Fort Worth ISD school year begins online Tuesday. But when can in-person classes start?
As the start of the school year arrives in Fort Worth, Andrea Contreras doesn’t know how to feel.
Both her kids are middle schoolers at Daggett Montessori School in Fort Worth ISD. Contreras works full time in billing at a doctor’s office, so she’s at work during the day. Her husband is self-employed, and he can’t always stay home. When online classes start Tuesday, they’ll have to leave their kids at home unsupervised.
That didn’t work well last spring, Contreras said. Ezekiel, who will start sixth grade, had more online class work to do than their daughter Serenity, who is starting seventh grade. Contreras and her husband had to stay on top of Ezekiel to make sure he was doing his assignments, but that was hard to do when neither parent was home during the day, she said.
Contreras also worries that if her kids go back to school in person, it might put them at greater risk of getting sick. One of them could be exposed to COVID-19 at school and bring it home to the entire family. Or if Contreras or her husband were infected at work, the virus could spread to their kids, who could then take it to school, she said.
“I want them to go back,” she said. “But at the same time, I understand why they’re not opening yet.”
Tuesday is the first day of school for Fort Worth ISD. The district is starting the year online because of concerns about the spread of COVID-19. It intends for in-person classes to resume Oct. 5, but a number of factors make that anything but a certainty, most notably whether there will be a spike in cases after this holiday weekend.
And even when classes resume in person, there will be uncertainty about how long that can be maintained.
Labor Day weekend a factor
Tarrant County public health officials say COVID-19 numbers are still too high across much of the district for students to come back to school in person. And officials and public health experts agree that the question of how long school shutdowns continue hangs on whether Fort Worth sees a spike in cases after the Labor Day weekend like the spikes that happened after Memorial Day and Independence Day.
Diana Cervantes, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at UNT Health Sciences Center, isn’t optimistic.
“I do think we will see a spike, unfortunately,” Cervantes said. “How big it’s going to be is going to depend on how careful we all are.”
Holiday weekends tend to lead to major upticks in disease transmission, Cervantes said. People go to gatherings, don’t take the same precautions they normally would and end up either contracting the virus or unknowingly spreading it to other people. Both Tarrant and Dallas counties saw sharp upticks in hospitalizations in the weeks after Memorial Day weekend, a trend that health officials attributed to holiday gatherings.
Residents in Tarrant County hear two competing messages right now, Cervantes said. The first is that it’s important to be careful so the county can avoid the kind of surges that took place in May and July. The second is that case counts are dropping and the risk is subsiding. If too many people listen to the second message and don’t take precautions, the county could see a surge in cases that could force school officials to push the beginning of in-person classes back further, she said.
In-person date is a moving target
When Fort Worth ISD announced in late July that it would push the first day of school back until after Labor Day and begin the year online, Fort Worth Superintendent Kent Scribner said the district could extend online-only classes beyond the proposed Oct. 5 in-person start date if COVID-19 numbers weren’t under control.
Then, on Sept. 1, Scribner told the Fort Worth City Council the district could decide to reopen before Oct. 5 if the county doesn’t see a spike in new cases of COVID-19 after Labor Day. The Fort Worth ISD Board of Trustees is scheduled to discuss a timeline for reopening schools on Sept. 15.
Scribner said district officials defer to county health authorities in deciding when it’s safe to return to school in person. The district wants students to return to in-person classes as soon as possible, but only once it’s safe to do so and when district officials are confident they’ll be able to avoid an outbreak that would force the shutdown of a school, he said.
Last week, Tarrant County Public Health released a dashboard showing where it’s safe for school districts to consider reopening. Public health officials said coronavirus numbers across most of the county have fallen low enough that districts could consider a hybrid learning model, allowing some students to come to campus in person and others to continue online. But in areas in northern and southern Fort Worth ISD, numbers are still too high for the district to bring students back safely, according to the dashboard.
