Pulitzer-winning journalist and epidemiologist Laurie Garrett has advised that large school systems should be testing and tracking representative school communities to gather data about COVID-19 infection rates before reopening widely.
One indicator of what will happen in the fall is to look at summer schools, several of which have closed quickly after reopening to in-person teaching due to a spike in positive coronavirus cases.
But, since this hasn’t happened, one indicator of what will happen in the fall is to look at summer schools, several of which have closed quickly after reopening to in-person teaching due to a spike in positive coronavirus cases.
In Norwalk, Connecticut, one high school closed just two days after opening in early July. That same week, two summer school teachers in Gila County, Arizona tested positive for COVID-19 after coming in contact with a teacher who died from the virus in late June. Gila County’s in-person program was shut down, yet four more staff tested positive, prompting the superintendent to recommend remote learning until at least October.
In mid-July, a summer school in Westwood, Massachusetts, closed temporarily after a teacher tested positive. Just twenty minutes away, in Quincy, Massachusetts, three summer school employees tested positive, leading to testing and quarantine for twelve other students and two staff. In Mountain Home, Arkansas, nine students and eight staff were quarantined after a positive case was identified at their school.
Similar outbreaks occurred at summer schools in Wisconsin, Missouri, Michigan, and Hawaii, where six locations closed after reporting positive cases involving a student, employee, or service provider.
But the largest summer school surge seems to have been at the Reach Academy, a special needs high school in Westchester County, New York. What happened there highlights how state guidelines delayed identifying additional cases.
On July 23, Anthony Nicodemo, the president of the Greenburgh-North Castle United Teachers union, alerted teachers that a staff member in the summer school tested positive the night before.
Although the school was temporarily closed for deep cleaning, school officials planned to test and quarantine only one other staff member and one other student—even though fifteen staff and four students were in proximity to the teacher, who left school early the previous Friday and called in sick for the next three school days.
Concerned, Nicodemo reached out to New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), the state teachers union, whose executive director, Melinda Person, joined the call for wider testing and a stricter quarantine. Though Person and Nicodemo argued that documents from the New York State Department of Health required a stronger response, the official decision did not consider the nineteen students and staff to be in “close contact,” because they had been socially distancing. (“Close contact,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is when an individual has spent fifteen minutes or more with an infected person at a distance of six feet or less.)
And Reach Academy, Nicodemo says, had done everything by the book. The school only had four students per classroom and teachers rotated in, so there was plenty of space. There were regular “static cleanings” of rooms and surfaces, and students were assigned individual laptops.
Staff who had traveled out of the region were not allowed on site. Masks were required, but Nicodemo saw students and staff not wearing them at times.
The extensive job of contact tracing fell to the school administrators. After the first case, administrators spent a whole day making phone calls and combing through records, a task made more difficult because the teacher who tested positive hadn’t been in school since the previous week.
Their list of proximate contacts was given to the county health department. But because HIPAA privacy rules prevent schools from releasing the identity of infected persons, anyone who was in proximity must wait until they are contacted by health officials to learn if they might have been exposed, which could be many hours or even days later.
Concerned, the local union sent out staff notices and reached out to media and statewide teacher groups, but the story was only reported in local news as the district announced plans to reopen school on Monday, July 27. Then, that Sunday night, a second teacher in the building who decided to get tested on their own came back with a positive result.
This triggered a more robust response. On Monday morning, Reach Academy remained closed as county health officials provided “rapid” onsite testing for more staff members. A third teacher tested positive, but not before she had reportedly been “out and about” over the weekend, as she had not been instructed to quarantine.
Over the next few days, two more teachers and at least three students tested positive, prompting Nicodemo to request the remaining summer session go fully remote. The district finally agreed on August 6, after the residential group home that the majority of Reach Academy’s students live in went into quarantine.
On July 28, the CDC’s chief medical officer, John Brooks, announced in a media call that the requirements for defining “close contact”—fifteen minutes and six feet away—were merely a “rule of thumb.” Transmission, he acknowledged, can happen much more quickly and from much farther away, so people “might want to” take precautions and voluntarily quarantine.
One poll found that 60 percent of all families prefer to wait until the risk of infection decreases; for parents of color, who are more likely to be impacted by the pandemic, the rate was 76 percent.
With a surge in COVID-19 cases across the country, parents have grown increasingly wary of the idea of reopening schools in-person. One poll found that 60 percent of all families prefer to wait until the risk of infection decreases (for parents of color, who are more likely to be impacted by the pandemic, the rate was 76 percent). Almost daily, new research is providing clarity about the coronavirus’s transmission among older children, and raising questions about its long-term health impacts.
According to Garrett, the greatest safety determinate in schools is the infection rate in the greater community. And though there is strong evidence that reopening schools is a surefire way to increase the virus’s spread—as seen in numerous summer schools, summer camps, and school planning conferences—schools with early start dates opened as scheduled last week, immediately making headlines as coronavirus cases soared.
In Indiana, one junior high reported a positive case on the very first day, while multiple employees in another district tested positive after the second day. This was quickly overshadowed by wider outbreaks in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Mississippi, where one school quarantined 116 students in the first week of reopening.
Undeterred, President Donald Trump continues to push for schools to fully open, nationwide.