From educators’ reflections on two tumultuous years to escalating school board fights over curriculum and transparency and new data surrounding both student reading scores and the benefits of tutoring, here were our most shared articles from February: 

700 Days Since Lockdown: Educators, Students, Parents and Researchers Reflect on Pandemic’s ‘Seismic Interruption to Education’

Reflections: 700 days. That’s how long it’s been since more than half the nation’s schools crossed into the pandemic era. On March 16, 2020, districts in 27 states, encompassing almost 80,000 schools, closed their doors for the first long educational lockdown. Since then, schools have reopened, closed and reopened again. The effects have been immediate — students lost parents; teachers mourned fallen colleagues — and hopelessly abstract as educators weighed “pandemic learning loss,” the sometimes crude measure of COVID’s impact on students’ academic performance. As spring approaches, there are some reasons to be hopeful. More children are being vaccinated. Mask mandates are ending. But even if the pandemic recedes and a “new normal” emerges, there are clear signs that the issues surfaced during this period will linger. COVID heightened inequities that have long been baked into the American educational system. The social contract between parents and schools has frayed. And teachers are burning out. To mark what will soon stretch into a third spring of educational disruption, Linda Jacobson interviewed educators, parents, students and researchers who spoke movingly, often unsparingly, about what Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, called “a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

—Photo History: ​​Scenes from 24 months of lockdown and perseverance (See here)

—Student Relationships: Teens share their tales of romance & friendship 700 days into COVID (Read here)

—74 Interview: Ed finance guru Marguerite Roza on funding, parental ‘awakening’ and being a data person in a time of public health panic (Read more)

—Special Series: See our full coverage — Reflecting on the COVID school years 

Million-Dollar Records Request: From COVID and Critical Race Theory to Teachers’ Names & Schools, Minnesota Districts Flooded With Freedom of Information Document Demands

School District Chaos: In bucolic Owatonna, Minnesota, the head of the school system’s HR department has been working since August to fulfill a request for records anonymous activists believe might reveal the presence of critical race theory in local classrooms. Down the road in Rochester, district officials told another group it would cost more than $900,000 to conduct its document search, which asks for curriculum covering history, social studies, geography, English, English literature, U.S. history and world history, and “any courses with a sociological or cultural theme [and] any courses with a curriculum that includes a discussion of current events.” In tiny Lewiston-Altura Public Schools, some of the activists lodging the requests have protested board meetings. The public has an absolute right to know what’s being taught in schools, freedom of information advocates tell Beth Hawkins, and Minnesota’s “sunshine laws” make asking for records as inexpensive as possible to ensure public access. Still, as one small-town newspaper groused, it’s hard not to see “politically motivated, overreaching demands designed to bury districts.”

‘We Have First-Graders Who Can’t Sing the Alphabet Song’: Pandemic Continues to Push Young Readers Off Track, New Data Shows

Learning Loss: Young children learning to read — especially Black and Hispanic students — are in need of significant support nearly two years after the pandemic disrupted their transition into school, according to new assessment results. Mid-year data from Amplify, a curriculum provider, shows that while the so-called “COVID cohort” of students in kindergarten, first and second grade are making progress, they haven’t caught up to where students in those grade levels were performing before schools shut down in March 2020. This year’s quarantines and short-term closures likely contributed to the slow progress, “For the youngest learners to go to school for two or three days and then be out for 10 — it’s not just picking up where you left off; it’s actually starting all over again,” said Susan Lambert, chief academic officer of elementary humanities at Amplify. Results from fourth- and fifth-graders, however, show greater recovery, with the rates of students meeting benchmarks nearly back to the same level they were in the winter of the 2019-20 school year. Tutoring providers are seeing the impact of remote learning up close. “We have first-graders who can’t sing the alphabet song,” Kate Bauer-Jones told reporter Linda Jacobson.

As Schools Push for More Tutoring, New Research Points to Its Effectiveness — and the Challenge of Scaling it To Combat Learning Loss

Research: In the two years that COVID-19 has upended schooling for millions of families, experts and education leaders have increasingly touted one tool as a means for coping with learning loss: personalized tutors. Now, days after the U.S. secretary of education declared that every struggling student should receive 90 minutes of tutoring each week, a new study offers more evidence of the strategy’s potential — and perhaps its limitations. An online tutoring pilot launched last spring yielded modest, if positive, learning benefits for hundreds of middle schoolers. But those gains were considerably smaller than the results from some previous studies, perhaps because of the project’s design: It relied on lightly trained volunteers, rather than professional educators, and held its sessions online instead of in person. “There is a tradeoff in navigating the current climate where what is possible might not be scalable,” study co-author Matthew Kraft told The 74’s Kevin Mahnken. “So instead of just saying, ‘Come hell or high water, I’m going to build a huge tutoring program,’ we might be better off starting off with a small program and building it over time.”

NYC Schools Reported Over 9,600 Students to Child Protective Services Since Aug. 2020. Is It the ‘Wrong Tool’ for Families Traumatized by COVID?

Absenteeism: Paullette Healy’s younger child had nightmares after the knock at the door of their Brooklyn apartment. Standing outside was a caseworker, explaining that the family was being investigated for educational neglect for not sending their children to school amid COVID fears — even though the kids had kept up with their work remotely. The report was one of 9,674 made by NYC school staff for suspected abuse and neglect to the state child abuse hotline from August 2020 to November 2021, according to public records obtained by The 74. In the first three months of the 2021-22 school year, there were about 45 percent more reports than during the same time span the year before, when most of the city’s nearly 1 million students were learning virtually. Now, after NYC student attendance rates plunged in early January amid the Omicron surge, and with ongoing debate over a remote learning option, there are fears even more families may get entangled in the child welfare web. The 74’s Asher Lehrer-Small reports.

School Choice Backers See Opening in COVID Chaos, Even as Culture War Issues Threaten to Fracture Coalition

Education Reform: School choice has always relied on a fragile left-right coalition, mostly between Black and Latino activists and centrist-to-conservative legislators pushing to rebalance the public school power structure. The coalition had weakened over the past few years. But COVID-19 is changing that. Fueled by parental impatience with lockdowns, quarantines, and mask and vaccine mandates — as well as curricula that some view as politically charged — there has been a flurry of legislative choice efforts in Kentucky, Missouri, Virginia and West Virginia. “The legislatures are on fire right now for these kinds of things,” said former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who chairs the nonprofit reform group ExcelinEd. “And I don’t see it going away.” But as 74 contributor Greg Toppo reports, even as choice backers see fresh opportunity in pandemic chaos, there are early warning signs that the coalition could fracture again. Greg Richmond, a longtime school choice advocate who now leads the Archdiocese of Chicago Catholic Schools, said concerns over so-called critical race theory could be “the Achilles heel” of the current choice renaissance. The new rhetoric, he said, is “not in pursuit of higher graduation rates and test scores,” but “winning the culture war.”

Vax Up, Masks Down: Maryland, Massachusetts Lead Effort to ‘Off-Ramp’ Face Coverings in School

School Safety: As Omicron cases recede in most of the country and K-12 debate turns to whether students should still have to wear masks, two Democratic states have charted a middle path that offers highly immunized districts the option. If more than 80 percent of students and staff are fully vaccinated, Massachusetts and Maryland let districts do away with mask requirements. Maryland also allows an end to masking when case rates remain low. Meanwhile, governors in New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware all announced this month their school mask mandates will be sunsetting, as soon as Feb. 28 in Connecticut’s case. Their actions follow a growing chorus of experts nationwide calling for mask-optional classrooms. “You cannot mask in perpetuity,” Maryland State Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury told The 74’s Asher Lehrer-Small. “You have to be able to have a responsible off-ramp.”

