Education Week - December 9, 2020 - 4

No More Snow Days, Thanks to Remote Learning?
Not Everyone Agrees
By Mark Lieberman
Some school districts and states
in recent years have abandoned or
rethought snow days and allowed instruction to continue virtually when
inclement weather shuts down school
buildings. The proliferation of remote
learning during COVID-19 has accelerated that trend in states like Massachusetts and New York, where schools
now have the option to continue snow
days or skip them this year.
Thirty-nine percent of principals
and district leaders say their district
has converted snow days to remote
learning days, and another 32 percent
say their districts are considering the
change, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey conducted earlier this month.
But some holdouts remain.
The Mahwah school district in New
Jersey last month made a splash na-

tionwide when it announced that it
would continue to " close " school as
usual this year during snow events,
even if students are already at home
due to COVID-19.
The district at the foot of the
Watchung mountains typically has
between three and five snow days
in its calendar to use when winter
weather strikes. Teachers traditionally encourage elementary students
to do fun activities at home that superstitiously make snowfall more
likely, such as wearing pajamas inside out, flushing ice cubes down the
toilet, and placing a spoon beneath
pillows while sleeping.
" The history of snow days is
steeped within our culture, " said Lisa
Rizzo, the district's director of special
services.
So when administrators began
discussing how to approach the cold
weather season amid a pandemic

Has your district changed its
approach to snow days/bad weather
days as a result of its experience
with remote learning
during COVID?

20%

No (Students will continue to get days off.)
z

z Not yet, but we are considering eliminating
snow days/bad weather days and replacing
them with remote learning days.

39%
32

z Yes (Snow/bad weather days will now be
remote learning days.)

N/A (We live in a climate where snow days/
z
bad weather days are never required.)

NOTE: Results show responses from principals and district leaders.
SOURCE: EdWeek Research Center survey, 2020

WHAT THE

RESEARCH SAYS

How should schools quarantine students who
have been exposed to coronavirus?

quarantines are intended to encourage those
who are asked to isolate to do so.

Too Many Days Lost?
By Sarah D. Sparks
The answer to this question has been a
moving target as research on COVID-19
evolves. The Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention last month tweaked its own
guidelines to districts-which most states
have mirrored in their own guidance-to
recommend that those who have had close
contact with anyone infected with COVID19 quarantine themselves for 7 to 10 days
after their exposure, down from the prior
recommendation of 14 days.
The move suggests different ways districts
could isolate students based on exposure,
symptoms, or a positive COVID-19 test. But
in states where coronavirus tests remain hard
to come by, quarantines are based either on
a standard number of days, or days since
the start of symptoms. Some districts, such
as In Jackson County, Miss., for example,
have even made quarantining voluntary for
students who were exposed but had not had a
positive coronavirus test.
Quarantines work by preventing sick people
from coming into contact with others during
the period in which they are infectious-a time
that for the coronavirus can begin two days
before symptoms start and stretch to more than
a month in some cases. Many state and district
isolation procedures call for students to be

isolated at least 10 days after symptoms start,
or after a positive test, and until symptoms
improve and the student has gone 24 hours
without fever, without using medicine that
reduces fever.
However, the CDC opted to lower the
number of isolation days in part because on
average, infected people begin to develop
symptoms by around the fifth day after being
exposed, and studies have found more than
97 percent of those who show symptoms
do so by day 11. But, studies of pediatric and
adult patients have found that even the most
common COVID-19 symptoms are far less
common among children than adults.

Children's Symptoms Differ
One study found while 71 percent of adults
with coronavirus had fever above 100.4
degrees, only 56 percent of the infected
children studied had a fever. And, while 80
percent of the adults had a cough, that was the
case for 54 percent of children. The pattern was
similar when it came to shortness of breath,
which affected 43 percent of adults and only 13
percent of the children in the study.
That has meant symptom-based quarantines
are less likely to capture child infections, and
day-based quarantines have been more likely to
keep healthy students home. Fewer and shorter

Since the start of the school year, some 2,000
students in the Licking Valley Local Schools in
Newark, Ohio, have been quarantined because
they had come within six feet of someone
who tested positive with the coronavirus for
15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period.
For a high school student who typically
moves through seven to eight classes a day,
Superintendent David Hile said, 15 students
could end up as close contacts on average. Each
of those students had to go into isolation and
take virtual classes for 14 days.
" We've been a 1-to-1 computing district
with Chromebooks for years ... so it's been a
fairly seamless transition for us, but learning is
still best in a classroom with your teacher and
peers. It's not nearly as effective when it's all
remote, " Hile said. " We had one student who
was a contact three times; she lost six weeks of
schooling and never tested positive. "
That student wasn't alone. After tracking
outbreaks, the Licking County health
department found none of the quarantined
students developed COVID-19 themselves
as a result of their exposure. Moreover, while
the district had to shut down just before
Thanksgiving after a dozen staff members
caught COVID-19, all the infections were traced
back to social activities outside the school-
church, family activities, and so on-and no
staff members have been infected by students
since the start of the pandemic, Hile said.

As a result, the county health department and
the district opted to change their quarantine
procedures, so that a student will no longer
be considered in need of quarantine if he or
she stayed at least three feet from the infected
person and both wore masks. Hile said the
change not only helps to keep students in class
but has motivated students and parents to wear
masks in school.

An Exception for Mask-Wearing
Missouri is testing the same option
statewide, with Gov. Mike Parson last month
asking districts to consider not quarantining
close contacts if they and the infected person
were both wearing masks.
Oklahoma has not changed who is
quarantined but is experimenting with how.
Through Dec. 23, the state health department
is allowing districts to provide " in-school
quarantines, " in which a whole class which
would have been sent home based on contact
with an infected student can continue to be
taught in-person, while being kept only within
their cohort, masked and socially distanced,
and tested frequently. Any student who tests
positive for the coronavirus would go into full
quarantine. Mustang public schools, the first
district to volunteer for the pilot, noted that
it has had only 1.24 percent of quarantined
students later turn up positive for COVID-19.
Experts recommended that if districts
choose to experiment with a new quarantine
procedure, they should work closely with their
local health department, and set out clear ways
to track infection spread in the schools.

From remote learning for young children to playground infection risks, schooling under the pandemic is raising a lot of questions for teachers and education leaders. This new research column aims to help readers
understand what the research says-and doesn't say-about our new context for learning. If you have a question, please send it to ssparks@educationweek.org.

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Education Week - December 9, 2020

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