Lesson of the Day: ‘The C.D.C. Has New School Guidelines. Here’s What You Need to Know.’ - The New York Times

In this lesson, students will learn what the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mean for the nation’s schools and their own. Then, they will be invited to hold a classroom debate on school reopenings.

Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021.

Lesson Overview

Featured Article: “The C.D.C. Has New School Guidelines. Here’s What You Need to Know.” by Dana Goldstein and Kate Taylor

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines on Feb. 12 that urged K-12 schools be reopened and that offered a comprehensive, science-based plan for doing so speedily. The agency was aiming to resolve an urgent debate roiling communities across the nation.

About half of the nation’s students are still learning from home. A majority of districts are offering at least some in-person learning, and more are trying to reopen this spring, but many are offering classroom instruction to students for just a few hours a day or a few days a week.

It has become increasingly evident that remote learning is a challenge — both academically and emotionally.

In this lesson, you will learn about the C.D.C.’s new guidelines for reopening schools and what they mean for the nation’s schools and your own. In Going Further activities, we invite you to keep exploring the issues and then to engage in a whole-class debate.

Warm Up

What has been your school experience during the coronavirus pandemic? Is your school in favor of in-person instruction? If it isn’t, do you think it should be?

Do you think all schools should be reopened? Or, out of an abundance of caution, should many, if not most, remain closed?

Before reading the article, take a few minutes to reflect upon your schooling experience during the pandemic. Then respond to the following prompts:

• What is your school experience like now? Is your school in-person, remote-only or a hybrid mix? If school includes an in-person component, what is being done to ensure the safety of students, teachers and other school staff members? Do you, your peers and your teachers feel safe? If your school is remote-only, what is it doing both to build a sense of community and to ensure that all students can be successful in a virtual environment?

• How has your school experience this past year affected you? Academically? Emotionally? Socially? How do you think other students — youths at different grade levels or with different learning needs — have been affected?

• Over all, do you approve of your school’s approach to instruction during the pandemic? Does your family? Your peers? If the decision were up to you, would you continue with your school’s current approach, or would you make changes? Explain your thinking.

Questions for Writing and Discussion

Read the article, then answer the following questions:

1. Dana Goldstein and Kate Taylor write that the C.D.C.’s recommendations “attempt to carve a middle path between people who want classrooms to reopen immediately and those teachers and parents who remain reluctant to return to in-person instruction before widespread vaccination.” What do they mean by “carve a middle path”? Do you think that the new guidelines will satisfy either side in the debate over school reopenings? Why or why not?

2. What do the new C.D.C. guidelines say about reopening classrooms? What specifically do they tell us about how to safely operate elementary, middle and high schools depending on the level of community transmission of the coronavirus? What safety and mitigation strategies do the guidelines recommend?

3. Find out if your school can safely open under the C.D.C. guidelines: First, find your community’s test positivity rate and the number of new cases per 100,000 people in the past seven days where you live using The New York Times Coronavirus Tracker, the C.D.C.’s Covid Data Tracker or your state or county website. Then, compare the agency’s policy recommendations for that level of transmission with what your school is doing. (The article notes that you might need to do some math to determine the rate per 100,000 people). What is your reaction to this information? Are you surprised?

4. What has been the response to the new guidelines? How have they been greeted by doctors and public health experts? How have teachers and teachers’ unions responded? What do some critics believe is missing from the new recommendations?

5. Will these guidelines encourage more districts to bring students back into classrooms? What are the major obstacles to reopening, according to the article?

6. What is your reaction to the new C.D.C. guidelines? Does it change your view on the science and the safety of reopening schools that you wrote about in the warm-up activity? What challenges might schools face in meeting the new recommendations? What questions do you still have about opening schools during the pandemic?

Going Further

Option 1: Explore the issue further.

Reopening schools is hotly contested issue. Which of the questions below, or which questions of your own, are you interested in exploring further?

• What are the risks in reopening schools?

• What are the costs of keeping them closed, such as social isolation, depression and academic decline?

• What does data show about coronavirus transmission in schools, in the United States and abroad?

• Should vaccinations of a certain group (such as teachers, parents or students) be a precondition to school openings?