Report: With Omicron, Math App Zearn Reveals a Troubling New Gap in Student Engagement — Even Where Schools Are Open

Missing Students: When the latest variant emerged, the data scientists at Zearn saw the same socioeconomic disparities in student use of their math app as they did in the first days of the pandemic. Or so they thought. Just as in March 2020, the number of affluent students using the popular math program remained relatively stable as December’s COVID-19 disruptions plunged schools into chaos, while the number of low-income kids plummeted. But this time, the Zearn team could find no correlation between the dip in student math participation and pandemic-related school closures. Instead, the drop seems to be tied to case counts — the gaps appear to be biggest where COVID-19 infection rates are highest. And kids in the low-income communities are hit hardest. Beth Hawkins has the story.

New National Poll: Americans Split on Whether Schools Should Teach Current-Day Racism

Curriculum: As battles erupt around the country over how the subject of race should be treated in the classroom, a new survey finds Americans are split over whether schools should teach children about current-day racism. It found that 49 percent of 1,200 respondents from around the U.S. believe schools have a responsibility to ensure students learn about the ongoing effects of slavery and racism in America. Meanwhile, 41 percent believe schools should teach students about the history of slavery and racism — but not about race relations today. A full 10 percent said schools do not have any responsibility to teach about slavery or racism in the U.S., according to the latest Mood of the Nation Poll conducted by The McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. The poll, released today, also addresses the degree to which people believe parents should influence their child’s education — another current flashpoint — the teaching of evolution and sex education, and COVID safety. Across the board, respondents said parents should have the most sway, followed by teachers. Jo Napolitano breaks down the results.

Increasing Segregation of Latino Students Hinders Academic Performance and Could Amplify COVID Learning Loss, Study Finds

School Segregation: Elementary students from low-income families are less likely than they were two decades ago to attend school with middle-class peers — a trend tied to the growth of the Latino population and continuing white flight from many school districts, according to a new study. In an analysis of over 14,000 districts nationwide, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland showed that in 2000, the average child from a poor family went to an elementary school where almost half the students were middle-class. By 2015, that figure had fallen to 36 percent. The increasing segregation, the authors said, has implications for districts’ efforts to address learning loss related to the pandemic because Latino families were among those hardest hit. Linda Jacobson has the story.

Teen-y Tiny Pandemic Love Stories: Students Share Their Tales of Romance & Friendship Two Years Into COVID

Student Relationships: Online games. Dating apps. Penpals from across the globe. Amid nearly two years of the pandemic, young people at every turn have found creative ways to connect with their friends and potential love interests. Despite what at many times has been a largely virtual world, teens often came out on the other side of lockdown with relationships that were stronger for the experience. Or as one New York City high schooler put it: “If you’ve been through a pandemic with someone, I feel like we’re bonded for life.” From long-harbored crushes to new friends over Zoom, breakups to hookups, and Bumble DMs to online multiplayer games, young people share their experiences of pandemic friendship and romance, brought to you in the form of seven mini-love stories. Asher Lehrer-Small has our Valentine’s Day special.

America’s School Boards Are in Crisis. Here Are 9 Ways to Fix That — and Keep the Focus on Educating Children

Commentary: The governing of public schools in many communities is nearing total collapse. From coast to coast, fights over book bans, curricula, bathrooms, racial issues, masks, vaccinations and police on campus have torn communities apart and led to angry confrontations, violence and destruction of property. People have resigned from school boards or declared they will not run for office due to the intensity of these conflicts. Meanwhile, problems such as student performance, teacher pay and working conditions, and learning loss during the pandemic remain on the sidelines. To help save one of the oldest forms of governance in this country — predating the American Revolution — contributor Christopher T. Cross suggests a number of actions that every state, every school board, can take to improve the governance of our public schools.

—74 Opinion: See all our latest op-eds and commentary

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It’s a major departure from the agency’s prior stance, which held that schools should enforce universal masking regardless of virus levels.

“Since July 2021, CDC recommended universal masking in schools no matter what level of impact COVID-19 was having on the community. With this update, CDC will now only recommend universal school masking in communities at the high level,” said CDC epidemiologist Greta Massetti in a media call.

The change comes as part of a wider reconfiguration in COVID policy now recommended by the CDC, easing masking guidelines for most Americans. Rather than using community case rates as the sole metric to determine risk levels, the agency will now use a new formula that also takes COVID hospitalizations and hospital capacity into account. 

Only in counties where COVID risk is high does the agency now recommend universal masking indoors, though individuals may continue to choose to wear face coverings at lower levels depending on their own personal risk and comfort, officials said. 

While only about of U.S. counties were considered low or moderate risk under the old framework, nearly 60 percent now fall into that categorization, accounting for about 70 percent of Americans. Individuals may check the updated risk level for their county on the CDC’s .

The change in school masking guidance comes after weeks of movement at the state and local level to scrap face-covering policies. In early February, several states including New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts announced the end of their school mask mandates, and on Tuesday, the Maryland State Board of Education voted to , though the change needs legislative approval before it will go into effect. ​​Of the 500 largest U.S. school districts, currently require students to wear masks, down from 60 percent at the beginning of February, according to data collected by Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic.

States such as California and New York have yet to announce an end to their school masking rules. But in a small step toward loosening restrictions, New York City students will on school grounds starting Monday, officials announced Friday morning. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he will announce an end date for school masking in his state Monday.

The CDC’s move to ease masking guidance represents a broader effort to help Americans return to a “new normal,” even as the virus continues to circulate.

Over 200 million Americans have received their primary vaccine series, pointed out CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, half of whom have been boosted. Many more have a level of immunity due to prior infection.

“With widespread population immunity, the overall risk of severe disease is now generally lower,” said Walensky. “Now as the virus continues to circulate in our community, we must focus our metrics beyond just cases in the community and direct our efforts toward protecting people at high risk for severe ailments and preventing COVID-19 from overwhelming our hospitals and our health care system.”

President Biden and the CDC have previously speculated the end of the pandemic, even giving the summer of 2021 the hopeful title “summer of freedom,” before the Delta surge quickly proved that COVID would continue to disrupt daily life.

Perhaps with awareness of that history, Massetti emphasized that schools — and the wider community, too — should adjust virus mitigation rules based on changing conditions.

“Public health prevention strategies can be dialed up when our communities are experiencing more severe disease and dialed down when things are more stable.”

Walensky added, “We need to be able to dial them up again should we have a new variant or a new surge.”

Still, some have critiqued the choice to ease masking guidelines as motivated by politics and pandemic weariness. As the CDC prepared to announce updated recommendations, several disability advocates the plan on Twitter.

The new metrics do not take community or school vaccination rates into account, though officials emphasized that vaccination greatly decreases the likelihood of severe illness and hospitalization and thus is indirectly reflected in the new thresholds.

Nationwide, a quarter of children aged 5 to 11 and 57 percent of youth aged 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the . Shots for children under 5 will not be available for over a month.

On Sunday, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that New York state will end its mask requirement for schools and child care facilities starting Wednesday. “The day has come,” the governor said. On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said indoor masking at schools and child care facilities after March 11. For students in Los Angeles Unified School District, masking appears to remain in place through the end of the year per an agreement between the district and the teachers union, although the timetable could be renegotiated. New York City Mayor Eric Adams already followed the governor’s lead, saying that he plans to drop the city’s school masking rule — along with vaccine requirements for restaurants, gyms and movie theaters — on March 7. Adams said his administration would continue to monitor COVID case rates and promised to make a final decision by Friday. “New Yorkers stepped up and helped us save lives by reaching unprecedented levels of vaccination,” he in a statement.

