RUSSIAN DENVER / HORIZON
№26/1047 от 07.10.2020
e-mail: info@gorizont.com
Simply the best
20 cluding teachers’ unions, scared parents, and the colleges and universities that will someday enroll a portion of the 50 million students in the nation’s public K–12 schools—all have interests, some not easily avoided or ignored by a governor. Assigning a young, healthy high-school math teacher to substitute for a secondgrade reading teacher with chronic health conditions—or inviting idle recent college graduates to sign on as teaching assistants—might sound easy on paper; in reality, the regulations meant to ensure that adults in classrooms are appropriately trained and vetted to work with children are also impediments to making rapid personnel moves in a crisis. Without clear direction and substantial financial support from the state or federal agencies, the easiest course for school administrators is to say nothing. According to a survey in mid-June, 94 percent of K–12 superintendents weren’t ready to announce when or how their schools would reopen. Two things need to happen before students can go back to school: First, Americans and their elected representatives must consciously decide that children’s needs are worth accepting some additional risk. Second, states and communities must commit the money and effort necessary to reinvent education under radically changed circumstances. Even in states where case counts have plunged, doing what’s right for children will require a massive civic mobilization. The problem isn’t that policy makers—
many of them parents too—don’t know what families are going through. It’s that, fundamentally, the way public officials thought about the consequences of this crisis was flawed. Early in the pandemic, authorities viewed the closure of schools as essential to preventing the spread of a deadly new disease. The federal government and the states have no firm plans for restarting school in August and September because they had no such plans in February and March; public officials simply didn’t classify education as a crucial form of infrastructure in need of protection. The Department of Homeland Security identifies 16 infrastructure sectors as «so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction, would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety.» Those sectors include agriculture, communications, electricity, financial services, health care, transportation systems, water, and even dams. The official list guides how local, state and federal homeland-security experts spend their time and resources. For each sector, a major federal agency is in charge of determining the best way to prevent essential functions from harm and support their recovery if necessary. (Water security falls under the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, and financial services under the Department of the Treasury.) Bars are not on the list of essential sectors. But neither are schools. The lingering uncertainty about whether in-person
education will resume isn’t the result of malfeasance, but utter nonfeasance. Four months of stay-at-home orders have proved that, if schools are unavailable, a city cannot work, a community cannot function, a nation cannot safeguard itself. That the federal government deemed schools a potential health threat to be shut down during a pandemic—but not an essential service—may reflect the American view of education as a state and local matter. More likely, the omission reflects a lack of imagination. In March, few foresaw that the shutdown measures would go on this long, and almost everyone assumed that the U.S. government in particular would spend the time far more wisely. While Americans closed down their businesses in the name of flattening the curve, President Donald Trump pitted states against one another and drummed up opposition to public-health guidance. Had he done his job properly, the governors who spent March and April trying to outbid one another for masks and ventilators could have devoted more energy to education. Had Trump implored his supporters to wear masks and be patient, case counts might well be dropping across the country. Instead, as many states experience an upswing in cases, plans to remake the education system—contemplating changes of a magnitude that would ordinarily take years to implement—are just now being written. In my work in security and disaster management, I have advised a number of
public and private entities about how to move forward during a pandemic. I am currently part of a consulting team advising the state of Massachusetts, where I live, specifically on its school reentry plans. As my children sleep in day after day, and their memories of their most recent in-person classes grow hazier and hazier, I am desperate for my state to reopen schools and hope it gets the details right. Massachusetts seems to have weathered one of the nation’s worst outbreaks reasonably well; infection rates have declined to the point that—with protocols in place to protect children, teachers, and staff—students might be able to go back to at least some normal classes. The harm they face from staying home is enormous. I would accept additional risk for the good of my three teenagers, and children younger than them would benefit even more from being in school. The notion that schools can’t open again to students until a vaccine arrives should not be the guiding moral standard. The vaccine may never come, and the many other nations that handled their outbreaks far more successfully than the U.S. can show Americans what to do and what not to do when reopening schools. Americans must learn to manage around the virus, to mitigate its potential for spread. Fall isn’t far off, and school systems nationwide need to make up for lost time. A bar doesn’t need a groundswell of public support to reopen, but schools most certainly do.
