CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Why isn’t Gov. Mike DeWine shutting down schools during the coronavirus’s latest record-breaking surge in Ohio?
Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer asked four public health and policy experts to weigh in on a key issue surrounding school closures: whether the decision should be left in the hands of superintendents and boards of education or whether the state needs to set hard rules for which learning model to use.
Experts say a blend of state measures and local control in school decision-making is most helpful. Officials on a state level can build out testing infrastructure and ensure data collected from school districts is comprehensive and uniform, or set rules for factors like capacity.
But local school officials, in partnership with health departments, have knowledge of the student body and the community where the virus is spreading.
“There’s the danger that you would have a one-size-fits-all solution that might impede a school or an independent school or a smaller school or an elementary school, for example, that may be doing extremely well,” Dr. David Rubin, the director of PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said. “The question is, what’s the right balance?”
In Ohio, there are 610 public school districts, and thousands of private and charter schools. In Cuyahoga County alone, there are 31 public school districts, including one of the largest urban school districts in the state, Cleveland.
By taking that one-size-fits-all approach by shutting every school down, that would ignore the stark differences between school districts.
“Communities vary tremendously across the states. You have very rural communities, you have urban communities, and they both address these needs differently,” said Elizabeth Van Nostrand, associate professor of health policy and management and interim director of the Center for Public Health Practice at Pitt Public Health. “So I think that with respect to whether school is closed, you have to look at a variety of factors.”
Van Nostrand said many factors go into these decisions, like cases for different age groups, positivity rates in the community, funding for access to online schooling and percentage of students with disabilities. Local officials can be more flexible in designing a plan for the community, like having some students come in two or three times a week.
That’s what Ohioans are seeing now, as many schools move to remote learning for the last few weeks of the year, but some schools remain open in a blended model. Often older students stay home, who might have an easier time learning online and are also more likely to be spreaders of the virus, according to early observations and research.
The potential problem with largely local control, without mandates, is that it doesn’t give school officials a framework to work with or, if faced with backlash from the school community, reasoning on which to fall back, said Barun Mathema, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.
“There has to be very, very clear chain of command, if you will, and guidelines,” he said. “When you don’t have it, then there’s a lot of mistrust in communities, governments, layers of government, and certainly among the people. The community gets utterly confused, (asking) ‘why is one community doing it that way? Everybody has bad rates.’”
Cuyahoga County saw protests surrounding switching between learning models, both for moving to remote learning and moving to in-person learning. One example was in Orange schools, after officials delayed plans to return in-person learning as the county returned from “orange,” or level 2 on the school’s color-coded coronavirus system, to “red,” or level 3, in October. Protesters claimed that making these decisions based on a county level wasn’t reflective of what was going on in the district.
Rubin said officials have learned to be careful about “threshold-based” restrictions during the pandemic, and said that PolicyLab has moved away from some of those types of guidelines in its own documentation. Having a particular trigger set off school closures doesn’t account for the different measures a district can take, like sorting students into groups or limiting certain age groups.
“You have to understand the nuance,” Annette Anderson, the deputy director of Johns Hopkins’ Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, said. “Schools are not a monolith.”
Anderson is one of the three founding researchers of Johns Hopkins eSchool + Initiative, which tracks reopening plans and the effects on students and equity. She said some schools have been able to open because there is the space to accommodate social distancing or have adequate ventilation measures to ensure air flow.
Threshold measures can lead schools to jump back and forth between learning models, Anderson said.
“For some parents that further disruption, and I think what you’ll start to see if we keep having schools that go back and forth,” she said. “Between reopening and closure, is that parents will just prefer to stay in remote because it becomes, you know, exhausting to try to figure that out.”
The state already implemented a mask mandate for students and staff in school buildings and established a school reporting system which is the source of basic, central data on how the virus is spreading. The Ohio Department of Health is partnering with Ohio State University researchers on a study which, through surveillance testing and contact tracing, is examining how the virus spreads in schools.
Surveillance testing and more rules on capacity or other factors that will help officials make decisions are among the suggestions for more measures the state could take, experts said. Anderson said this is an opportunity for Ohio to build an infrastructure for collecting more health data from schools, so it can be stored for research and used to make science-backed decisions. Making sure schools are collecting the same data points could also be helpful.
Rubin pointed out that any prioritization of teachers and staff for vaccination is also a measure that could help schools stay open, as coronavirus cases are prevalent in adults, and a lack of teachers and staff because of quarantine or sickness can also shut schools down.
“We have to accept now that school staff are central employees for the functioning of a community,” he said. “If you do that, you recognize that they should be prioritized for that distribution. And once we can get, you know, offer, and hopefully vaccinate, schools, school employees, that gives you a lot more ample opportunity to have in person choice and have as many families returned to the school building as possible.”
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December 05, 2020 at 08:00PM
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