Coronavirus: The debate over reopening America’s schools

More than 28 million children across the US are now eligible to receive Covid-19 vaccinations, a step that could relieve anxiety for families, bring more kids back to schools, and slow the spread of the disease.

On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for kids between the ages of 5 and 11 after an advisory committee voted 14-0 to recommend the shots. The move comes after the Food and Drug Administration last week granted an emergency use authorization to the vaccine, concluding that its benefits outweigh the risks in young kids.

Jesse Hernandez, a senior cook at the University of California Riverside, started hearing rumors that layoffs were coming for the residence hall and dining staff just weeks after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic last March.

For a while, it seemed all talk.

Many schools across the US gambled on offering in-person classes in early August, even as their states were still battling uncontrolled spread of Covid-19.

In some of those schools, it hasn’t gone well.

Thousands of schools nationwide will not be reopening this fall. But in Las Vegas, the private K-12 Meadows School plans to use an artificial intelligence-powered thermal screening system to keep students safe as they return to classes.

The system will scan for signs that students have elevated temperatures — an indication they might have Covid-19 — as they enter buildings for their classes. If they’re flagged, the students will be asked to wait separately for about 10 minutes, and then get their temperature taken again. If the result is within a normal range, they’re cleared to start their day. If not, they’ll be sent home.

When Simon’s school in Maryland closed this spring due to the pandemic, his family didn’t know what to expect.

“Like every family who has a kid in school, there was a lot of uncertainty,” Simon’s mom, Laura LeBrun Hatcher, told Vox. “Everybody was in a ‘what’s going to happen’ moment.”

In mid-June, a sleepaway camp in Georgia opened for its first camp session of the summer, welcoming 363 campers and 234 staffers and trainees back for what was supposed to be a fun summer outdoors. The camp followed most of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines, including keeping campers in cabin groups as much as possible. But the campers were not required to wear masks for camp activities, including singing and cheering.

Six days in, a teenage staff member left camp after developing chills, and tested positive for Covid-19. Eventually, 49 percent of the campers, even children as young as age 6, were found to have been infected, while 19 percent of trainees and 56 percent of staff were infected. Notably, 26 percent of the cases reported no symptoms.

It’s almost August. School starts in many parts of the country in less than a month. And the coronavirus pandemic is still raging, with Florida hospitals full and 18 states setting single-day records last week.

The result is that many schools can’t open safely, and many districts have announced that they will be continuing remote learning into the fall. That’s left parents — many of whom are worried about their kids’ ability to learn online, not to mention their own ability to keep their jobs with no child care — scrambling for solutions.

The shift to remote learning this spring in response to the coronavirus pandemic was a disaster for many students and families — so much so that in recent weeks, many public health experts have called for schools to reopen if possible.

It’s increasingly clear, however, that in many communities, it isn’t possible — at least not yet. As cases of Covid-19 continue to skyrocket around the country, school districts from Los Angeles to Nashville to Houston have announced that they will begin the fall term in an online-only format.

The nation’s largest school district, New York City, said last week that students will be physically in classrooms only part time at the most in the fall. The nation’s second-largest, Los Angeles, announced Monday that it will be remote only. Meanwhile, day care centers around the country are closing their doors, unable to balance the higher operating costs and reduced enrollment that came with the coronavirus pandemic.

Experts have been warning for months that this pandemic would cause an unprecedented child care crisis in the United States, a country whose system for caring for children was already severely lacking before the public health emergency began. But policymakers devoted little attention to the problem, and for months this spring, parents were left to figure out, largely on their own, how to do their jobs with schools and day cares closed.

This spring, Kwesi Ablordeppey worked nights taking care of veterans at Holyoke Soldiers’ Home in Massachusetts, where at least 76 patients have died of Covid-19.

During the day, though, he has been the resident IT consultant at his home in Springfield — his two teenage daughters often needing his help troubleshooting problems with their Zoom lessons. Like most students around the country, the 10th-graders shifted to online learning earlier this year when their school closed to help slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Covid-19 is upending our lives and forcing us to make complex decisions with little information and conflicting guidance from authorities. Summer, typically the season of staying up late and popsicles in the park, offers no escape. Many of us are already turning to the fall, and the fate of schools.

What will we do with our kids? Can we really send them back to school? If we keep them at home, will they forget how to read? If we send them to school, what might be the consequence? We are living a nightmare, but this is where we are. The choices are high-stakes and plagued by uncertainty. Even thinking about them makes me sweat.

When Roy Romer took over as superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District after three terms as governor of Colorado in the 1990s, he faced a daunting challenge. The district was 150,000 desks short, forcing kids to use classrooms in shifts on chaotic year-round schedules. It didn’t work well, he says, especially for kids who were already behind and struggling with difficulties at home. He decided there was no alternative but to try to get the facilities students needed.

“We built 137 schools, made it available so every child could have a place in the classroom, and massively changed the course of instruction in LA,” Romer said.

There’s something wrong with America’s discussion about reopening.

Federal and state guidelines for reopening economies amid the coronavirus pandemic tend to frame recommendations in individual terms: This is what your school, restaurant, or bar should do to reopen safely: minimize capacity, stagger students or customers, encourage mask-wearing, and so on.

As colleges across the United States slowly unveil campus reopening plans, I keep thinking of something Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University and co-host of the Pivot podcast, told New York magazine in May: “At universities, we’re having constant meetings, and we’ve all adopted this narrative of ‘This is unprecedented, and we’re in this together,’ which is Latin for ‘We’re not lowering our prices, bitches.’”

Galloway’s statement might come off as crass to those unfamiliar with the financial model of most American colleges. But there’s a stark element of truth to it: Many institutions, particularly smaller schools that are dependent on tuition to survive, are wary of the possibility of low enrollment numbers and declining revenue if online classes continue into the fall.

Many parents have one thing on their minds: Will schools be open in the fall?

States and cities across the country are eager to get restaurants and salons reopened this month, but they’re equivocal as to whether full-time public education will be ready to resume in September.