The School Reopeners Think America Is Forgetting About Kids Olga Khazan Jennifer Nuzzo hopes to send her kids to camp this summer, but like many parents, she’s a little worried about it. The camp she selected for her son requires kids to wear masks, and she thinks he might get overheated. Other than that, though, she sees little problem with kids attending an outdoor camp this summer. And the same goes for schools—most districts haven’t yet announced when and how they’ll resume in-person classes, but she thinks they should open up in the fall. Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University and a leading expert on the coronavirus, is one of a number of scientists vocally advocating for summer camps and schools to reopen, with some precautions, even if there’s no vaccine yet. «The idea of keeping kids at home, and having parents work at home, for however long, until we get a vaccine,» Nuzzo told me, «it seems to me that there are harms that kids are experiencing that we are not accounting for.» Some public-health experts say that having in-person classes in a few months is still too risky, citing countries like Israel and China that have had to shut down schools after opening them up. The experts who disagree—call them the «reopeners»—aren’t blind to the dangers of the virus, but they believe the hazards should be weighed against the costs of changing children’s lives so dramatically. This message likely has a friendly ear in many parents, especially those who have been Zooming into meetings while chasing after toddlers. Even parents who have been enjoying the extra family time might be ready for a break. I recently talked by phone with a friend, a father of two, and could hardly make out what he was saying, because he was yawning so much and
slurring his words. He was exhausted from homeschooling all day, he said. (I don’t have children, a decision some parents constantly berated me for—until they suspiciously stopped in March.) But beyond relieving exasperated parents, in-person schooling confers all sorts of societal benefits that students are currently missing. With schools shifted to distance learning, 7 million kids have been stuck at home without the internet they need for their Zoom lessons. Research suggests that some low-income students are losing a year of academic gains. School feeds kids; it socializes them. There are good schools and bad schools, but even the worst ones tend to be better than no school at all. Apart from the benefits of school, the reopeners point to evidence that children are less affected by the coronavirus than adults are. A recent study in Nature found that children and teenagers are only about half as likely as adults to get infected with the coronavirus. Though the long-term implications of a mild case of COVID-19 are still not known, when kids do get infected, only 21 percent show symptoms, compared with 69 percent of infected adults over 70. In May, some parents worried for their kids’ safety when about 100 children in the U.S. came down with a delayed, severe reaction to the coronavirus called «multisystem inflammatory syndrome.» Reopeners say this disorder has been so rare as to be worth the risk. While more than 120,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, only about two dozen deaths have been children under the age of 15. Meanwhile, more than 1,700 children die in the United States each year from child abuse and neglect—two issues that have been harder for children to report while they haven’t been seeing teachers regularly. A major reason schools are reluctant to reopen isn’t just the potential danger to children, but also that to the teachers and
parents whom students might infect. Just how likely children are to transmit the virus is still an area of debate, and the stakes are high: If kids are found to pass the virus easily, even though they rarely show symptoms, they might become major spreaders of coronavirus to their communities. According to Nuzzo, and some studies, there’s little evidence that infected kids are as contagious as infected adults. However, Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, believes that opening up schools and day cares would be risky, pointing to other studies suggesting that kids might indeed serve as vectors, passing the virus onto others in their family as they do with stomach bugs and sniffles. «I haven’t seen enough evidence to convince me that children are less involved in the transmission of COVID-19,» Shaman told me in an email. Most summer camps have likely already decided whether to open this year. But to the reopening crowd, the call on camp is even easier, since research suggests that the virus is not transmitted as easily outdoors as it is indoors. If camps avoid crowded indoor bunks and dining halls, as well as the potentially contagious toilet clouds in the bathrooms, campers might not have much to worry about. «It’s logical that schools should open in the fall and summer camps, if it’s still possible, should open,» Daniel Halperin, an adjunct professor of public health at the University of North Carolina, told me. «I’m worried about my daughter driving, but I wouldn’t keep her home because there’s a one-out-of-a-million chance that she’s gonna die in a car accident.» I pointed out to Halperin that Israel recently reopened schools and then promptly had to close them again when the virus ripped through classrooms. Four children in Israel have developed COVID-19 related heart problems. Halperin—who wasn’t
aware of the four children when I interviewed him—seemed unfazed. After all, those infections are cases, he said. Given how rare COVID-19 deaths are in children, «what’s the likelihood that would actually lead to one death in a child?» Such rhetoric can sound startling at a time when lots of people—health experts in particular—are being cautious about a return to normalcy. And some are less sanguine about just throwing open the schoolhouse gates. In an opinion article he co-authored for <CT:OBLIQUE>JAMA<CT:>, Josh Sharfstein, the vice dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, acknowledged the «urgency» of reopening schools, but said it should be done with some modifications. Kids should be kept six feet apart, drop-offs should be staggered, common areas should be closed, and many extracurriculars should be canceled. Oh yeah, and have your teen wear a mask, won’t you? Sharfstein told me he envisions that, to facilitate social distancing, «kids will be in school one day, out of school the next day; in school one week, out of school the next week.» And even the reopeners want schools to proceed with caution. Teachers who are older or immunocompromised should be given the option to work in different jobs for the time being, several of them told me. Perhaps reopening could start with younger children, who have a greater need for in-person instruction. Maybe schools in hot-spot areas should remain closed. And if kids start getting sick, Jeffrey Klausner, an epidemiologist at UCLA and a reopener, suggested «hitting pause» on school for a few weeks. The decision of whether to open up schools is going to take a clear-eyed assessment of all the risks. The way Nuzzo sees it, we have to think about not only the societal health benefits of keeping a generation of