Find a way to make schools work
Published in the Boulder Daily Camera, 11/17/20
The COVID-19 era has taught us that there’s more to life than staying healthy. However, somewhere in the fog of COVID-19, we seem to have forgotten the importance of one of society’s most essential activities: the education of our children.
In March, the decisions to empty our schools to protect students and staff were prudent. We didn’t know how vulnerable children were to the disease nor how likely they were to transmit it to others. By September, we knew much more.
A Brown University-led study that now includes more than 5.8 million students and 830,000 staff (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/schools-arent-superspreaders/616669/) told us that K-12 schools were almost never the source of outbreaks to the community. While kids and teachers do show up at school with COVID-19, the evidence found “vanishingly few” examples of outbreaks in K-12 classrooms.
Additionally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gathered enough data by October to know that children under 15 were substantially less likely to die from COVID-19 than from the seasonal flu.
To sum it up, the science told us that K-12 kids attending school rarely cause community outbreaks, nor did being in school significantly increase the students’ health risks. You don’t need to hire a computer modeler to understand that this means that shutting down schools will have no meaningful impact on the spread of COVID-19 to the community, nor on the health of the children attending school.
Additionally, by September, the scientists started to tally the cost of closing schools on children’s intellectual and emotional development. What every parent of school age children knew by late March, the scientists confirmed was true – keeping schools closed to in-person learning came at great cost to children, particularly those in elementary schools. And the kids who suffered the most were the ones who could afford it the least. A published article authored by the editor of the journal, JAMA Pediatrics, estimates 5.53 million years of life could be lost as a result of school closures in the United States. Big ouch.
Knowing the above, you’d think that our schools would have opened in August with the wisdom and commitment to provide reasonably safe working environments for teachers and staff while they perform one of our nation’s most essential jobs – educating our children at school.
That’s not what happened in much of America. Instead, the school boards, including those in Boulder County, decided that the educational and emotional needs of students took a back seat to the requirement to all but ensure that students, teachers, and staff were put at virtually no risk of the disease while at school.
In August, when Boulder County COVID-19 case rates were low, the Boulder Valley and St. Vrain Valley school districts declared themselves unprepared for in-school instruction. They then spent two months developing quarantining rules with hair triggers for shutting down classes and schools whenever COVID-19 appears.
Today, a teacher or student at BVSD suspected of having COVID-19 causes the entire class to be quarantined for 14 days, even if the class has practiced social distancing and wore masks. Two positive tests in three classes shut down an entire school and force many students and staff into a 14-day quarantine.
The consequences of these rules are available on the BVSD web site. On Sunday, the site listed a total of 39 active confirmed COVID-19 cases across 35,000-plus BVSD students and staff. As a result of these 39 confirmed cases – a 0.11% confirmed infection rate – these quarantine rules have led to 1) a closure of seven schools as of last week and 2) a 14-day quarantine for 145 staff members and 887 students. Starting this week, all 56 BVSD schools will be closed to students through December.
By comparison, the countywide infection rate over the same 14-day period was 0.77% – seven times higher than the infection rates at BVSD schools. Given that, it seems like a fourth grade teacher might have one of the safest jobs in Boulder County during this wave of infections.
Shutting down the schools when they appear to be safer than the community at large makes no sense under any circumstances. If we believe that the education of children is essential, it’s obscene.
This is not a difficult problem to fix. Adjusting the quarantining rules to be more selective and increasing the use of testing can keep schools safely open to our children. Local school boards need to change these rules that, although developed with good intentions, are delivering disastrous results.
Step up, guys, and find a way to make schools work.
The COVID-19 era has taught us that there’s more to life than staying healthy. However, somewhere in the fog of COVID-19, we seem to have forgotten the importance of one of society’s most essential activities: the education of our children.
In March, the decisions to empty our schools to protect students and staff were prudent. We didn’t know how vulnerable children were to the disease nor how likely they were to transmit it to others. By September, we knew much more.
A Brown University-led study that now includes more than 5.8 million students and 830,000 staff (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/schools-arent-superspreaders/616669/) told us that K-12 schools were almost never the source of outbreaks to the community. While kids and teachers do show up at school with COVID-19, the evidence found “vanishingly few” examples of outbreaks in K-12 classrooms.
Additionally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gathered enough data by October to know that children under 15 were substantially less likely to die from COVID-19 than from the seasonal flu.
To sum it up, the science told us that K-12 kids attending school rarely cause community outbreaks, nor did being in school significantly increase the students’ health risks. You don’t need to hire a computer modeler to understand that this means that shutting down schools will have no meaningful impact on the spread of COVID-19 to the community, nor on the health of the children attending school.
Additionally, by September, the scientists started to tally the cost of closing schools on children’s intellectual and emotional development. What every parent of school age children knew by late March, the scientists confirmed was true – keeping schools closed to in-person learning came at great cost to children, particularly those in elementary schools. And the kids who suffered the most were the ones who could afford it the least. A published article authored by the editor of the journal, JAMA Pediatrics, estimates 5.53 million years of life could be lost as a result of school closures in the United States. Big ouch.
Knowing the above, you’d think that our schools would have opened in August with the wisdom and commitment to provide reasonably safe working environments for teachers and staff while they perform one of our nation’s most essential jobs – educating our children at school.
That’s not what happened in much of America. Instead, the school boards, including those in Boulder County, decided that the educational and emotional needs of students took a back seat to the requirement to all but ensure that students, teachers, and staff were put at virtually no risk of the disease while at school.
In August, when Boulder County COVID-19 case rates were low, the Boulder Valley and St. Vrain Valley school districts declared themselves unprepared for in-school instruction. They then spent two months developing quarantining rules with hair triggers for shutting down classes and schools whenever COVID-19 appears.
Today, a teacher or student at BVSD suspected of having COVID-19 causes the entire class to be quarantined for 14 days, even if the class has practiced social distancing and wore masks. Two positive tests in three classes shut down an entire school and force many students and staff into a 14-day quarantine.
The consequences of these rules are available on the BVSD web site. On Sunday, the site listed a total of 39 active confirmed COVID-19 cases across 35,000-plus BVSD students and staff. As a result of these 39 confirmed cases – a 0.11% confirmed infection rate – these quarantine rules have led to 1) a closure of seven schools as of last week and 2) a 14-day quarantine for 145 staff members and 887 students. Starting this week, all 56 BVSD schools will be closed to students through December.
By comparison, the countywide infection rate over the same 14-day period was 0.77% – seven times higher than the infection rates at BVSD schools. Given that, it seems like a fourth grade teacher might have one of the safest jobs in Boulder County during this wave of infections.
Shutting down the schools when they appear to be safer than the community at large makes no sense under any circumstances. If we believe that the education of children is essential, it’s obscene.
This is not a difficult problem to fix. Adjusting the quarantining rules to be more selective and increasing the use of testing can keep schools safely open to our children. Local school boards need to change these rules that, although developed with good intentions, are delivering disastrous results.
Step up, guys, and find a way to make schools work.