As we continue to navigate these unprecedented times, KCBS Radio is getting the answers to your questions about the coronavirus pandemic. Every morning at 9:20 a.m. Monday-Friday we're doing an "Ask An Expert" segment with a focus on a different aspect of this situation each day, sponsored by Sierra Pacific Financial Advisors.
Today we continue our focus on the reopening of schools and how it will impact students, teachers and administrators with John Bailey, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he works on issues related to education and workforce development.
We spoke with your colleague Rick Hess yesterday, and there were lots of questions that popped up. I'd be curious, as you sat down to look at this issue, once it became clear there was going to be a wholesale change in our schools almost overnight, what questions hit you first?
The biggest question, frankly, is one I think a lot of your listeners are asking, which is how do we reopen schools? Not if, but how do we make sure we have all the planning and preparations in place so that the moment health officials say it is okay to open up schools, we're able to do that? And I think what concerned Rick and what concerned myself is that we were hearing across the country a little bit of fatalism that we're never going to be able to open up schools, and not thinking about this in a way that would lead to the planning that's going to be necessary to make sure school doors are open in the fall.
I know you folks have put out a couple of blueprints; once you start digging into this so many issues arise, one of them having to do with the age of the faculty, which might not be an issue, for example, in elementary schools so much but when you get up to the university level you have a real issue.
Yeah it's true. This is what concerns me now, that I don't see enough attention being given to this by state officials or local school districts. There's still a lot about the virus that we don't understand. We don't understand it's transmission mechanism, we don't understand whether or not people can get re-infected from it. But there's one thing that's very clear from all of the data coming from China and Europe and now the United States, which is the people that are most vulnerable to severe COVID symptoms as well as hospitalizations and sadly, fatalities, are people who are above the age of 65. So when you look at that across the teaching population, it's about 18% of all teachers across the country. In the state of California it's 20% of teachers. And this creates an enormous challenge because for those teachers that are vulnerable to COVID-19, it's likely that even when schools reopen, they're not going to be able to come back to the physical classroom. So we're going to have to figure out roles and assignments for those teachers but we're also going to quickly need to find substitutes and other teachers that are going to be able to quickly come and replace them inside the classroom. So a huge challenge there.
Let's go ahead and get to questions that have come in to our email inbox, askus@kcbsradio.com.
First question: I have two granddaughters in 2nd and 5th grade and a granddaughter in 1st grade and 3 year old grandson in preschool. How can parents possibly work - remote or in offices, unless the children are in school full-time? Reopening sounds like possibly half days or alternate days each week. Has anyone addressed the issues this creates for working parents and what are they to do?
It's such a great question. I think the writer of that question hit on some of the biggest problems that we're facing right now, which is that you can't really reopen the economy or businesses again unless you reopen schools. And schools are going to be vital in terms of making sure that kids are not just getting education but also giving a place for kids to go so that parents can go to work. There's enormous complexities that are getting created right now as schools are trying to figure out how they manage the physical distancing requirement in the classroom that the CDC recommends. This is spacing kids six feet apart in a classroom. And it's leading some schools to give out alternating schedules, where half the kids come in the morning and half come in the afternoon. Those decisions can't be made exclusively by the school districts, they have to be made in conjunction with employers and most importantly with parents. Because as the listener expressed, it's really impossible for many parents to be able to accommodate this and work at the same time. So we're going to need other options for them, whether it's different types of after school programs or other, different places kids can go when they're not inside the school building.
How will after school programs work? Will there be after school programs? If not, what rights may I have at my workplace so I'm able to take care of my children and work?
That's a great question. I'm actually somewhat optimistic that we will see a resurgence of after school programs. We're already seeing across the country experimentation with different types of camps and summer programming, that I think we're going to learn a lot from, that can help inform what after school programs could look like going forward. We're going to learn a lot about childcare facilities, and again all of that is going to help with improving the way we reopen after school programs going forward.
Now, as to the rights that a worker has with their employer, that's a different question but I know all the different business organizations - the business roundtables, chambers of commerce both nationally as well as state chambers - are trying to push and advocate on behalf of parents that employers give the flexibility that the parents need to be able to work but also be able to be home when they need to be able to take care of their kids as well.