In early February, a flurry of Democratic states including New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut announced the end of their K-12 face-covering rules. Yet a few holdout states, and many individual districts, still require students to cover up without a set end date — and decision makers are seeking further clarity on when to safely drop the practice.

As if on cue, two new papers deliver a clear, quantitative look at just how many cases unmasking might trigger, helping school leaders set customized benchmarks for the end of mandates based on their community’s expressed goals.

“Instead of saying, ‘Well, you know, masks off, people get sick. Masks on, fewer people get sick,’ [officials can understand] what exactly the magnitude of these outcomes are,” said John Giardina, the lead author of one of the papers and a Harvard University Ph.D student.

His , which was peer-reviewed and published Feb. 14 in JAMA Network, uses simulation modeling to identify the COVID transmission levels at which virus spread would stay in control even when classrooms are mask-optional. 

It comes as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said leaders in her state are such as community COVID transmission levels and pediatric hospitalizations as they decide whether to lift the statewide school mask mandate in March. And California officials say they are examining student vaccination rates to when schools might be able to scrap their mask rules, even as health officials say the county will likely for other settings by late March.

“We’re among the 13 states that have not ended their school masking requirements,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said . “I have stated very clearly that on the 28th of this month we will be announcing a specific date. That date with destiny, the masks will come off, and we’ll do it in an appropriate manner.”

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have signaled that they will be looking to in the coming weeks, with an emphasis on preventing hospitalizations rather than avoiding transmission altogether.

The study Giardina published with co-authors from universities such as Stanford, Brown and Johns Hopkins allows decision makers to consider all of those metrics — case rates, vaccination levels and hospitalizations — simultaneously.

Using the ‘formula’

School leaders can select from three possible objectives: Avoiding all in-school transmission (which Giardina acknowledges may be an unrealistic standard), keeping the average additional cases due to unmasking below a specified level, such as 5 per month, or keeping the average additional hospitalizations under a threshold, such as 3 per 100,000 people per month. 

Then, based on the share of students who have been inoculated with COVID vaccines, they can find the appropriate community transmission level for unmasking.

“If you have your goals and you have the context you’re in in your community when it comes to vaccination and how effective you think masks are, you could certainly look at that table as a kind of formula and say, ‘Should we take off masks, or shouldn’t we?’” Giardina told The 74.

He cautions, however, that the model used in the study relies on certain assumptions that decision makers should take into account. For example, it uses transmission rates from Delta rather than Omicron, and assumes a school with 638 students and 60 staff.

“I would still hope policymakers take all the uncertainties into account and how things might differ for each particular community,” he said.

In the table above, schools can usually focus on the middle column, the researcher explained, which assumes the switch to mask-optional classrooms will decrease overall COVID mitigation effectiveness from 70 percent to 30 percent. But if the building has particularly effective ventilation, staving off some virus particles even when kids don’t cover up, they might push to the left column, where mitigation remains slightly higher even after scrapping face coverings. Conversely, if the school previously helped students access high-quality masks like KN95s, the dropoff in mitigation effectiveness when unmasking might be steeper, pushing schools to the right column.

A school with 50 percent student vaccination that assumes an average drop in protection without masks (middle column) and is willing to accept an average of up to 10 additional COVID cases per month due to the policy change could go mask optional once community transmission falls below 22 cases per 100,000 residents per day, according to the table. If the school increases its student vaccination rate to 70 percent, the threshold jumps to 32 cases per 100,000 because the stronger immunization rate will help stave off the higher community transmission rate.

Fifteen states and Washington, D.C. were at or below per day, as of Feb 22. Another 15 were below 32 per 100,000. Nationally, case counts are trending downward, in some communities dramatically with 60 to 75 percent declines over the last 14 days.

Of the 500 largest U.S. school districts, currently require students to wear masks, according to data collected by Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic. That’s down from 60 percent at the beginning of February, and other districts have mask-optional policies set to kick in in the coming weeks.

In New York, where no end to the statewide school masking rule has yet been specified, of registered voters said they supported Gov. Hochul’s plan to review COVID data in early March before making any changes, while 30 percent thought the mandate should already have been lifted, according to a from the Siena College Research Institute released Tuesday. Another 10 percent said they wanted the policy to end after this week’s school vacation.

A second datapoint

As the move toward unmasking continues, a out of Duke University’s corroborates Giardina’s findings, adding a second tool for school leaders to use in their decision making.

Like the study published in JAMA Network, the ABC Science Collaborative paper links school face-covering policies to additional likely COVID cases based on community transmission rates.

“You can see the differences in masking versus not masking and how many cases per week will happen in the community as a result of school policy,” said Danny Benjamin, professor of pediatrics at Duke and co-chair of the Collaborative, explaining his findings to educators in a Feb. 14 . “You can then match these differences with your community’s risk tolerance as it relates to COVID.”

The paper, which the authors call a “blueprint” for navigating school policy this spring, draws on data from 61 school districts with varying mask rules. The researchers used those figures to then project the implications of mask-optional versus mask-required policies in a hypothetical 10,000-student school system.

When community case rates are high, mask mandates prevent much would-be transmission, the authors found. In universally masked schools, it generally takes 20 to 25 COVID-positive individuals to set foot in the building for one case of in-school transmission to occur, said Benjamin, compared to other settings where the average infected person tends to pass the virus on to at least one other person. 

“The short version is that masking clearly works,” he said.

However, when community case rates are low, the difference in prevented cases shrinks and school leaders may decide that enforcing a mandate is not worth the downsides. Research suggests that masks may hinder youngsters’ and interfere with for people of all ages.

When case rates are just 100 per 100,000 residents per week, or about 14 per 100,000 per day (roughly the infection level before the Delta surge), districts with universal masking prevent only three additional cases compared to districts with voluntary masking. At 250 per 100,000 residents per week, where many communities currently stand, school mask mandates fend off an extra 10 cases in the district per week, the paper projects.

The brief does not break down expected cases by school vaccination rates. Nationwide, just under a quarter of children aged 5 to 11 and 56 percent of youth aged 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the .

For some broader perspective, Benjamin reminded school leaders that children are just as likely or more likely to be hospitalized when they catch the flu or RSV compared to the coronavirus in all age groups except for 12- to 17-year-olds who have not been vaccinated against COVID.

Still, Benjamin’s co-chair at the Collaborative, Kanecia Zimmerman, emphasized that any shift in policy has implications not just for families’ physical health but also their mental health. An early February conducted by CBS News found that 57 percent of parents of school-aged children believe masks should still be required in school while only 36 percent said they should be optional. Another 7 percent want face coverings banned in classrooms.

Even when epidemiologically sound, a shift to voluntary masking may create distress for families, and the Duke associate professor of pediatrics urged school officials to consider bolstering the mental health supports available to students.

“Unmasking … is going to represent a substantial change for many families, for many districts, for many children,” she said. “When you’re making decisions about how to move forward, make those decisions in light of how you might be able to do things for the whole child.”

On Friday, Pfizer-BioNTech that they will postpone their request that the Food and Drug Administration authorize their vaccine for children 6 months to 4 years old, saying they will wait for the data on a three-dose series. 

Three doses “may provide a higher level of protection in this age group,” the companies wrote.

