How Will School Look In A Pandemic? Like A Hot Mess, Many Say.

ACROSS AMERICA — Fears about her students’ and colleagues’ health and well-being weave menacingly along as Staci Wright, a veteran special education teacher in Iowa who teaches some of her district’s most vulnerable high school students, contemplates the first day of “pandemic school.”

“My worst fear is that I will come to school with COVID and not know I have it, and one of my students who is immunocompromised will die, or my associate who is 10 years older will get it and die,” Wright tells Patch. “I worry about my kids who are emotionally fragile, who find out they have it and are sent home, only to find out someone who got it from them died.

“How do you pull them through that?”

Robert Redfield, the director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, acknowledges the trepidation of teachers like Wright, especially in coronavirus hot spots, but has amplified President Donald Trump’s call for a robust school reopening. Without in-person classes, Redfield says, children will falter — in their academic achievement, but also in social and in emotional development.

But even as Redfield champions the in-person return to school, the agency he heads added clarity to the question of whether children are susceptible to the virus and vectors of transmission. Nearly 600 kids attended a summer camp in Georgia where many of the precautions schools will follow were in place: they maintained the same small "cohort" groups throughout the camp, they physically distanced, the use of communal spaces was staggered, and surfaces were frequently wiped down with disinfectant.

The virus tore through the camp, infecting 260 of 597 kids. The number was probably much higher, the CDC said, because rest results were only available for 58 percent of the group.

RELATED: Nearly 300 Georgia YMCA Campers Test Positive For Coronavirus: CDC

The White House says teachers, mandatory reporters of child abuse, are critical to help children deal with the non-virus demons many face at home. In ordinary times, few teachers would disagree, Wright included, but there is nothing normal about the soon-to-start 2020-21 school year.

Wright says she tries to stay out of the politics looming over the reopening of school. She wasn’t among the Iowa teachers who wrote and mailed their obituaries to Gov. Kim Reynolds, who ordered all schools to reopen with at least 50 percent in-person classes — a curveball teachers didn’t expect after the governor’s administration told school districts to develop comprehensive return-to-learn plans that best fit their local needs.

But Wright and her husband are updating their wills, a task they’d meant to get to years ago but has taken on added urgency as she steels herself for the opening bell Aug. 24.

America’s public schools have never been through anything like the coronavirus pandemic. They scrambled to put together online learning plans after school abruptly halted in the spring, a process Wright describes as surreal in the first few days of the school shutdowns, when advice from education department leaders over back-to-back Zoom meetings changed by the hour.

Mixed Advice From Experts

Given the conflicting advice coming from the White House, what school will look like is about as clear as a Boolean Pythagorean Triples math equation to a kindergartner.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos says that “more and more studies show that kids are actually stoppers of the disease, and they don’t get it and transmit it themselves.” DeVos cited, in particular, a German study that hasn’t been peer-reviewed. Still in preprint review by the Lancet, it’s not yet proven as a guide to clinical practice.

Acknowledging the studies, White House Coronavirus Task Force medical coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx says that while children under 18 do appear to get less sick when they have COVID-19, some “suffer terrible consequences if they have underlying conditions.”

And the results of a South Korea study leave very much “an open question” whether U.S. children “spread the virus at the same as children over 10,” Birx said.

And Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s chief infectious disease expert, compared teachers to laboratory control groups in an “experiment” to determine how schools can reopen safely.

The “default situation,” Fauci said in an interview this week with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, is for students to return to in-person school, both for their social and emotional well-being, but also so working parents can avoid the “downstream ripple effects” of teaching their children at home.

But he acknowledged many questions remain unanswered.

“In many respects, unfortunately, though this may sound a little scary and harsh, and I don’t mean it to be that way, is that you’re going to be actually part of the experiment, of the learning curve, of what we need to know,” Fauci said.

“Because remember early on when we shut down the country, as it were, the schools were shut down,” he said. “So we don't know the full impact, we don't have the total database, of knowing what there is to expect.”

Fauci has served both Republican and Democratic administrations during his 36 years as director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases.

But he’s caught in political crosshairs as the Trump administration presses schools to return to in-person classes.

The president is “browbeating the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into becoming a cheerleader for his political agenda or trotting out his education secretary with absurd theories of how children actually block the virus,” Fairfax County Schools Superintendent Scott Braband told The Washington Post.

