The National Academies are recommending that the public schools open. I don’t know the details of their reasoning, since it would cost me $54 to order the publication, but there is a summary. I was boggled at their recommendations.
COVID-19 Precautions for Reopened Schools
The report also recommends schools and districts take the following precautions to protect staff and students:
- Provide surgical masks for all teachers and staff. All students and staff should wear face masks. Younger children may have difficulty using face masks, but schools should encourage compliance.
- Provide hand washing stations or hand sanitizer for all people who enter school buildings, minimize contact with shared surfaces, and increase regular surface cleaning.
- Limit large gatherings of students, such as during assemblies, in the cafeteria, and overcrowding at school entrances, possibly by staggering arrival times.
- Reorganize classrooms to enable physical distancing, such as by limiting class sizes or moving instruction to larger spaces. The report says cohorting, when a group of 10 students or less stay with the same staff as much as possible, is a promising strategy for physical distancing.
- Prioritize cleaning, ventilation, and air filtration, while recognizing that these alone will not sufficiently lower the risk of COVID-19 transmission.
- Create a culture of health and safety in every school, and enforce virus mitigation guidelines using positive approaches rather than by disciplining students.
The report says the cost of implementing these COVID-19 precautions will be very high, totaling approximately $1.8 million for a school district with eight school buildings and around 3,200 students. These costs are coming at a financially uncertain moment for many school districts, and could lead to funding shortfalls. While the size of the funding shortfall will depend on how well-resourced a school district is, many districts will be unable to afford implementing the entire suite of mitigation measures, potentially leaving students and staff in those districts at greater risk of infection.
Wow, let’s highlight the deep structural problems in the US educational system, shall we? They’re arguing that failure to open the schools would widen the inequities in our society, but $1.8 million for a typical school district, in a system stupidly funded by property taxes is going to fracture everything. The poor districts simply won’t be able to afford that, and the richer districts are often Republican suburbs where we can expect freak-outs over masks, among other things. This is a report straight out of fantasy-land. How “well-resourced” do they think our schools are?
Also, if they want to “create a culture of health and safety”, why are they opening schools at all? Everyone is just playing a grand game of chicken, careering towards catastrophe with a promise that they’ll swerve out of the way at the first sign of trouble. Playing chicken ain’t safety.