In early February, Pfizer and BioNTech sent a rolling submission to the FDA for authorization of a two-dose round of shots, hoping to jumpstart the process of vaccines for little ones as early as the end of the month, while continuing to monitor whether a third dose may eventually be needed. But that timeline will now be halted until after researchers examine data from the three-dose regimen.

The FDA, in turn, pushed back its scheduled Feb. 15 advisory committee meeting to review the companies’ submission. 

“We will provide an update on timing for the advisory committee meeting once we receive additional data on a third dose,” said the federal agency in a .

Pfizer and BioNTech expect to have numbers on the efficacy of a third shot by early April, the companies said.

Younger children bear the lowest COVID risk out of all age groups and, even when unvaccinated, are less likely to fall seriously ill from the virus than vaccinated adults. But whiplash from the Friday announcement may frustrate many parents who were counting on the arrival of shots for some long-awaited relief after the Omicron surge brought on and widespread .

Health experts, too, expressed frustration with the sudden change in plans, worrying that it could undermine faith in the shots. 

“This rollercoaster that parents under 5 (including me) are forced to ride is an absolute, unacceptable disaster,” Katelyn Jetelina, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Texas School of Public Health, on Twitter. “Pfizer and the FDA need to get it together so the public knows what the (heck) is going on (and why) so we can continue to be confident in this process.”

Brown University’s Ashish Jha, on the other hand, : “This is good science in action. If we don’t yet have clear evidence of effectiveness, postponing a decision is the right thing to do.” He did, however, acknowledge “I know this will so disappoint parents of kids under 5.”

Pfizer-BioNTech shots for kids 6 months to 4 years old contain three micrograms of the vaccine, while the shots for teens and adults contain 10 micrograms and 30 micrograms, respectively.

Just under a quarter of children aged 5 to 11 and 56 percent of youth aged 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the .

Massachusetts officials announced Wednesday morning that students and staff will no longer be required to wear face coverings in school starting Feb. 28, when the current statewide masking mandate expires. “With Massachusetts a national leader in vaccinating kids, combined with our robust testing programs, it is time to lift the mask mandate in schools and give students and staff a sense of normalcy after dealing with enormous challenges over the past two years,” Gov. Charlie Baker said.

As Omicron cases recede in most areas of the country and K-12 debate turns to the contentious question of whether students should still be required to wear masks, two Democratic states have charted a middle path that offers highly immunized districts the option to scrap face coverings in school.

Massachusetts and Maryland allow districts to drop mask requirements if more than 80 percent of students and staff are fully vaccinated. In Maryland, school systems also wield the option to change their policies once the surrounding county surpasses 80 percent immunized, regardless of student and staff rates, or when community coronavirus transmission has remained low to moderate for two weeks straight.

“You cannot mask in perpetuity,” Maryland State Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury told The 74. “You have to be able to have a responsible off-ramp.”

A growing chorus of experts would agree. Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration chief, said on Sunday he expected to see more governors lift mask mandates and that we have to “try to at least make sure that students in schools have some semblance of normalcy for this spring term.” , and all recently published columns to a similar effect. And five Bay Area medical professionals on Tuesday penned an op-ed with the provocative headline “”

On Monday, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat who has enacted some of the strictest statewide COVID mitigation rules in the nation, the end of the state’s K-12 face-covering mandate, allowing schools to go mask-optional starting March 7. Delaware Gov. John Carney also made a similar move, stipulating that his state’s K-12 face-covering mandate would end . And hours later, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont followed suit, announcing that the state’s school mask mandate would be .

“We can responsibly take the step given the continuing drop in new cases and hospitalizations from Omicron, and the continued growth in vaccinations,” Murphy wrote on Twitter..

In New York, where the mandate was already in , Gov. Kathy Hochul Wednesday. She announced that she was lifting the indoor masking requirement starting Thurs., Feb. 10 but would wait to make a call on face covering in school until early March, after students’ winter break.

“This fight is not over. We’re not surrendering, this is not disarmament,” Hochul said.

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that with COVID cases still high in parts of the country, its guidance on masking in schools .

As of Feb. 7, about of the top 500 school districts required that students and staff wear masks in classrooms, according to the data service Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic. Face-covering rules still tend to fall along partisan lines, with Democratic districts mostly requiring masks and Republican districts mostly leaving the decision to parents. States such as Florida, Texas and, more recently, Virginia have moved to outlaw mask mandates in school, but have in many cases . 

But in deep blue Maryland, the state superintendent says that it may be time for schools to rethink their status quo, pointing out that not only have COVID vaccines been available to children 5 and up for months, but that even toddlers may now soon access shots.

When Choudhury set out to extend his state’s K-12 masking order amid Omicron, he also sought to build in provisions “incentivizing the right set of behaviors to be able to tackle COVID-19,” he said. 

The state superintendent combed through safety guidelines from states across the country, ultimately pulling from models in Massachusetts and Nevada to allow districts to do away with mask rules when vaccinations are high or when case counts are low.

“We cannot miss this opportunity to return to normal when we have the tools at hand,” Choudhury said. “Let’s not let fear overcome the ability to come back to normal.”

Howard County is the only Maryland county so far to surpass the 80 percent community vaccination threshold, according to state data, and Montgomery County, which has 209 schools and some 160,560 students, is just a few points away at 77 percent immunized. Yet with transmission rates still high in the wake of Omicron, Howard County Public Schools said that it is not yet ready to go mask-optional.

“While COVID cases are continuing to decline rapidly, we continue to have indoor masking in place,” Brian Bassett, communications director for the 57,325-student district, wrote in an email to The 74. “We will continue to evaluate all our COVID mitigation strategies for the remainder of this school year and heading into next year and adjust as we’re able.”

The 80 percent vaccination threshold is what Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University, and a team of researchers recommended as a marker at which schools could safely drop masks in a November that has not yet been peer reviewed. But that guidance was based on data from the Delta surge, he points out, not Omicron.

“With Omicron, if your goal is really to eliminate transmission, it’s about more than just vaccination. It’s about how much transmission there is,” the Boston doctor told The 74. 

That said, serious illness from Omicron in vaccinated individuals has been vanishingly rare, Linas added. His own thinking on the topic, he acknowledged, is shifting to a stance of: “We’re going to have to accept that there might be some COVID (in school), and that’s OK.”

In Linas’s Massachusetts, which implemented its mask-optional threshold in late September, at least have sought and received permission to drop mask mandates after documenting that they had surpassed the 80 percent student and staff vaccination threshold, according to reporting from The Boston Globe. While the majority have not yet scrapped their policies due to Omicron fears, at least five took the plunge before mid-December and for the most part did not see large increases in COVID cases.

Seventy percent of youth at Hopkinton High School, the first school in the state to do away with universal face coverings, reported that the change in policy improved their school experience, while 8 percent said it made it worse, an early December found. Students reported better class discussions as well as “contagious smiling.” Research suggests that masks may hinder youngsters’ and interfere with for people of all ages.

But even if many students happily anticipate the end of mask requirements, policymakers will have to contend with widespread hesitation from another key constituency: parents.

A of over a dozen polls since the summer found that most parents wanted to keep kids covered up in school. The most recent survey, conducted in January for The New York Times, found that of American adults supported universal masking for students to limit Omicron spread.

Teachers unions in major cities like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago have also influenced decisions on COVID mitigation in schools throughout the pandemic, and amid Omicron called for . Los Angeles Unified School District has taken the step of , instead requiring that students wear surgical masks or respirators like N95s or KN95s. The and the continue to recommend universal K-12 masking, with a preference for .