School Teacher Who Died Did Everything Right

Teachers saw their vulnerability in the June death of Kimberly Chavez Lopez Byrd, an Arizona teacher who caught COVID-19 while sharing an online classroom with two others for a couple of hours a day.

The three teachers did everything right.

They socially distanced. They wore masks and gloves. They used hand sanitizer at every turn — steps that ultimately weren’t armor enough against the coronavirus for the 61-year-old Byrd.

Some are taking early retirement from an industry already besieged by teacher shortages. Others are talking about taking leaves of absence. In the Phoenix area, a music teacher was fined $2,000 for resigning after he decided returning to a virtual classroom with other teachers wasn’t “worth the risk.”

As much as teachers want to stay out of the political wrangling, they’re under pressure in many states to make decisions “while knowingly risking lives,” Jennifer Serravallo, a New Jersey mother of two, former teacher, author, speaker and literacy consultant, wrote in a Facebook post that resonated with thousands of people.

“I really care about kids, and I really care about teachers,” Serravallo tells Patch. “I think the reopening of in-person classes is potentially harmful from a public health standpoint and a teaching and learning standpoint, so I felt like I had to speak up.”

Her state is one of many where teachers are at loggerheads with the governor over the planned Sept. 8 start of school.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy made his most emphatic statement yet Monday in support of in-person school, saying that “every education expert has confirmed that in-person learning is critical, and remote learning is only an acceptable substitute when absolutely necessary.”

New Jersey is in the “absolutely necessary” stage now, according to state teachers union head Marie Blistan, who tells Toms River Patch that Murphy’s view is “not plausible if you want to have health and safety.”

Halfway across the country in Illinois, schools are taking a different tack. Students in the suburban Chicago district of Plainfield will begin the year remotely, even as students in some neighboring districts will physically go back to classrooms.

“We sincerely hope no one anywhere gets sick or worse, but we must be concerned first and foremost about our own students, staff and families,” Superintendent Lane Abrell said at a recent school board meeting.

The split decision supporting remote classrooms was a relief to parent Dawn Bullock. She agrees with parents who favored in-person school that the option is better for their general well-being, but Bullock tells Plainfield Patch she’s not sure parents understand “how different the classrooms will be when students go back.”

“We know so much about this virus and yet so little. In about four months, we went from kids can’t get this virus to 10-year-olds and older can get the virus. We don’t know the long-term risks of COVID-19, either,” Bullock says. “I get that we all crave normalcy — I do, too — but I crave life more.”

Drop your finger anywhere on the U.S. map, and you’ll find similarly mashed-up plans aiming to balance public health and student needs, often under the glare of a political stage light.

‘It’s Just Baffling This Is What We’re Doing’

Back-to-school plans are taking every imaginable shape.

In some districts, plans call for four days of in-person school for every 10 days on online learning. In others, students may be required to show up every day for two hours of in-person instruction, then spend the rest of the day in an online classroom.

Or maybe kids go to school once a week and spend the other four days learning at their computers. To accommodate social distancing, schools like the one Wright teaches at are scrambling for off-campus classroom space.

In Florida, where coronavirus cases and deaths are surging, the reopening of school is tied up in court. Through their union, teachers are suing Gov. Ron DeSantis, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez, and state education officials to block what they called a “reckless and unsafe reopening” with compulsory face-to-face instruction.

And some states are taking a step that was practically unheard of in pre-pandemic times.

In Illinois, home-school associations are seeing an uptick in the number of parents planning to teach their children at home — some at the suggestion of the local school district.

Local schools in Iowa are also seeing their enrollments fall — and per-pupil state aid payments along with them — as parents turn to the state home-school law, which is at sharp odds with the governor’s requirement that students spend at least 50 percent of their time in classrooms.

Iowa has one of the most lax home-school laws in the country, allowing parents to teach their children at home without even so much as a mention to local school authorities.

“I've never heard of a public school encouraging families to home-school and to enroll in private school," Des Moines, Iowa, school Superintendent Tom Ahart said at a recent school board meeting. "That is not what our community needs. Our community needs their kids, our kids, to be in school five days a week. I absolutely believe that — but not at all costs.”

