Education Week - November 18, 2020 - 8

Getting Schools Open:
A No-Win Decision as Virus Cases Surge
you, over here, you can have that'? "
Turner said. " There are so many layers of complexity to this. "

By Catherine Gewertz &
Stephen Sawchuk

Cautious Stance
The Montgomery County, Md.,
school district, one of the nation's
largest, with 163,000 students, is

Risk of Transmission

Mark Lennihan/AP

District leaders are on the hot seat
like never before. As coronavirus
cases surge again in most states, they
are faced with letting students come
into classrooms, or requiring that
they stay home to learn. It's a no-win
decision, and they're making it with
drastically imperfect information.
If superintendents and school
boards stick with-or retreat to-remote-only instruction, they risk the
wrath of parents who want their kids
back in classrooms. If they push forward with face-to-face learning, they
could be criticized for gambling with
the health of students, staff, and their
families.
Interviews with superintendents
show that as they are wrestling with
this unenviable choice, they are not
only weighing their local health metrics, but managing the many internal
mechanics that shape a safe return to
school: The cost and procedures of
new safety protocols, labor contracts
that need to be renegotiated, and the
staffing jigsaw puzzle that buckles
if scores of teachers refuse to enter
school buildings.
" There are so many pieces to these
decisions, " said Kimberley Cantu, the
superintendent of the Mansfield Independent School District, which serves
35,000 students near Dallas. " People
get frustrated. Parents might not truly
understand. They might know some
of the parts we deal with, but not all
the parts. "
Increasingly, the debate is also taking on an equity subtext, as superintendents struggle with opinions about
reopening that frequently cleave
along lines of wealth, politics, race,
and privilege.
Take Shelby County schools in
Tennessee. About 73 percent of
the Memphis-area district's more
than 100,000 students are Black;
COVID-19 hit the city's Black community hard. And with COVID rates
outpacing the local health department's recommendations for returning, Superintendent Joris Ray
has bucked the regional trend: He's
refused so far to return to in-person
learning.
" I just can't take that gamble in
a school district where some of my
parents don't have access to health
insurance, " he said. " I can't take it
when the students here stay in multigenerational homes with a square
footage of no more than 900 square
feet.
" Sometimes parents look at this
from a middle-class lens, and they
negate some of the other risk factors
that our children have. "

a case study of the complexity of
school districts' reopening decisions, and the difficulty of judging whether districts are being too
cautious, taking too much risk, or
playing it just right. Currently, it's
weighing a phased return to faceto-face instruction in January.
Nearly everywhere in the U.S., local
districts choose which health metrics
to base their safe return decisions on.
Frequently, they follow their local
health department's data, and two
of the most common indicators they
watch are:
* the number of new cases and
* the percent of COVID-19 tests that
are positive.
But some health departments use
7-day averages for those metrics,
while others use 14-day averages.
Each decides which levels of those
indicators constitute low, medium or
high risk for reopening. Federal and
international standards vary, too: The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses a 14-day average for new
cases and test positivity in its school
guidance, defining five zones of risk,
from green to red. But the Harvard
Global Health Initiative and Johns
Hopkins University, two leading
COVID-19 trackers, use 7-day averages.
In Montgomery County, the
health department uses a 14-day average for test positivity, so that can
be mapped onto the CDC's scale.
As of Nov. 3, it showed 3.1 percent
of COVID-19 tests were positive,
putting the county in the CDC's
" lower " risk zone. The World Health
Organization, last spring, had advised governments to consider reopening only when their test positivity rates were 5 percent or lower
for two weeks.
Montgomery County uses a 7-day
average on its other key metric, new
cases per 100,000 people, so that

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

can't be judged against the CDC's
scale. As of Nov. 3, the county reported 13.1 new cases per 100,000
people in the most recent week. Set
onto the Harvard Global Health Initiative's scale of risk, which uses that
same metric, Montgomery County's
new-case rate is relatively high, a
level 3 of 4.
The districts' data points have created a Rorschach test for people on
all sides of the school reopening debate: everyone interprets the data,
and their attendant risks, differently.
That's meant parallel rivers of criticism and support for the district's
decision to stay in all-remote mode.
A recent exchange in a local, private
parents' group on Facebook illustrates this division.
" It's a deadly disease, " said one parent. " We're in the middle of a crisis
and people want to go back to normal
when that isn't possible. " Another parent returned fire: " The crisis is that
kids can be safe in schools, but MCPS
pretends that is not the case. "
Derek Turner, who leads the district's reopening plans as chief of
operations and innovation, defends
its decision to stay remote, especially
if the case count continues to rise.
Schools might have to toggle back
and forth between in-person and
remote learning, which could be as
disruptive to some families as working in all-remote mode is to others.
The district is also concerned about
equity. Within its 500-square-mile
area, some ZIP codes have seven
new cases per 100,000 people and
some have 25, with lower case counts
clustering in lower-poverty zones, he
noted. But that doesn't mean it's feasible to reopen in-person in areas with
the lowest risk.
" How would that be from an equity
perspective if we said, 'You, you're
in poverty, and you don't get to
have that in-person experience, but

Students line up to have
their temperature checked
before entering PS 179 in the
Brooklyn borough of New
York in late September. New
York City was one of the first
big-city districts to return
students for some in-person
learning during the
coronavirus pandemic.

For some, the questions about metrics obscure a key issue: Studies so
far suggest that schools are not major
focal points for COVID-19 transmission, and there's an emerging consensus that children under age 10 are less
likely to contract the virus-though
those that do can still pass it on. Many
argue that with the right health precautions, including mask-wearing,
social distancing, and contact tracing
protocols, they can reopen safely.
Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the dean of Brown
University's School of Public Health,
encouraged schools to be bolder about
reopening, even as they carefully track
their local virus metrics. Too often, he
said, fear is trumping science in schoolreopening decisions.
" What we know right now is that
schools don't appear to be a place
where there is a lot of spread happening, " Jha said in an interview with
Education Week.
But, in a vivid illustration of the division and emotion on the issue, Jha's
comments came in for both praise
and attack on social media. " Shame
on you, " one poster said on EdWeek's
Facebook page. In a Twitter thread
about the interview, one person ventured that schools " could be more
aggressive " about reopening, while
another said: " People who say these
things are not in the classroom. "
Some districts still operating in allremote mode, though, have transmission rates that are, by almost any
available measure, extremely low. San
Francisco is a case in point: Mayor
London Breed has excoriated the
city's school district for not bringing
students back to classrooms, when
its health metrics put it in the state's
lowest-risk category.
But there are also districts with far
higher case numbers potentially considering a return to in-person learning. In the big Clark County, Nev.,
district, which includes Las Vegas, the
number of new cases recently surged
past 200 new cases per 100,000 people and a positive-test rate of nearly
9 percent-far exceeding its adopted
guidelines for returning to school.
Fermin Leguen, the acting chief
health officer for the Southern Nevada
Health District, who has been advising
the Clark County district on reopening,
acknowledged at its Oct. 22 meeting
that metrics were unlikely to improve
anytime soon, and said he would support a decision to bring some students
back, citing the detrimental effects to
student learning and socialization.
Such a plan would depend on strict
safety protocols and COVID-19 testing of employees, he said. (The district
said it will consider transition plans at
a Nov. 12 board meeting, after EducaCONTINUED ON PAGE 10 >

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Education Week - November 18, 2020

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