Rechercher dans ce blog

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Most Big School Districts Aren’t Ready to Reopen. Here’s Why. - The New York Times

As education leaders decide whether to reopen classrooms in the fall amid a raging pandemic, many are looking to a standard generally agreed upon among epidemiologists: To control community spread of the coronavirus, the average daily infection rate among those who are tested should not exceed 5 percent.

But of the nation’s 10 largest school districts, only New York City and Chicago appear to have achieved that public health goal, according to a New York Times analysis of city and county-level data.

Some of the biggest districts, like Miami-Dade County in Florida and Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas, are in counties that have recently reported positive test rates more than four times greater than the 5 percent threshold, the data shows.

The alarming spread of the virus has prompted a growing number of districts to announce they would rely on online instruction in the fall. The superintendent of the nation’s sixth-largest district, in Broward County, Fla., on Tuesday recommended full-time remote learning despite pressure from the state’s governor and President Trump. That followed an announcement on Monday that California’s two largest districts, Los Angeles and San Diego, will teach 100 percent online.

“I’m just super frustrated and really disappointed that our nation, our states and our communities have not exercised the discipline that they need in order to get the coronavirus under control,” said Robert W. Runcie, the Broward superintendent. “Now the futures of our young people are collateral damage from our inability to take this thing seriously.”

In recent days, Nashville, Atlanta, Arlington, Va., and Oakland, Calif., have also announced plans to start the school year remotely.

The broad national move to keep schools shuttered represents a deepening crisis for the nation’s tens of millions of schoolchildren, who are already falling behind academically and socially during the pandemic.

The decisions will also require working parents to continue to carry a heavy burden of ad hoc child care and home schooling, which is presenting families with impossible trade-offs.

Many European and Asian nations have been able to reopen schools safely after controlling the spread of the virus using tools such as widespread mask wearing, testing and contact tracing. Some American health experts believe that operating schools may be safer than generally acknowledged, given research suggesting that young children are less likely than adults to either contract the coronavirus or to spread it.

Credit...Carl Court/Getty Images

But the fact remains that the United States has failed to control the spread of the coronavirus, making it difficult to apply the reassuring news from abroad. Local and state leaders must now decide on the best course of action between two bad choices: either open school buildings and take the risk that educators, students and parents become ill, or keep them shuttered and hinder the development of tens of millions of children.

“These are like wartime decisions,” Mr. Runcie said. “This is literally like sending people into battle, and without appropriate tools.”

In the United States, districts are increasingly splitting into three groups: those that plan to teach online only, those that will allow families to choose between in-person and at-home instruction, and those offering a hybrid approach, with students spending some days in classrooms and some learning remotely.

Many large districts fall into the third category, although more are moving into the first as the virus continues to rage in their regions.

The 5 percent positive test rate was not developed specifically for schools, but it has emerged as a metric that many districts are considering when making plans.

The number comes from a general threshold established by public health experts, who say that a positive test rate of less than 10 percent, and ideally under 3 percent, is generally needed to control and suppress the spread of the virus in a community.

The World Health Organization encourages governments to reopen their economies only if their positivity rates are below 5 percent for at least two weeks. But the rate is a reliable indicator only when there is widespread testing, and many states are still not testing enough.

This week, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, a Democrat, announced that schools across the state could only reopen in September if they were in a region where the average daily infection rate was below 5 percent over a two-week period. None of the state’s 10 regions currently have an infection rate over 2 percent.

Jim Malatras, an aide to the governor, said the state “wanted to establish an objective number so schools can plan.”

Credit...Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press

In Florida, which has five of the nation’s largest school districts — Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough, Orange and Palm Beach Counties — officials have taken a different approach, aggressively pushing schools to resume operations.

Last week, the state’s education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, who was nominated by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, issued an emergency order asking districts to reopen “brick and mortar schools with the full panoply of services.”

But fully staffing the Broward school system to maintain social distancing between students and staff members would require at least $230 million in new funding, Mr. Runcie said, because of the need to hire thousands of additional teachers to reduce class sizes to an average of 14 students.

In California, where case numbers have been soaring, reopening schools has become a moving target. Just two and a half weeks ago, when Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed the state budget, it included strong language that discouraged schools from operating exclusively online.

But as cases climbed, concerns about too much online instruction quickly morphed into concerns about too little school safety. California is using the 5 percent positivity threshold as a guideline — one that has grown increasingly distant in many places. In Los Angeles County, home to the nation’s second-largest school district, the positivity rate has averaged 9 percent over the past seven days.