Last month, Tarrant County Public Health released guidelines for reopening schools during widespread COVID-19 community transmission. Included in those guidelines is a series of benchmarks that public health officials recommend districts use to determine when it’s safe to bring students back to school in person.
Among other metrics, the county health department recommends districts wait until the seven-day moving average of people who test positive falls below 10%, and ideally below 5%. Tarrant County’s COVID-19 positivity rate stood at 9% last week.
The health department also recommends that districts wait until the rate of reported new cases per week falls below 100 cases per 100,000 residents. Although much of the district falls below that threshold, the attendance zones around Diamond Hill-Jarvis, North Side, Amon Carter-Riverside, South Hills and O.D. Wyatt high schools remain higher.
Vinny Taneja, Tarrant County’s public health director, said the guidelines are meant to give school districts a framework to decide when it’s “somewhat safe” to reopen. But Taneja said county health officials advise districts to wait to reopen in person until the county’s numbers fall well below the thresholds laid out in the guidelines. It’s almost inevitable the county will see an increase in case counts when school districts reopen in person, he said. But if numbers are low enough on the first day of in-person school, that uptick should be manageable, he said.
By keeping schools closed for in-person classes until Oct. 5, district and county health officials will be able to get a better idea of how big an effect the Labor Day weekend will have on the county’s COVID-19 numbers, Taneja said.
School districts aren’t required to follow any of the guidelines issued by the county health department. In late July, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a nonbinding opinion saying that local health authorities couldn’t order schools to close “for the sole purpose of preventing future COVID-19 infections.” That opinion came a week after Tarrant County health authorities ordered school districts to start their school years with only online classes for the first six weeks.
“While local health authorities may possess some authority to close schools in limited circumstances, they may not issue blanket orders closing all schools on a purely preventative basis. That decision rightfully remains with school system leaders,” Paxton said in a prepared statement.
Some school districts in the county have already brought students back in person. Keller ISD started its school year in person on Aug. 26. Last week, three days after students returned to school, the district asked fifth-graders and fifth grade teachers at Indian Springs Middle School to quarantine for two weeks after three employees tested positive for COVID-19.
Can in-person classes be sustained?
When schools do reopen in person, keeping them open will be another major challenge, said Cervantes, the UNT Health Science Center professor. The good news is that prevention and control measures like frequent hand-washing, social distancing, masks and physical barriers between students can be effective in controlling the spread of the virus, especially when those measures are layered on top of each other.
But while teachers can control their students’ behavior in the classroom, they have no way of knowing what those students do when they leave school, Cervantes said. Because there’s no routine testing of people with no symptoms, teachers and school administrators will have to assume that at least a few students are coming to school every day who are infected with COVID-19 but asymptomatic. Schools will need to enforce safety precautions rigorously if they want to avoid another shutdown, she said.
Enforcing those guidelines can be a challenge, especially with younger children, Cervantes said, but teachers are good at finding creative ways to do it. She’s seen teachers who decorated their masks and face shields and incorporated them into stories they read in class.
“It is difficult. You can’t 100% guarantee it,” she said. “But that is the best thing to get the buy-in from kiddos.”
FWISD parents face hard decisions
When the district begins in-person classes, parents can still choose for their children to continue online only. Contreras, the Daggett Montessori School mom, isn’t sure what she’ll do. She’s looking for a part-time job that would let her stay home for at least part of the day. If she can find one, she’ll probably keep her kids at home and continue distance learning, she said. If not, she’ll send them back to school in person.
Her kids have opinions of their own about what they want to do, Contreras said. Serenity wants to go back to school. She misses seeing her friends every day. But Ezekiel likes being at home alone with no one telling him what to do, Contreras said.
Meanwhile, Contreras worries her kids will fall behind academically. She didn’t think they got the same learning experience online last spring as they would have had in person. She also worries about the social interactions they’re missing.
“It’s just bad,” she said. “Hopefully it doesn’t last very much longer.”
This story was originally published September 7, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
