Schooling in the Time of COVID

It’s possible. It’s safe. These districts show how.

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Push was coming to shove. It was the third week of August, 2020, and public schools in Milford, Ohio, were scheduled to start the school year on the following Monday, August 24. District superintendent John Speiser checked in with the team that had spent a long summer working on the logistics of returning to school in person for the first time since March. 

“There were multiple factors, not just one, but transportation was definitely one. We just didn’t have it quite ready yet,” Speiser said. “We got feedback from our staff that they weren’t ready. An important thing about leadership, I think, is to trust your people that you work with and listen. We just went on down the line and the answers were, ‘We’re just not there yet.’”

Speiser called the school board president, and they agreed: The school year would be pushed back a week. The message went out to families on Friday afternoon, August 21. 

It wasn’t necessarily what parents wanted to hear. (I know—I was one of those parents.) One more week of wrangling childcare, one more week of keeping kids occupied amid restrictions on gatherings. But on August 31, as promised, buses trekked through neighborhoods. Teachers welcomed students. Classrooms looked a little different, and so did the schedule, but for the first time since mid-March, thousands of students in our suburban Cincinnati public school district experienced a relatively normal school day. After that last hiccup, Milford made it into mid-February without any district-wide closures. The closures that did happen were for snow, not COVID. In-person schooling in the middle of a pandemic was never going to be easy. But it is possible. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Patti Scriffiny

    Thanks for this article, which is trying to break the narrative down into something more nuanced than in other outlets.

    Last week was my first week in a year with all my (high school) students at once, instead of hybrid school. The energy uptick was palpable, and a little exhausting! I am relieved to have them there, and it will be a net improvement.

    But, it is worth mentioning that I spent time with counselors this week with concerns over the mental health of two different kids, despite the return to in-person learning. Not all kids made it back this week for a variety of reasons. We had structural and cultural problems before COVID. The status quo was far from perfect. COVID made it harder to gloss over some of those things, and I hope it made us much more aware. But not all the distress was caused by remote/hybrid schooling, so in-person school won't fix those things. My prayer is that we come back and grapple with what we've learned. I worry that we won't.

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    Martin Sulkanen

    Some $125B is being directed to education in the new COVID relief bill. Is most of this going to be used to outfit other schools to adopt similar plans?

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    Jesse.Wick

    Thanks for highlighting this. I teach special ed in a district outside of Nashville that used a similar approach with similar results. It has required some flexibility on our part, especially early in the year, but nothing insurmountable. So far I’ve only been quarantined once, and with vaccines rolling out, I hope we can keep most everybody in the building for the home stretch. It’s better for everyone.

    I don’t get the intransigent insistence of some of the unions about staying remote. On my end, teaching remotely was way more work than in person. I would far rather have the kids in the building. Some of that may be due to the population I serve and my being less tech savvy than younger colleagues though.

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  4. Kurt Von Fuchs

    I was hopeful last year that one bright spot in this pandemic would be that we as a country would actually figure out how important teachers are unfortunately that has turned out not to be the case

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    Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

    Eaton High School is about 600-700 students for high school total. We started the year a little later than normal, but opened in person 5x a week. About 10% of parents opted for distance learning. We had 1 practice day of hybrid learning each quarter. It's mostly gone fine, but once a week I was getting a form letter telling me someone tested positive, and if I wasn't notified it meant my child wasn't exposed.

    The school tried to spread desks AMAP, but the policy was if someone tested positive, then everyone one desk around them had to quarantine. The way you found out was they called you to the principal's office, one at a time. Womp, womp! So every time someone got called, people would mentally contact trace to see if they were within one desk of quarantine.

    My youngest (sophomore) was in an honors class. On Friday afternoon before Christmas break, at 1:45pm (school lets out at 2:20pm), a classmate from an earlier class got called to the office. 3 minutes later another student from the same class got called. My son looked at a friend of his and said "grab your gear, we're next". The teacher looked at him puzzled, but 2 minutes later, his friend was called down. Then he was. He grabbed his gear and told the teacher he wouldn't be returning for the end of the class. She said she'd email him.

    As I noted below, he and his friend started on JV, and played up on varsity. They missed two games (one that night), and not quite two weeks of practice due to being quarantined. But he only missed 25 minutes of school, and the teacher is impressed by how aware he is.

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    Josh

    One quote by an administrator strikes me especially.

    "At that point, my position was that we should wait, observe, and learn: Why should we take the risk with our people and jump into the unknown when we knew other districts were opening and we could learn from them?"

    This crisis will continue as long as people in charge refuse to take the moral responsibility to make a decision. My children's school made the hard and ultimately correct decision to do what was best for kids and open the school. Instead of navel gazing and clutching their pearls, the school reached out to me and other medical resources last spring to start working on a plan to open the school safely. We opened successfully and we have had no closures. Meanwhile, all of the public schools refused to open and made no effort to prepare and a large number of children are suffering the consequences.

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    Rick Henderson

    Great job, Rachael. Really well reported. I wonder if schools will adopt longer class periods if indeed we find that students learn more when they aren’t jostled around from subject to subject and room to room.

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    1. Shaybult

      There are plenty of schools that have been doing block schedules for years. My daughter had block schedules all through high school - and she graduated in 2016. Just pointing out that it's not a xovid phenomenon and there have already been studies on the impact (mostly positive).

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  8. Safety Cone

    The real problem has been making COVID the primary and singular risk that must be conquered. That stance always the ignored the science. Enough data was available last May that this was a culling disease of the old, and of those with compromised health. There should have been thoughtful gratitude, a bad thing for sure but not Ebola or SARS. A serious reckoning would acknowledge our unpreparedness, but that it wasn’t afflicting our young. It presented an infinitesimally small risk for kids. And only a tiny sub population of children exist for whom this would ever be more than a bad cold. The hysterical myopic stance of cringing fear surely lit a fire under Warp Speed but it also allowed policy to ignore other priorities more significant in children’s welfare.

    It’s all spilt milk now.
    The vaccine is here, the panic should end.

    Never too late to chart a new course.

    So write this year off, but by September the distancing, the hybrid-ing, the reduced occupancies will all be solutions to a problem that if it ever needed our singular attention it certainly does not now. Schools could easily return to pre COVID arrangements, though with so much angst, time and pride directed at the problem, I doubt many Schools will have the fortitude to push the plunger and dismantle the Bridge Over the River Covid.

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  9. Josh Low

    One frustration I've had with folks who are concerned about schools opening safely is that they feel like they are going completely into the unknown, rather than looking at what other places have done to open up safely. I was supportive of my school district's decision to start in distance in August with opening up later in the fall after they received face masks and air filters. Using those early months to see how opening worked in other places seemed fine to me. At this point the results are in and we should be opening schools more widely.

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    Carl M

    One thing that's been on my mind around the issue of schools reopening: what about the *desire* to return to work?

    I'm a psychotherapist. When things started shutting down, I started seeing patients by phone and video. After a few months, I began offering people the option of resuming in-person sessions - socially distanced, window open, HEPA filter running. About 1/3 took me up on this, and the percentage has gradually increased.

    I took this step because it improved the quality of the work I could do. I wanted to do it. There must be plenty of teachers who feel similarly (actually, I know a few) but are shut out of decisions being made at a higher level. In other words, there are teachers who find themselves in the same sorry state as many kids.

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