“We had hoped it wouldn’t get to this point,” said the Los Angeles schools superintendent, Austin Beutner. “All of a sudden, in the middle of June, everything just went through the roof.”

The decision by Los Angeles and San Diego to teach online is expected to be influential. Several other large districts in the state, including San Bernardino, Santa Clara and Oakland, will start the year remotely, and this week the public schools in Pasadena and the entirety of Stanislaus County in the Central Valley said they would delay in-person learning at least for the first weeks of August.

The Coronavirus Outbreak

  • Frequently Asked Questions

    Updated July 7, 2020

    • What are the symptoms of coronavirus?

      Common symptoms include fever, a dry cough, fatigue and difficulty breathing or shortness of breath. Some of these symptoms overlap with those of the flu, making detection difficult, but runny noses and stuffy sinuses are less common. The C.D.C. has also added chills, muscle pain, sore throat, headache and a new loss of the sense of taste or smell as symptoms to look out for. Most people fall ill five to seven days after exposure, but symptoms may appear in as few as two days or as many as 14 days.

    • Is it harder to exercise while wearing a mask?

      A commentary published this month on the website of the British Journal of Sports Medicine points out that covering your face during exercise “comes with issues of potential breathing restriction and discomfort” and requires “balancing benefits versus possible adverse events.” Masks do alter exercise, says Cedric X. Bryant, the president and chief science officer of the American Council on Exercise, a nonprofit organization that funds exercise research and certifies fitness professionals. “In my personal experience,” he says, “heart rates are higher at the same relative intensity when you wear a mask.” Some people also could experience lightheadedness during familiar workouts while masked, says Len Kravitz, a professor of exercise science at the University of New Mexico.

    • I’ve heard about a treatment called dexamethasone. Does it work?

      The steroid, dexamethasone, is the first treatment shown to reduce mortality in severely ill patients, according to scientists in Britain. The drug appears to reduce inflammation caused by the immune system, protecting the tissues. In the study, dexamethasone reduced deaths of patients on ventilators by one-third, and deaths of patients on oxygen by one-fifth.

    • What is pandemic paid leave?

      The coronavirus emergency relief package gives many American workers paid leave if they need to take time off because of the virus. It gives qualified workers two weeks of paid sick leave if they are ill, quarantined or seeking diagnosis or preventive care for coronavirus, or if they are caring for sick family members. It gives 12 weeks of paid leave to people caring for children whose schools are closed or whose child care provider is unavailable because of the coronavirus. It is the first time the United States has had widespread federally mandated paid leave, and includes people who don’t typically get such benefits, like part-time and gig economy workers. But the measure excludes at least half of private-sector workers, including those at the country’s largest employers, and gives small employers significant leeway to deny leave.

    • Does asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 happen?

      So far, the evidence seems to show it does. A widely cited paper published in April suggests that people are most infectious about two days before the onset of coronavirus symptoms and estimated that 44 percent of new infections were a result of transmission from people who were not yet showing symptoms. Recently, a top expert at the World Health Organization stated that transmission of the coronavirus by people who did not have symptoms was “very rare,” but she later walked back that statement.

    • What’s the risk of catching coronavirus from a surface?

      Touching contaminated objects and then infecting ourselves with the germs is not typically how the virus spreads. But it can happen. A number of studies of flu, rhinovirus, coronavirus and other microbes have shown that respiratory illnesses, including the new coronavirus, can spread by touching contaminated surfaces, particularly in places like day care centers, offices and hospitals. But a long chain of events has to happen for the disease to spread that way. The best way to protect yourself from coronavirus — whether it’s surface transmission or close human contact — is still social distancing, washing your hands, not touching your face and wearing masks.

    • How does blood type influence coronavirus?

      A study by European scientists is the first to document a strong statistical link between genetic variations and Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Having Type A blood was linked to a 50 percent increase in the likelihood that a patient would need to get oxygen or to go on a ventilator, according to the new study.

    • How can I protect myself while flying?