Linas acknowledges that pivoting away from universal masking may be understandably scary for many.

“It’s not going to be obvious the day when it’s safe to go to school without a mask,” he said. “It’s still going to be controversial and people are still going to protest it and be uncomfortable.”

Yet, “‘masks forever’ is not a solution. ‘Masks forever’ is a problem,” Linas believes. Given that, school leaders must identify benchmarks for when it’s safe to drop face coverings.

Those benchmarks, said John Giardina, a PhD student at Harvard University and lead researcher on Linas’s study using simulation modeling to predict transmission in classrooms, can work in two directions: Below the case rate threshold it’s safe to drop masks and above it, it’s time to reinstate mandates.

“[It] would be the same cutoff when masks might need to be added back on in response to a new wave or variant,” he told The 74.

Maryland school districts that unmask after two weeks of mild community transmission are required to follow a similar protocol, re-activating their universal face-covering rules if COVID spread remains elevated for 14 straight days.

“There’s an on-ramp at the transmission level,” explained Choudhury.

In Massachusetts, case counts remain “way off-scale for where we want to be before we start taking off masks (in school),” said Jeremy Luban, professor of medicine at UMass Medical School, who isn’t convinced that schools should be unmasking.

“But we’re getting there,” he added. “I think it’ll be pretty soon.”

Even as Omicron surged through Los Angeles early last month, Hilda Avila knew she would send her son back to his public middle school when classes resumed.

“As a parent, it is my responsibility to teach my son that there are going to be challenges,” said Avila, whose 12-year-old son Jaziel attends Wilmington Middle School. “Adversities are going to come, and as a human being one cannot live out of fear.”

But the first few weeks were not easy, said Avila, who recalled feeling frustrated that teachers were absent and substitutes she did not know led her son’s classes. Some teachers at the school taught online after getting a vaccine exemption, she added.

Many LAUSD parents seemed last week to have caught up with Avila’s thinking, sending their children back to school in growing numbers after keeping them home earlier in the month.

According to , attendance increased from  in the first week of school in early January to nearly 80 percent last week. 

When schools resumed classes on January 11, The Los Angeles County Department of Health was reporting

But parents and educators said that while things have slowly gotten better inside the nation’s second largest district’s schools, the first week was not easy. 

Irma Villalpando, an aide at the Maywood Center For Enriched Studies Magnet school, said more than 300 students and at least 10 teachers were out the first week.

“There were two subs sent from the district and the rest of the classrooms were covered by counselors, principal, assistant of principal, some teachers had a training period and they also helped in and covered classrooms,” said Villalpando. “It ran very smoothly.”

But Villalpando said while classes were covered, not much learning was going on: “Some students did tell me that it was difficult because they were not doing much, they were bored.” she said.

 The parent of two high school students attending Maywood, Villalpando said one of her daughters told her “she had a hard time staying awake in one of her classes because she had nothing to do.” 

Last week, Interim LAUSD superintendent Megan Reilly, COVID cases were dropping, and added that 100 percent of school teachers and employees are fully vaccinated. Teachers that would fail the vaccination mandate would get .

“We continued to be intelligent and agile in creating the safest learning environment,” said Reilly, “Monitoring conditions daily, consulting with experts and doctors and reviewing COVID-19 data to ensure all measures are effective.”

District’s health safety guidelines include weekly COVID-19 testing for both students and employees, isolation for five days if testing positive, and mandatory use of masks. The LAUSD a new mask mandate on Monday, prohibiting cloth masks. 

Vanessa Aramayo, a parent advocate with Alliance for a Better Community said the school district is doing everything possible to implement those guidelines. 

“I believe the schools reopening during the pandemic allowed for increased testing, identification of cases and environments that are safe for children, and they also provide environments and information for parents to be able to obtain the resources, they need to be able to protect themselves and their families from infection or from further spread,” said Aramayo.

Despite the guidelines and precautions, some families don’t believe it is safe to send children back to school, including parents of students with special needs, said Lisa Mosko, a parent advocate with Speak UP.

“Many families I know were relieved to be back at school in person because the academic and mental health toll of being out of school for so long on their kids was too much,” said Mosko. “Other families I know did not feel ready to go back, especially families of kids who are medically fragile.”

“They [The LAUSD] have a very difficult job and that’s making sure that schools are safe, that teachers and students, and that all the faculty will not be in harm’s way if they go back to school,” said Aramayo. “And the testing that they’ve implemented has been groundbreaking and they’ve been a leader in doing that.”

Veronica Sierra is a sophomore pursuing a journalism degree at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She was born and raised in Valencia, Venezuela; and moved to California in 2015 where she continued high school, graduating in 2015.

With school systems beginning to spend an unprecedented $125 billion in pandemic aid, how well are states fulfilling their obligation to ensure the money goes toward helping the most disadvantaged children recover from COVID-19’s disruptions?

That was the key issue behind a special Jan. 26 panel discussion moderated by The 74’s Beth Hawkins and presented in conjunction with Education Reform Now. Among the central questions: Are state plans ambitious enough to help students recover missed learning? Do the plans incorporate evidence-based solutions and reflect the priorities of parents, educators and stakeholders? If the response in your community is lackluster, how can you succeed in holding officials accountable? What specific improvements can you demand? 

You can stream the replay above (if not displaying properly, ); panelists include Nicholas Munyan-Penney, senior policy analyst, Education Reform Now; New Jersey state Senate Majority Leader Teresa Ruiz; Terra Wallin, associate director for P-12 federal policy, The Education Trust; Shirline Wilson, director, Education Reform Now Washington; and Dr. Christine Pitts, resident policy fellow, Center on Reinventing Public Education.

Follow all our latest news coverage surrounding unfinished learning, school recovery, and relief funds by signing up for The 74 Newsletter. 

Here were our most widely shared articles to kick off 2022:

Why Learning Loss Is Prompting Educators to Rethink the Traditional School Calendar: Start Earlier, End Later, Extend Breaks for Remediation

Learning Recovery: Pandemic-related school closures, which caused alarming learning losses among the country’s most vulnerable students, have prompted some administrators to reconsider their academic calendars. Though the school year wouldn’t get any longer, an earlier start date, a later end date and numerous, elongated breaks could allow more timely remediation for children in need — and enrichment for those who are not. The suggestion comes as the fast-spreading Omicron variant is making it difficult for schools to remain open. But districts had already begun scaling back — moving to four days of instruction per week and adding days off to their calendars — in an effort to curb teacher burnout. Jo Napolitano takes the national pulse of year-round schooling, including in Washington state, where 22 districts are exploring ways to rearrange their 180-day calendars.

New Research: Students in Majority-Black Schools Had Been 9 Months Behind Their White Peers. Now, the Gap Is a Full 12 Months

Achievement Gaps: While students overall are starting to make up unfinished learning, what’s been described as the pandemic’s “K-shaped” recovery — and the resources directed to it — remain deeply inequitable, according to a new report by researchers at McKinsey & Co. Pre-pandemic, pupils in majority-Black schools were, on average, nine months behind children in white schools. Now, that gap has widened to 12 months. At the same time, the services and in-person instruction that could begin to bridge the gap are imperiled. Student absenteeism is up sharply from last year, and the number of children in individual classrooms who are several years behind is up 9 percent, creating daunting challenges for teachers in terms of tailoring instruction. Beth Hawkins has a quick rundown of the numbers. 