As an veteran teacher in California public schools, I am worried about schools’ personnel having sufficient funding, planning, training, or support to keep everyone safe. As a teacher, the school is my workplace. Should I refuse to perform an unsafe directive or should I obey now and file a grievance later? Should I hire an attorney?
I'm glad that your listener is asking these questions. I think it is way too soon to be filing a grievance. I think what we need to do is work with school district leaders as they're putting in the planning and preparation to make sure fundamentally that teachers are safe. And that's going to require, probably, teachers wearing masks, going to require temperature screenings for kids coming in, it's going to require weekly cleanings of classrooms and school buses and hallways. There's a lot of steps that schools can take to help protect the safety of teachers. So I think we need to make sure we're working in partnership with school leaders to make sure these happen.
That said, I am concerned. I think we just saw an experiment in reopening schools in the United Kingdom, and there the teachers' union did not believe that there were adequate steps to protect teachers. And as a result, they had to re-close schools after just two weeks of reopening. So there's a heated debate going on there that in many ways may foreshadow the debate we're going to see here in the United States in terms of teachers feeling like their safety is at risk, and whether or not preparations and measures and accommodations that are being put in place are enough to assuage those concerns.
That leads into another question. I have extended family and some friends living in France and I know at least some children have been back in school there for weeks, at school. Is there anything we can learn from them, and I assume other countries where schools have opened?
That's such a good question, and I believe the answer is yes. We in the United States get to benefit from the experiences and experiments occurring right now in Europe: France, Germany, Denmark and also the lessons we just learned from the United Kingdom, as they reopen the schools. A couple lessons that we see: first, physical distancing. We've seen how schools have had to accommodate their schedule for spacing out students, making sure students don't go to cafeterias but rather eat inside their classroom, we've seen temperature screenings. So we're learning a lot in terms of physically structuring schools.
Second, there's a bit of hopeful news. There's a lot of fear that the moment those countries reopened their schools you would see this massive resurgence of COVID-19 infections. And in fact, that hasn't been the case. So what that tells us is that students may not be quite the super-spreaders that many people had feared. And that in many ways tell us in the United States that it's going to be likely we reopen schools this coming fall.
There's one last thing that I think we've learned from the experiences in the United Kingdom, and that is even when schools were accommodating all these new measures and adjusting to the health precautions that health officials have put in place, there was a group of parents that still felt it was unsafe to send their kids to school. That was about 20-30% of parents at one point in France, we're likely to see next week what the full amount is going to look like, close to 40% of parents in the United Kingdom. I think the warning sign for us in the United States is that even if we do everything right, even if we put in place all these measures to protect kids and teachers, there's going to be some percentage of parents that aren't going to feel safe sending their kids back to school until there's a vaccine. So we're going to need ways of accommodating them, most likely through remote learning until there's a vaccine.
Does that feel like an independent study program where the same curriculum is being taught but it's being consumed in a different way? Or do we need some entirely different approach for kids who aren't going to come to school at all because their parents don't feel safe sending them?
It's a great question and I don't think there's a single right answer. I think it's going to look different. What I've been seeing is some states are setting up a virtual school statewide that parents can send their kids to, and that's very much an independent learning experience where they're learning as an online cohort. We're seeing Utah is experimenting with pairing up a teacher that is teaching students online with a teacher that is teaching the students in that same grade and subject matter in a physical school. So there's a little bit more of a seamless experience between the kids that are in school and the kids that are remote. So I think it's going to look different for different types of kids in different types of school districts, but these are the types of issues that we have to grapple with in the next few months.
Would you recommend Pre-K schools not reopen since chances are these kids will not remain socially distanced?
(laughs) I think we all know that kids, when they're that age, they do the exact opposite of social distance from one another. Again, I think these early experiences coming out of Europe suggest that kids may not be super spreaders, and also that COVID doesn't present the same risks to those types of students. So I think what we're going to see from the CDC and state health officials over these next few weeks is likely reopening of childcare facilities and preschool facilities, but doing it in a way that has a little bit less students and children in a physical space at a given time. You're not going to be able to put masks on those kids, you're not going to reasonably be able to ask them to always keep apart from one another. But I do think we're going to be able to have preschools reopen in relatively short order.
I'd love to hear how your guest thinks the cohort model will work in high schools. Can students rotate through their classes in mixed cohorts? Is it realistic to think that would be possible?
