As COVID-19 surges, should Fort Worth schools close? Here are some factors to weigh.
Angie Boyd’s son, Jacob, struggled last spring when Fort Worth ISD shut down schools and moved classes online.
Jacob, now a seventh-grader at J. Martin Jacquet Middle School, racked up about a dozen absences during online classes. Jacob told his mom he couldn’t get logged into the school district’s system. Boyd isn’t sure what happened, but she knows Jacob was distracted by other things online and things going on around the house.
Even when he was engaged, remote learning didn’t work well for Jacob, Boyd said. Jacob is autistic, and he does better when can work with a teacher in person, she said.
Now that he’s back at school in person, Jacob is doing better, Boyd said. He keeps up with is assignments better, he’s less distracted, and he seems more comfortable working with his teachers than he did when classes were online. But as COVID-19 cases in Tarrant County climb, Boyd worries about how Jacob would do if the district had to switch back to online classes.
“It wouldn’t be good at all,” Boyd said. “I know his grades are going to slip.”
For weeks, public health officials in Tarrant County have warned school districts that they need to be ready to shut down school buildings and move back to remote learning for all students. Fort Worth ISD officials say they have no immediate plans to switch back to all-online classes, but they’ve left the possibility open. Some parents of students who have returned to school in person worry about how another round of school shutdowns would affect their children, both academically and socially.
Tarrant County surge in COVID-19
Fort Worth ISD began gradually bringing students back to school in phases on Oct. 5. Clint Bond, a spokesman for the district, said district officials take their guidance from county health officials, the Texas Education Agency and any executive orders that are in place. The district doesn’t have a specific threshold at which it would switch back to remote learning for all students, Bond said, “but we’ll know it when we get there.”
TEA guidance allows districts to shut down schools and return to remote learning after confirmed COVID-19 outbreaks on campus. Districts could only receive funding for up to five consecutive days of remote instruction during shutdown without a TEA waiver. Districts that close schools in response to a COVID-19 outbreak and don’t offer online learning would be required to make up those days later in the year or forego state funding for those days.
At an Oct. 13 Tarrant County Commissioners Court meeting, Tarrant County Public Health director Vinny Taneja recommended school districts in the county go all-online as the county experienced a surge in hospitalizations and people showing up to emergency rooms with COVID-like symptoms.
Two weeks later, Taneja said that guidance hadn’t changed. The county’s positivity rate on COVID-19 testing stood at 12%, meaning the virus was rampant, he said. The county health department’s COVID-19 school reopening dashboard recommends virtual learning for all parts of the county. But Taneja acknowledged school districts have to take other factors, like TEA guidelines and the needs of parents and students, into account when making their decisions.
“I don’t envy their position,” Taneja said. “It’s a very hard position to be in.”
It’s difficult to pin the surge in cases on schools reopening alone, Taneja said. The county is still dealing with an uptick in cases associated with Labor Day weekend. Bars have reopened and restaurants have increased their capacity. Tarrant County has also played host to four Dallas Cowboys home games and six World Series games, all in front of limited crowds. All of those factors likely contributed to the surge the county has experienced for the past month, he said.
During the week between Oct. 26 and Nov. 1, 368 students, faculty and staff in the district had either tested positive for COVID-19 or been exposed to the virus, according to Fort Worth ISD’s COVID-19 dashboard.
Schools present a unique challenge that certain other settings don’t, Taneja said. In jails, prisons and nursing homes, for example, a limited number of people come in and out every day, he said, so if an outbreak happens, it’s easier to trace and contain. But in schools, where every student, teacher and staff member goes home every day, it’s much harder to figure out where an outbreak originated and trace its spread, he said.
Other school districts revert to remote learning
If Fort Worth ISD did switch back to all-remote learning, it wouldn’t be the first big city school district to do so. In late October, Boston Public Schools officials canceled in-person classes for thousands of the district’s highest-need students, who made up the only group that had returned to school in person. District officials also expect to delay other student groups’ return to school.
Other large urban districts have delayed bringing students back to campus until well into the fall semester or beyond. On Oct. 20, El Paso ISD approved a waiver from TEA allowing the district to continue remote-only instruction into early November. The district plans to open learning pods on campuses Monday, allowing certain students, including those with excessive absences and failing grades in two or more classes, to return to school in person. All other students in the district will continue learning remotely. Officials in El Paso County are struggling to deal with a dramatic surge in COVID-19 cases that has left the county’s hospitals overwhelmed.
In Atlanta, school officials announced in October that the district would delay in-person learning at least until January. In a blog post, Atlanta schools Superintendent Lisa Herring wrote that district officials decided to push back school re-openings when COVID-19 case counts in the city began to climb sharply after several weeks of declines.
When districts shut down schools and switch to online learning, there are a host of equity issues they need to consider, said David DeMatthews, a professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education. Students who receive extra services, including English language learners, students with disabilities and students in special education programs, are among the biggest concerns, he said.
Students in those groups tend to benefit most from social interaction with other students and working one on one with teachers, he said. And students with disabilities and those in special education programs benefit from support systems in place in school that don’t translate well to an online environment, he said.