Teacher Trauma: New Orleans Researchers Find Educator Mental Health Closely Tied to Pandemic Classroom Effectiveness

Mental Health: A new report finds challenges associated with student learning loss top the list of pandemic-era stressors experienced by teachers in New Orleans, whose levels of depression, anxiety and PTSD rival or exceed those of health care workers. According to a survey administered by the Trauma-Informed Schools Learning Collaborative, a feeling of being ineffective with students — reported by white teachers more often than their Black colleagues — was the top stressor, followed closely by challenges related to hybrid and remote instruction. A joint endeavor of Tulane University, NOLA Public Schools, the New Orleans Health Department and a number of social service agencies, the coalition conducted the survey in June 2021, before first the Delta variant and now Omicron dashed hopes that schools might return to “normal” this year. Beth Hawkins has five top takeaways from the research.

Exclusive: Pittsburgh Schools Reported Zero Student Arrests While Court Records Show It’s a Discipline ‘Hot Spot’

School Discipline: Federal data show that no Pittsburgh students were arrested during the 2017-18 school year — certainly something worthy of celebration, if only it were true. Instead, a report released this month by the ACLU of Pennsylvania found that Allegheny County — and Pittsburgh in particular — is a student discipline “hot spot.” While the district said its underreporting was done in error, an analysis of county juvenile court data show that police carried out nearly 500 school-based arrests in Pittsburgh Public Schools that year. Those arrests disproportionately targeted Black students and children with disabilities, often for minor offenses. During the 2018-19 school year in Allegheny County, Black students were arrested nearly nine times more often than their white classmates, according to juvenile court records. That year, 1 in 51 Black boys and 1 in 69 Black girls were arrested at school, compared with 1 in 316 white boys and 1 in 894 white girls. Outside southwest Pennsylvania, federal education data suggest the issue of underreporting student arrests is also widespread. More than 60 percent of large school districts nationwide reported zero school-related arrests during the 2015-16 year, according to a 2020 report by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The harms of having police in schools are much more widespread than districts report,” the ACLU’s Harold Jordan said. Read more by The 74’s Mark Keierleber.

Supreme Court: Maine allows private religious schools to participate in its tuition benefit program for families that don’t have a public high school in their community — except for schools that seek to instill religious beliefs in their students. That caveat is at the heart of Carson v. Makin, . Plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Bindas, with the libertarian Institute for Justice, argued that the state is discriminating against religion. He is representing two families that were told they could not receive a tuition benefit because they wanted their children to attend religious schools. Based on the justices’ questioning, experts said, states would likely no longer be able to defend such rules after the court rules next year. “Very few of the justices paid any attention to the longstanding principle at the heart of American constitutional tradition — that taxpayers should not be forced to fund religious education,” said Alex Luchenitser of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. .

Aldeman: There Is No ‘Big Quit’ in K-12 Education. But Schools Have Specific Labor Challenges That Need Targeted Solutions

School Staffing: The full numbers aren’t in yet, but 2021 will likely set a modern record for the number of Americans who quit their jobs. Economists have dubbed it the Great Resignation, as millions of employees search for higher pay and better working conditions. Is this Big Quit happening in education? Says contributor Chad Aldeman, the data suggest the answer is no. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while turnover rates are setting new highs in the private sector, they look pretty normal in public education. That doesn’t mean there are no labor challenges in K-12. It’s just that those issues are smaller in magnitude than what the private sector faces, and they are much more about specific schools and particular roles within schools. Districts, Aldeman writes, should respond accordingly with solutions — including those involving targeted pay hikes — tailored to the actual challenges schools face. Read the full analysis. 

In Push to Renew School Accountability, Feds Urge States to Keep Eye on Pandemic’s Effects

Accountability: Following a two-year pause, states must resume pinpointing their lowest-performing schools and those with persistent achievement gaps, according to a recent draft of guidance from the U.S. Department of Education. But bowing to uncertainty sparked by the pandemic, officials will allow one-year changes to the criteria states use to identify those schools. That means report cards states use to communicate student performance to the public could look quite different. “This gives a clear signal to the field and to the states that we are restarting accountability,” said Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, president and CEO of the Data Quality Campaign, one of the organizations that said more statewide data is necessary to fully understand the impact of the pandemic on students. The guidance also invites states to propose long-term changes that account for other areas of student success, such as college and career data. But others argue allowing states to make changes to how they rate schools could leave parents confused. Linda Jacobson reports.

‘We Don’t Have Any Talented Students’: Confronting English Language Learners’ Drastic Under-Representation in Elementary Gifted & Talented

Equity: English learners are drastically underrepresented in elementary school gifted and talented programs, and the one tool advocates hoped would better identify them — non-verbal assessments — doesn’t work, critics say. In Florida’s Brevard County Public Schools, for example, only five of the 1,927 English learners in grades K-6 are among the 1,836 students enrolled in the district’s G&T program. Experts say teachers are not adequately trained to spot giftedness in these students and often falsely assume their language difficulties mean they are deficient or need remediation. Meanwhile, a national expert told The 74’s Jo Napolitano, many districts are abandoning costly non-verbal gifted assessments because they yield the same results as traditional verbal tests. A new exam that uses animation could help, and many G&T educators strive to identify giftedness in ways that transcend language. Still, it remains an enormous challenge. “We have all of this talent just sitting there,” said Jonathan Plucker, president of the National Association for Gifted Children. “And the child isn’t benefiting from their own skills. That is a massive societal failure. We simply have to do better.”

Rotherham: Bloomberg’s $750M Grant Is the Jolt the Charter Sector Needs — and a Litmus Test for White Democrats Who Claim to Back School Choice

Commentary: Bloomberg Philanthropies’s $750 million effort to create more high-quality charter school seats around the country is an exciting jolt to a sector that needs it, says contributor Andrew Rotherham. Which is why the lack of enthusiasm from the education reform and charter school world over the Bloomberg announcement was as noteworthy as the commitment itself. While charters are not a panacea or silver bullet, they get results. On average, urban charters outperform other public schools in their communities — often substantially. Support for charter schools is above 70 percent among Black Americans, who, along with Hispanic Americans, disproportionately support expanding school choice. You know who disproportionately doesn’t vigorously support more school choice? White Democrats. It’s noteworthy just how much opposition to greater educational choice comes from white progressives who are, on average, to the left politically of Black and Hispanic Americans on pretty much every issue except educational empowerment. Charters are an equity solution in public education because they give low-income parents power and choice and help create good schools in communities too often denied them. The next time someone tells you with great solemnity about how they “center” parents and just humbly follow the evidence on school choice, ask how excited they must be about a $750 million commitment to try to do that. Read the full essay.

Analysis: Pandemic Learning Loss Could Cost U.S. Students $2 Trillion in Lifetime Earnings. What States & Schools Can Do to Avert This Crisis

College & Career: In newly released data, the nonprofit testing company NWEA reports that the median student in grades 3 to 8 returned to school this fall 9 to 11 percentile points behind in math and 3 to 7 percentile points behind in reading. But it’s difficult to convey the magnitude of that learning loss. To make it more tangible, contributors Dan Goldhaber, Thomas J. Kane and Andrew McEachin propose restating the loss in terms of students’ future earnings — which they calculate could total $43,800 per child, or more than $2 trillion spread across the 50 million public school students currently enrolled in grades K to 12. Schools could compensate for those deficits with tutors, extra periods of instruction in math and reading, Saturday academies and afterschool programs. But no one should expect to produce the equivalent of the necessary eight to 19 extra instructional weeks just by asking teachers to run a few review sessions and to generally pick up the pace. Read the authors’ suggestions for what states and schools can do now to avert this looming crisis.

