear answers yet.
The committees don't actually set
policy themselves-that would bump
up against the governance and decisionmaking
powers of school boards
and superintendents. But they do
weigh in, often forcefully, and sometimes
their recommendations are
prescient.
In the Howard-Suamico, Wis., district,
for example, Superintendent
Damian LaCroix decided at the beginning
of the school year to make
wearing a mask a recommendation.
(His district's medical advisory committee
had urged a requirement.) But
mid-September, as rates increased,
LaCroix reverted back to a mask requirement.
Florida's
Orange County district's
medical advisory panel, begun before
the 2020-21 school year, helped
the district devise ways to keep band
practice and football games going,
and to troubleshoot small-seeming
but consequential details, like keeping
students hydrated when shared
water fountains are off limits, noted
Pam Gould, the vice chair of the
county school board.
In Orange County, she said, the
committee has also supplied critical
anecdotal trend data of its own.
Every day, its members are in hospitals,
clinics, and other settings
where they are directly observing
the course of the virus. That's important
because Florida this summer
changed how it collects and reports
COVID-related deaths, and how it
provides reports on school-based
infections, which has led to delays
in getting accurate figures to school
leaders.
" Without that boots-on-theground
perspective and access to
that data, we would not have the
information we need to make these
decisions, " said Gould.
In Newton, Fleishman says,
I felt it was very
important to
have as much
of a scientific
and clear way of
decisionmaking
so that I wouldn't
have to float in
the wind based
on politics or just
the varying
perspectives
on what should
be done.
Cheryl Watson-Harris,
superintendent of the DeKalb
County School District in
Georgia, set up a medical
advisory committee to help
inform COVID policy.
Dustin Chambers for Education Week
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - October 20, 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - October 20, 2021