• What are the most important measures for school safety, such as masking, distance between students, ventilation and minimizing large group interactions?

• Why do some parents lack trust in a school’s ability to protect the health of their children?

To help you find answers to these and other questions, you might begin by looking at The Times’s School Reopenings topic page or read some of these recent articles:

We Asked 175 Pediatric Disease Experts if It Was Safe Enough to Open School
Why Ventilation Is a Key to Reopening Schools Safely
Biden Is Vowing to Reopen Schools Quickly. It Won’t Be Easy.
Missing in School Reopening Plans: Black Families’ Trust
Teachers’ Union Leaders Face a Tough Test Over School Reopening
As School Closures Near First Anniversary, a Diverse Parent Movement Demands Action
Rhode Island Kept Its Schools Open. This Is What Happened.
The Impact of Teacher Deaths
Republicans Seize on Shuttered Schools as a Political Rallying Cry
Surge of Student Suicides Pushes Las Vegas Schools to Reopen
What Will It Take to Reopen Schools? | The Daily podcast

After conducting your research, make a list of pros and cons for reopening schools. Then, reflect on your list: What are the best arguments and evidence supporting each column? What are the weakest? What remaining questions do you have?

Option 2: Hold a classroom debate.

Should we reopen all of the schools in the United States? Do the risks of keeping schools closed outweigh the dangers of opening them?

Within 48 hours of taking office, President Biden signed an executive order to “reopen school doors as quickly as possible.” However, many teachers, teachers’ unions and parents are not convinced that policies are in place to ensure a safe return.

In “School Closures Have Failed America’s Children,” Nicholas Kristof writes that as many as three million children have gotten no education for nearly a year.

Flags are flying at half-staff across the United States to commemorate the half-million American lives lost to the coronavirus.

But there’s another tragedy we haven’t adequately confronted: Millions of American schoolchildren will soon have missed a year of in-person instruction, and we may have inflicted permanent damage on some of them, and on our country.

The Opinion essay continues:

Yes, it’s hard to open schools during a pandemic. But private schools mostly managed to, and that’s true not only of rich boarding schools but also of strapped Catholic schools. As a nation, we fought to keep restaurants and malls open — but we didn’t make schools a similar priority, so needy children were left behind.

However, a letter sent by the California Teachers Association to Governor Gavin Newsom in late January argues that schools need to be very careful not to reopen too soon. The union writes:

California needs to have an aggressive plan focused on statewide safety measures to slow the spread along with a more rapid and effective vaccine rollout for essential workers, for educators, and for parents/guardians who work in critical infrastructure industries like food and agriculture as well as live in vulnerable communities …

We need a clear and coordinated state, county and local plan that puts the health and safety of our communities first and does not take shortcuts toward the path of opening schools in person. To do otherwise will continue the “yo-yo” effect we warned of last summer and this fall — opening schools, only to then close them because we failed to have the necessary layered protections and asymptomatic testing in place.

Additionally, Farah Despeignes, a Black mother of two who has opted for remote learning for her children, expressed her frustration to The Times: “Everything that has happened in this country just in the last year has proved that Black people have no reason to trust the government,” she said, adding: “My mantra is, If you can do it for yourself, you shouldn’t trust other people to do it for you. Because I can’t see for myself what’s going on in that building, I’m not going to trust somebody else to keep my children safe.

Debate these and other perspectives with your class. While there are many debate structures and formats, you might consider having students — individually, in pairs or in teams — research and play the role of different stakeholders in their community, such as students, parents, teachers, school staff members, social workers, public health officials and epidemiologists.

Whatever debate format you choose, it is important to ground the debate and discussion in the science, and to be attentive to the trade-offs between any choice: There aren’t simple answers or solutions that apply to all schools or all communities. Be sure to familiarize yourselves with the local factors: school population, school building safety features and community transmission rates.

And keep in mind that no one student, parent or teacher speaks for all members of a group, and that people have their own experiences, identities and needs that inform their perspective. So, depending on class size, you might have one student play a parent who wants schooling to be remote and another student play a parent who is in favor of in-person instruction.

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Lesson of the Day: ‘The C.D.C. Has New School Guidelines. Here’s What You Need to Know.’ - The New York Times
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