Curriculum Case Study: We’ve Been Teaching Reading Wrong for Decades. How a Massachusetts School’s Switch to Evidence-Based Instruction Changed Everything

Curriculum: The second in our recent series of essays about the Knowledge Matters Campaign’s tour of Massachusetts schools spotlights UP Academy Holland and the efforts of educators Victoria Thompson, Elizabeth Wolfson and Mandy Hollister in leading an instructional shift away from balanced literacy. In its place, the trio helped implement a new high-quality, knowledge-building English language arts curriculum specifically designed to support the science of reading — a curriculum they say changed everything for their students. “For us,” they write, “this journey and shift has been personal — personal for ourselves as educators to do right by our students, personal in that we had been taught a way of teaching that was wrong and yet believed it for so many years, and personal for the students who we saw struggle every single day with the way things were taught.” Read more about their students’ dramatic improvements — and how the school’s story ties into a national trend of educators embracing a new vision of teaching and learning through the implementation of high-quality instructional materials. (Also be sure to check out our complete curriculum series right here)��

Go Deeper: Get essential education news and commentary delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up here for The 74’s daily newsletter.

Conducted by researchers at Yale University, the study — involving more than 6,600 center- and home-based child care providers — showed that masks on children were associated with a 13- to 14 percent reduction in closures, while social distancing of 6 feet reduced the chances of closure by just 7 percent.  

With for vaccinations — and shots for those under 5 possibly still —  the study supports experts’ recommendations that children 2 and up wear masks, especially with Omicron still causing frequent outbreaks, the authors wrote in an American Medical Association journal.

At a time when masking continues to incite protests, the findings, they said, “have important public health policy implications for families that rely on child care to sustain employment.” While the spike in cases due to Omicron has led to in centers, masking, the researchers added, can keep programs from having to close.

COVID-19’s impact on child care has had serious ramifications for the nation’s economy and families with young children. Thousands of mothers left the when their children’s programs shut down. About 3 percent of child care centers after lockdowns, according to one analysis, and many lost an important source of playtime and language development.

But requiring young children over 2 to wear masks, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently , is arguably even more controversial than such mandates are for kids in kindergarten and beyond. Opponents argue the masks make it hard for young children to recognize facial expressions and develop language skills, while others say those concerns are unfounded. 

“We know children as young as 2 can safely and consistently wear masks if adults make that a routine expectation,” said Dr. Dean Blumberg, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of California, Davis. He said masks may soon become optional as spring and summer approach, but added it’s important to remember why masks were recommended in the first place. “This was a completely novel virus that nobody had any immunity to,” he said.

The Yale study is different from most because it asked teachers about their masking practices in the spring of 2020 and followed up with the same teachers a year later, said Walter Gilliam, a child psychiatry and psychology professor at Yale and co-author of the paper.

It was also “a much larger study than most and takes into account many different types of programs in a wide variety of communities,” he said. 

Policing mask use

The results, however, come as the COVID-related restrictions of the past two years have started to ease. Some states, for example, no longer recommend contact tracing.

In a Tuesday Washington Post , three physicians wrote that schools should begin to phase out mask mandates. The CDC’s latest guidance, which describes the benefits of  , such as N95s, they wrote, offers a “pathway to compromise” in which those who are at higher risk protect themselves.

“Time and energy that staff spend policing mask use is far better spent on teaching and supporting children,” they wrote, also citing research that of masks on young children’s development, particularly those that might have hearing loss.

The Yale paper addresses concerns that masks may inhibit children’s social and speech skills. The data is “very mixed and any negative impacts on children reading social cues is very small,” Gilliam said. “It’s COVID-19 that’s harmful, not the masks that prevent its spread.”

Blumberg at the University of California added that young children are not with masked adults all of the time and have “plenty of opportunities to develop these language skills and look at people’s lips moving.”

Even so, mask opponents are unlikely to be persuaded to drop their objections, noting that the generally recommends against mask use for children under 5. 

“The harmful effects are amplified with young children,” said Sharon McKeeman, founder of Let Them Breathe, a California advocacy group that sued the state over its mask requirement in schools and is backing that defy the state’s indoor mask requirement. “Child care providers are starting to stand up for their rights and Let Them Breathe is here to support them.”

‘Always trying to catch up’ 

California still has a strict indoor mask mandate that includes child care centers. New York, where a judge this week, is another. But in most cases, “parents likely choose programs that align with their beliefs with respect to mask wearing,” because child care centers are generally private businesses and not run by public boards like schools, said Lynette Fraga, CEO of Child Care Aware, a nonprofit that advocates for child care policies and supports local efforts to help families find care.

She noted that while opinions on masking in child care settings are as varied as they are in K-12, requiring masks is relatively inexpensive compared to other mitigation strategies like upgrading ventilation systems or social distancing, which can require more staff and smaller class sizes.

The Yale study showed that in the early months of the pandemic, only 9 percent of centers and child care homes in the sample required children to wear masks, likely representing “highly vigilant programs.” the authors wrote. A year later, about a third of the programs had a mask policy for children. 

One factor that contributes to the pushback against masking children — whether it’s in child care or K-12 — is that families rarely know when the requirement will be lifted, said Benjamin Linas, a Boston University epidemiologist,

With Omicron still prevalent, he agrees that both schools and child care centers should currently require masks as much as possible. Dr. Thomas Murray, the lead author of the Yale study, the increased rate of child hospitalizations associated with Omicron. At the beginning of January, an average of were being admitted to the hospital each day — a pandemic record.

But Linas said families need to know upfront what’s triggering masking rules and what conditions would allow such requirements to lapse. He co-authored last year that includes a tool to guide districts in making such calls. The same process could be used in programs for young children, he said. 

Public health and district officials “typically do not make the goals of masking policy clear,” he said, “and so the policies are inherently stagnant and always trying to catch up.”

From early November through Jan. 1, the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn family was under investigation by the Administration for Children’s Services, or ACS, the New York City agency tasked with looking into suspected cases of child abuse and neglect. Healy had been reported for educational neglect for not sending her children to school amid COVID fears, even though she says her kids kept up with their work remotely. 

The report that spurred their investigation was one of more than 2,400 that New York City school personnel made to the during the first three months of the 2021-22 school year, according to data obtained by The 74 through a public record request — about 45 percent more than were reported over the same time span a year prior when most of the city’s . From August 2020 to November 2021, records show NYC school staff made a total of 9,674 reports. 

The highest monthly tally, 1,046, came in November 2021, the same month that ACS and the Department of Education issued ​​instructing schools to have patience with families keeping their children home due to COVID-19 concerns, and to avoid jumping to allegations of educational neglect when students don’t show up.

About a third of the reports from NYC school personnel from September through November — 839 out of 2,412 — included an allegation of educational neglect. Of that total, just over half named educational neglect as the sole allegation, according to an ACS spokesperson, who pointed out that the rate was actually higher pre-COVID in the fall of 2019, when about 40 percent of reports from city school personnel alleged educational neglect.

Many of the families caught up in COVID-related investigations this school year, including the Healys, say that given the DOE’s statements and guidance, their ACS reports should never have been made.

Child welfare investigations, which disproportionately involve low-income families of color, can have devastating impacts. Charges can stay on parents’ records for years — even in cases like Healy’s where the agency ultimately found no evidence of neglect. Job prospects in fields like child care and education can be erased. And most dire, children can be separated from their parents — a trauma that studies show is later associated with elevated risks of .

