Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

Yesterday the CDC issued a report urging public schools to reopen with certain provisos. As reported in an article by Roni Caryn Rabin in the NYTimes:

On Tuesday, federal health officials weighed in with a call for returning children to the nation’s classrooms as soon as possible, saying the “preponderance of available evidence” indicates that in-person instruction can be carried out safely as long as mask-wearing and social distancing are maintained.

But local officials also must be willing to impose limits on other settings — like indoor dining, bars or poorly ventilated gyms — in order to keep infection rates low in the community at large, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionwrote in the journal JAMA.

School administrators must limit risky activities such as indoor sports, they added. “It’s not going to be safe to have a pizza party with a group of students,” Margaret Honein, a member of the C.D.C.’s Covid-19 emergency response team and the first author of article, said in an interview. “But outdoor cross-country, where distance can be maintained, might be fine to continue.”

The key caveat to reopening is the maintenance of mask-wearing and social distancing… two mandates that many politicians and some parents resist. But at least those are two areas schools have some control over and can enforce. The other caveat, that “…local officials also must be willing to impose limits on other settings — like indoor dining, bars or poorly ventilated gyms” is beyond the control of schools and teachers. The third caveat, that administrators “…limit risky activities such as indoor sports” is a hybrid: schools CAN control things like pizza parties and cupcake exchanges that happen in their facilities, but they could find themselves in a bind if the Governors in their state want to have ice hockey matches and basketball games…. and football games, attended by thousands in some parts of the country, are hardly equivalent to “outdoor cross country”.

Interestingly, the article references a USA Today article union leader Randi Weingarten and Rajiv Shah, the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, who fully support the reopening of schools with or without vaccines as long as there is “…Widespread, regular testing… combined with the right steps and federal support “. The rationale for their support conditioned on those caveats is “…to restore free school meals, give children a social outlet, and provide myriad school-based services that are vital to low-income children.” From the teachers’ union’s perspective the social needs of the children are as important as the academic needs… and more important than “the economy”, which seemed to be the most important reason for opening schools under the Trump administration.

Emily Oster, an economic professor at Brown and an advocate for conditionally reopening schools, underscores the need for communities to make some sacrifices in the name of school reopening:

“Prioritizing schools is going to mean limiting some of those other activities, and deciding that we want to undertake some of those sacrifices to keep schools open, because we’ve decided as a society that schools are important relative to other things,” Dr. Oster said.