Serravallo says it’s not a matter of whether in-person school plans will have to be walked back but, rather, when that will happen.

She ticks off a variety of confounding issues that practically guarantee their failure, including the airborne spread of virus-laden droplets that growing research shows may extend farther than 6 feet; the natural inclination of children to migrate closer to one another, and the difficulty of keeping them a safe distance apart; and even what educators already know about the wildfire-like spread of the common cold, the flu and head lice.

“Lice don’t jump; they crawl from one head to another. Anyone who’s been a teacher knows that when one kid has lice, many do,” she says, drawing a parallel with the spread of the coronavirus through close contact.

And in her area in the Northeast, many schools are older and don’t have air conditioning — meaning fans that make classrooms comfortable could “blow the virus around.”

And, she asks, “Imagine how hard it will be for kids to wear a mask, soaking wet with saliva and sweat, for six hours?”

“Any way you look at it,” Serravallo says, “it’s just baffling that this is what we’re doing to get kids back in the classroom.”

Serravallo, who talks with educators around the world in her literacy education consulting work, calls on schools to cry uncle and concede there’s no safe way for in-person school to resume.

She points to the return-to-school plans approved by her colleagues in Hong Kong and Italy as models the United States should follow — basically, officials there said kids couldn’t return to the classroom until two full weeks passed with zero coronavirus cases.

In the United States, confirmed coronavirus cases have surpassed 4.5 million, with more than 153,000 deaths, the most by far of any country, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Some states have flattened the curve on new infections; others are still seeing wild spikes.

U.S. testing remains in disarray, meaning that even if a student, teacher or staff member tests positive for the coronavirus, that person might not self-isolate for days because of delays in getting test results.

For Some, The Schoolhouse Is A Safe Harbor

Education experts who say kids best thrive when they’re around their peers in a physical classroom aren’t wrong, Serravallo says, but they may be shortsighted in seeing the public school setting as the only way to meet their social needs.

She hasn’t taught public school for years, but when schools abruptly closed, she did a lot of teaching and led book clubs and writing groups. She dropped off books to families needing them, and she saw teachers doing book drop-offs at their students’ homes.

More innovation like that is possible to deliver educational resources to homebound learners, simply by deploying staff differently — for example, charging bus drivers idled during the pandemic with taking care of book and assignment drop-offs.

“Crisis teaching — this emergency spring into action, figure out how to build this plane as you’re flying it — is admittedly challenging for all concerned,” she says, “but there is a way to do online instruction better, provide social-emotional support, and figure out how to get hands-on materials so children aren’t on the screen all the time.

“It’s not as great as in-person for really young kids, but from a public health perspective, the solution is to provide smaller groups you can trust in neighbors and friends,” she says. “Parents, and even community groups like the YMCA, can figure out ways to provide socialization.”

Serravallo isn’t sending her children — a 7-year-old going into second grade and an 11-year-old going into sixth — back to their public school. She hasn’t seen a plan from her local district yet, but she plans to teach her children. She’s also offered to “spread the wealth” and help out her neighbors.

“I’m fortunate to be in a privileged position to set my work aside,” she says. “Not everyone can do that.”

Serravallo says that for some parents who can’t afford to take time away from work, sending their children off to school every day just as they did before the pandemic is the only workable solution.

The physical schoolhouse is a lifeline and safe harbor for the nearly 30 million U.S. schoolchildren who depend on free or reduced meals, or the estimated one-fifth of U.S. kids who live in violent households.

“No matter what schools decide, if every kid who can learn at home does, it leaves space for those who can’t,” she says.

The Question Isn’t Rhetorical

In Iowa, Wright is checking the days off her calendar, and checking her primal fear against what feels to her like an almost biological need to see her students again and give them the attention they need.

“In special ed especially, you’re serving not just the child, you’re serving the whole family,” she says. “If you get Johnny on your roster in the ninth grade, he stays on the whole four years. Those relationships are really intense and deep.”

But what if Johnny is infected and passes it on to the entire classroom? What if his mom or grandmother or baby sister gets COVID-19 and dies?

Wright’s question — “How do you pull them through that?” — isn’t rhetorical.

Patch editors Tom Davis in New Jersey and Abhinanda Datta in Illinois contributed reporting.

This article originally appeared on the Across America Patch