Students with issues like traumatic brain injury or severe cognitive or intellectual disabilities work on skills that are designed to help them live as independently as possible once they reach adulthood. That work usually takes the form of hands-on activities that are nearly impossible to replicate well online, DeMatthews said.
Teachers and principals have found ways to reach students with less severe disabilities during school shutdowns, DeMatthews said. But DeMatthews has spoken to superintendents across the state, and none seem to have found a workable way to reach the highest-need students remotely.
“I consistently hear that everybody is struggling,” he said.
How long the effects of shutdowns last may also vary widely from one student to the next, DeMatthews said. Students with minor speech issues or learning disabilities will likely be able to catch up fairly quickly with extra help, he said. But for students with more severe disabilities, school shutdowns could have major, long-lasting consequences, he said.
During normal years, many students with severe disabilities go to school through the summer because school officials recognize they stand to lose too much ground if they’re out of school for too long. School shutdowns may be a two-edged sword for those students: the kinds of support they need to thrive don’t always work well online, and they have a harder time making up for lost ground once schools reopen, he said.
“If they don’t get that support, I think they’re going to be significantly disadvantaged,” he said.
Schools may not be super-spreaders
There’s evidence that schools may not be the super-spreaders that public health officials once worried they would be. In a report released in early October, researchers at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Barcelona analyzed COVID-19 reporting data from regions across Spain and found “no significant effects of the reopening of schools” on infection rates. In most instances, researchers found no increase in reported cases associated with school re-openings. In a few areas, they noticed a slight increase that was “compatible with current diagnostic effort in the schools.”
Certain populations of students also seem to be less susceptible to the virus than others. During an Oct. 14 media briefing by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Dr. Wendy Armstrong, a professor of medicine in the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, said cases of COVID-19 appear to be more common among adolescents than among the youngest students. Younger students are also less likely to transmit the disease, Armstrong said.
It’s unclear if that difference is because younger children are less susceptible to the disease or if they’re less likely to come in contact with it because they’re less mobile and less likely to be in congregant settings than older students.
One other possible factor is that younger children seem more likely to wear masks than teenagers, Armstrong said. At the beginning of the pandemic, public health officials worried that schools wouldn’t be able to get the youngest students to keep their masks on through the school day. Those concerns turned out to be unfounded, she said.
“Our young children are willingly wearing masks to do their part to keep communities safe,” Armstrong said. “They do it proudly.”
But Armstrong cautioned against reopening schools in communities with substantial levels of community spread of COVID-19. Schools tend to be a microcosm of their larger communities, she said, so any risks that exist outside of school are likely to make their way in
Even if schools themselves aren’t super-spreaders, the risks associated with reopening schools aren’t limited to what goes on in the classroom, said Diana Cervantes, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at UNT Health Sciences Center. School leaders have a great deal of control over what happens in their buildings during the school day, and they’ve implemented rigorous safety measures in hopes of preventing COVID-19 outbreaks, she said. Those measures seem to be effective in minimizing transmission in the classroom, she said. But before and after school and during extracurricular activities, school leaders have less control over where students go, what they do and what precautions they take.
Cervantes works from home, and most days, she sees children walk past her house on their way home from school. They take their masks off and talk and laugh, she said. It’s understandable, in a way, she said — schools are a restrictive environment, and once students leave, they want to act like everything is normal. But when people act like life has returned to normal and relax their personal precautions, it can make it more likely that the virus will spread, she said.
Parents worry about shutdowns
Ariel Banales said she worried about how another round of shutdowns would affect her son, Aaron, a kindergartner at John T. White Elementary School. Last year, when Aaron was in pre-K, he had a hard time focusing on his school work. His younger siblings distracted him, and it took him longer than it should have to finish his work, she said.
So when Fort Worth ISD began bringing students back in person, Banales and her husband decided they’d try sending Aaron back to school. If anything happened that caused concerns, they’d go back to remote learning. But so far, Banales has been happy with the precautions teachers and school staff have taken.
Going back to school in person hasn’t been perfect for Aaron, she said. He misses being able to play with friends at recess and do classroom activities that aren’t safe this year. But overall, going back to school has been good for him. If the district were forced to close schools again, she worries Aaron would miss out on hands-on activities at school. He’d also have the same distractions at home that he had last year, she said.
Boyd, the Jacquet Middle School mother, said she’s been pleased with how her son’s school has handled in-person classes. Everyone wears masks, and teachers and school staff keep everything clean, she said. There are few enough students at school that it never seems crowded to the point that students and teachers could be at risk, she said.
But Boyd worries about how the shutdowns have already affected Jacob. His grades were bad enough last year that she doesn’t think he should have been promoted to seventh grade. She understands that teachers were more lenient than usual because of the disruptions students dealt with. But if the district were forced to switch back to remote-only learning again and teachers showed the same leniency, she worries some students might be promoted without having learned everything they need to succeed in higher grades.
Jacob has fared well since he went back to school in person, Boyd said. He’s applied himself more, she said, and his grades have improved. But she isn’t sure if that progress would continue if he had to switch back to online classes.
“If he chooses — it’s all about his effort — I think that he’ll be OK,” Boyd said. “But he’s had to change his mindset.”
This story was originally published November 5, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