I think it's totally realistic. I think COVID has created a crisis, and out of that crisis is leading to a bunch of innovative rethinking of school models. Some are going to be blended learning, some are going to be cohorts where students are learning as a cohort within the same grade and subject, some online, some in the classroom. We could see where students are going through their high school experience with the same teacher, a looping almost where the teacher moves up the grade levels in the same subjects as the students do. I think we're going to see a lot of different experiments with it, and I'm excited. I think that COVID could be the prompt to catalyze some new ways of thinking to better serve kids that many of us have been arguing for years were needed. But again the crisis created by COVID created the prompt to get schools to think differently.
Never let a good crisis go to waste, right?
(laughs) That's exactly right.
I’m really concerned when I hear that they’re thinking of having young children wear masks at school. I’m a retired kindergarten teacher and I truly believe there will be long-term harm to kids in terms of social development and reading skills. Isn’t there a better way?
It's a great question and the CDC is a little mixed on this. They're encouraging masks for teachers, that seems to be a given. They're also encouraging masks to be worn by high school students. But the CDC acknowledges that there's actually risks in some ways with younger children wearing masks, and really gives it to local school discretion to whether or not masks should be used for those early ages. I think what we're likely to see is that students at that level probably won't be wearing masks. Some may, but most won't. And what you're going to be seeing is those masks phased in with the older students.
What do you think is likely to happen to high school sports?
I think a lot of students are asking this, in terms of what activities can they participate in, what activities are they not going to be able to participate in. We've seen some of the high school athletics associations have begun trying to assign risk profiles to different types of sports. There are some sports that don't have a ton of close contact - baseball would be an example - and are likely to be able to resume because they're low risk. But then you have higher risk sports like wrestling, even football. And there's open questions about what those might look like. I've seen some states considering moving their football season to the spring, as a way of trying to buy some time to see if we can learn something else about the risks and if there's other adequate preparations. But I think there's a huge debate going on right now about the best ways of protecting kids in those sports.
We're seeing it too in other activities. The state of Texas has recommended that schools don't do choir, because if you think about it with kids singing and a lot of the activities associated with singing or using instruments, it actually could potentially propel the virus. So they're encouraging those activities to be set aside. But again, I think it's going to be a very risk-based decision for each activity, for each school.
Hard to imagine fall without high school football and the marching band in Texas, isn't it? It really boggles the mind.
(laughs) I know.
A lot of school districts were already facing serious financial problems. How are they going to pay for equipment, increased cleaning, physical modifications, et cetera?
It is unreasonable to expect schools to be able to pay for all this extra protective equipment for teachers and extra cleaning supplies. Even doing remote learning has extra costs, because we need to make sure that every student has a laptop or an internet connection at home. And so I think there's a growing consensus that Congress does need to make additional dollars available to schools to help them with these reopening costs. And the good news is that there's precedent here. Congress did this in part of the first three phases of economic relief they provided states. They provided additional dollars to hospitals to help with addressing the extra needs that they had with personnel costs, with cleaning costs and with other equipment - ventilators and whatnot - to be able to surge capacity to help make sure that hospitals could push back COVID.
I think we're going to need a similar type of surge of resources to help schools with reopening in the fall. I think all eyes are on Congress. What we're told is that Senator McConnell will start negotiations on the phase four package at the end of July, and so I think we're hopeful that we'll see a negotiated phase four bill sometime in August.
This one comes from a regularly scheduled elementary school substitute teacher who writes: I'm concerned about returning to the classroom. Should the school district that I substitute in be responsible to provide me with the essential COVID-19 training and PPE prior to returning back to the in-class setting? In addition, will the district plan to educate substitutes with the distance learning tools using the online program on the laptops? It'll be difficult enough to teach and be exposed in different classrooms everyday and not be properly trained and equipped.
I think absolutely, those are reasonable expectations. Whether you're a full-time teacher at a school or a substitute, you should be able to expect, coming into a workplace, that it's prioritizing your safety. And that includes training on the different types of protocols that are being used, making sure you have the protective equipment whether that's masks or other equipment that teachers will need. I think all of that is reasonable. And the same goes with the types of technology and technology partners that a school is working with to provide remote learning. It's more than just learning to use a laptop. We have all these great online content tools that are available, new types of platforms. It's totally reasonable - and in fact it should be expected - that schools invest in professional development to help make sure those teachers are successful.