      If air travel is unavoidable, there are some steps you can take to protect yourself. Most important: Wash your hands often, and stop touching your face. If possible, choose a window seat. A study from Emory University found that during flu season, the safest place to sit on a plane is by a window, as people sitting in window seats had less contact with potentially sick people. Disinfect hard surfaces. When you get to your seat and your hands are clean, use disinfecting wipes to clean the hard surfaces at your seat like the head and arm rest, the seatbelt buckle, the remote, screen, seat back pocket and the tray table. If the seat is hard and nonporous or leather or pleather, you can wipe that down, too. (Using wipes on upholstered seats could lead to a wet seat and spreading of germs rather than killing them.)

    • What should I do if I feel sick?

      If you’ve been exposed to the coronavirus or think you have, and have a fever or symptoms like a cough or difficulty breathing, call a doctor. They should give you advice on whether you should be tested, how to get tested, and how to seek medical treatment without potentially infecting or exposing others.

Even in Orange County, Calif., where a cluster of conservative officials has aggressively pushed for reopening, larger districts have been hearing from teachers’ unions and nervously eyeing the local test positivity rate, which averaged 14.6 percent over the last seven days.

On Monday, the county’s Board of Education voted to recommend that schools reopen without social distancing and other precautions. But their recommendation is not binding, and on Tuesday, the Santa Ana Unified School District, the county’s second-largest, announced it would pivot from a planned hybrid reopening to distance learning.

“While we hope at some point to have our students attend our schools alongside their classmates and teachers, now is not the time,” the superintendent, Jerry Almendarez, said in a statement.

In the Northeast, parents and school leaders face a very different landscape. New York City, the nation’s largest district with some 1.1 million students and 1,800 schools, was center of the nation’s outbreak this spring. Now the city’s average positive test rate hovers around 2 percent — the lowest among the country’s largest school districts.

Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times

That leaves New York virtually alone — with the exception of Chicago, the third-largest district, where the city had a 5 percent positivity rate — in having the virus sufficiently under control to satisfy the public health threshold. Still, New York City will likely offer in-person instruction only one to three days a week when the school year begins in September.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has made the return to classrooms a priority, but he signaled greater flexibility on Tuesday amid a steep uptick in virus cases. The state’s guidelines require districts to offer in-person education five days a week, although parents could choose to have children learn online only.

The Houston Federation of Teachers, a union that represents 6,500 educators, had blasted the state’s plan for reopening campuses as “unacceptably vague and hardly adequate.” In a letter sent to the school district on Sunday, teachers asked to delay classroom instruction until the area had seen a decline in new cases for at least 14 days and achieved the positive test rate of less than 5 percent. That is far from the current landscape in greater Houston, which in recent days had a positive test rate of 13 percent.

“No one wants to be inside the school building more than teachers,” said Maxie Hollingsworth, a math teacher at a Houston elementary school. But Ms. Hollingsworth said she was not comfortable returning to her classroom and risking infection; her daughter has asthma and is at higher risk of complications from the coronavirus.

“The plain truth to me,” she said, “is it is immoral to reopen schools without the things we need in place.”

Texas officials are closely watching the national landscape, and it is possible they will modify the five-day-a-week requirement. The Houston Independent School District, the nation’s seventh largest with 209,000 students, is expected to make an announcement on Wednesday about plans for the academic year.

Rising virus counts in Clark County, Nev., are complicating plans for the nation’s fifth-largest district to provide 326,000 students with two days per week of in-person learning.

“The No. 1 aspect is safety,” said Linda Cavazos, the vice president of the district’s board of trustees. “We may be looking at having to change the entire thing to distance learning.”

Nery Martinez, who has two teenage children and was laid off from his job as a bartender at the Caesars Palace casino because of the pandemic, said he preferred online instruction, despite the financial impact that supervising his children’s learning would have on his family once he goes back to work.

“Face to face is a lot of risk,” he said. “I need to make the money to pay rent, but I want to be here to protect them.”

Contributing reporting were Shawn Hubler, Dan Levin, Sarah Mervosh and Mitch Smith.

Let's block ads! (Why?)



"Here" - Google News
July 15, 2020 at 07:53AM
https://ift.tt/309WKY2

Most Big School Districts Aren’t Ready to Reopen. Here’s Why. - The New York Times
"Here" - Google News
https://ift.tt/39D7kKR
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Search

Featured Post

A New Cafe, Cocktail Bar, Sports Pub, and Pickleball Destination Is Opening in Far South Austin - Eater Austin

takanadalagi.blogspot.com Two new sibling bars are opening in far south Austin sometime this year. There’s cafe and cocktail bar Drifters S...

Postingan Populer