ACS has clarified that, on its own, missing class should not be a reason for educators to suspect neglect. “We are … working together (with the DOE) to make sure that families are not reported to the state’s child abuse hotline solely because of [a] child’s absences from school,” a spokesperson wrote in a Jan. 13 email to The 74, adding that the agency is providing training to professionals working with children on ways to support families without calling the hotline.

But now, after New York City student attendance rates plunged in early January amid surging Omicron cases, and with over how the Adams administration will approach remote learning, questions swirl over whether even more families may get entangled in the child welfare web.

“I’m … worried about who’s going to be asked to answer for the decisions that they made in the wake of Omicron,” said Gabriel Freiman, head of education practices at the legal nonprofit .

Healy echoed the concern, adding that families who kept children home amid the surge may be “vulnerable to possible investigation.”

How did we get here?

Rewind to the fall: New York City announced that schools would open in-person with no option for remote learning, and Healy was terrified. She had suffered massive personal losses through the pandemic — more than a dozen of her relatives had died of the virus, she said, ranging in age from 36 to 87 — and the Brooklyn mother remained unconvinced that sending her children into crowded buildings was a good idea. She quickly submitted applications for home instruction for both of her kids. 

Meanwhile, just before classrooms reopened, the nation’s largest school district made a vow to parents: “The only time ACS will intervene is if there is a clear intent to keep a child from being educated, period,” then-schools Chancellor Meisha Porter said during a September . “We want to work with our families because we recognize what families have been through.”

Even while remote, Healy’s kids were still learning, she said. Both were accessing and submitting coursework via Google Classroom. She had even met with school staff to update both children’s Individualized Education Programs, the plans that spell out their special needs and mandated school services.

“I was in constant contact (with the schools),” Healy said. “​​All of the things that needed to happen were still happening.”

So it caught Healy off guard when, in early November, an ACS caseworker knocked on her door. The agency had received a report of suspected educational neglect from a staff member at her younger child’s school.

Healy had understood that a visit from ACS was a possibility. As a member of the advocacy group PRESS, , she knew of numerous other parents keeping their children home from school due to coronavirus concerns who had been investigated. She had even put together informing parents of their rights when ACS shows up. But her own investigation still took her by surprise. If anything, she was over-involved in her children’s education, she thought, not neglectful. 

“I’ve always inserted myself into the schools whether they wanted me there or not,” Healy joked.

Familiar with her rights as a parent, Healy did not let the caseworker inside their house. But despite being armed with strategies to navigate the situation, the visit was jarring to the whole family. After the caseworker left, her 14 year-old son, who has autism, paced back and forth for an hour, worried that the unfamiliar woman would return with law enforcement, Healy said. Her 13 year-old child, who identifies as non-binary, had continued nightmares, fearing they would be taken away from the only home they knew. Even Healy herself couldn’t avoid creeping thoughts of the worst-case scenario.

“You automatically think someone’s here to take my kids away,” she told The 74.

‘ACS is like the police’

Just like doctors and nurses, school personnel are mandated by New York state law to report suspected cases of child abuse and neglect to a central hotline. But even before COVID-19, alike have critiqued the practice as potentially harmful to families and prone to racial bias.

In New York City, some of children named in ACS investigations are Black or Hispanic, while, together, those racial groups make up 60 percent of the city’s youth. In 2019, according to , the lower-income, mostly Black and Latino neighborhood of East Harlem saw over six times as many investigations as the nearby Upper East Side, which is mostly white and affluent.

Even among neighborhoods with similar poverty rates, those with greater shares of Black and Hispanic residents face , research shows.

“ACS has long been used to criminalize our families,” said Tanesha Grant, a New York City parent leader who formed the group for mutual aid throughout the pandemic. Many Black parents, she told The 74, see child protective services as a form of racialized surveillance and punishment. 

“ACS is a curse word in our community. ACS is like the police,” she said.

“It is deeply concerning to us,” said a spokesperson for the agency, “that, year after year, there are dramatic racial and ethnic disparities in the reports ACS receives from the state and is required [by law] to investigate.” 

As per a 2021 state , mandated reporters are now required to undergo implicit bias training intended to keep reporters’ assumptions from coloring their assessments of parental fitness.

But just how much of an impact it will make in the K-12 setting remains to be seen. Nationwide, school staff report more allegations to child protective services than any other category of reporters, yet school reports are or lead to family interventions, research shows. In New York City, approximately 1 in 3 calls from school personnel ultimately lead to evidence of abuse or neglect, said ACS. In cases where no evidence is found, families often report that the investigation process can be .

There’s often a mismatch, said Freiman, of Brooklyn Defenders, between the typical impacts of child protective services investigations and the purpose they are meant to fulfill.

“Neglect is supposed to cover a category below which we don’t expect any parent to go,” the legal expert explained. 

But the parents keeping their children out of classrooms this school year, from what he has seen, tend to be highly involved and caring, like Healy. Some are even former PTA heads at their children’s schools. 

“These aren’t people who are trying to hurt their children. They’re trying to protect their children,” he told The 74. “ACS is just the wrong tool to employ.”

Even the softer guidance that ACS and DOE offered in November was not enough to sufficiently blunt that tool, advocates said. Healy said she worked with 50 families accused of educational neglect through PRESS and was only able to use the updated guidance to dismiss cases against two of them. 

Miranda rights for child welfare

As a way to mitigate some of the worst effects of ACS investigations, state Sen. Jabari Brisport, a former educator from Brooklyn, is that would require a Miranda-style reading of parents’ rights at the outset of every child welfare investigation. 

“Parents of color are more likely to be unaware of the rights they have when dealing with [child protective services],” Brisport told The 74. “The bill seeks to address the disparities in the CPS system.”

When, without warning, ACS showed up at the door of Melissa Keaton’s Flatbush, Brooklyn apartment in late October, the mother was taken by surprise. Having lost her father, who was a caregiving adult to her 9-year-old daughter, in April 2020 during the city’s deadly first coronavirus wave, Keaton chose not to return her traumatized child to her sought-after dual language school in Manhattan’s Lower East Side when classrooms reopened. The family was not ready for a two-train commute to and from school each day, Keaton decided. Unlike Healy, she was in the dark about how to navigate the interaction with her caseworker.

“There’s no paperwork. There’s no way of, you know, finding out what is this process? How does it work? What is expected of me?” Keaton told The 74.

Parents are not legally obligated to allow caseworkers to enter their homes unless ACS has a warrant. But many parents assent without realizing they have a choice. If caseworkers find evidence of drug use or other outlawed practices, it can lead to compounding charges and increase the likelihood of child separation. 

“Sometimes our families actually find themselves in a deeper hole — not because they’ve done anything wrong — but because ACS comes into the home looking for a problem,” said Tajh Sutton, a PRESS organizer. “They’re going through your refrigerator, your cabinets … asking these really invasive and inappropriate questions of your children.”

“This bill doesn’t create new rights,” explained Brisport. “It literally tells parents what their rights are.”

‘ACS should not have been called’

Despite the lasting psychological impacts of the neglect investigation upon her children, Healy also acknowledged that her caseworker was kind and actually quite helpful. The staffer fast-tracked her children’s applications for home instruction, helping her younger child recently gain approval for the program. Healy hopes her son will also soon be approved.

But her example, she believes, is an outlier. Not everyone is so fortunate. 

On Dec. 23, Keaton was preparing to lay flowers on the gravestone of her late father. The day marked what would have been his 63rd birthday — and because her dad’s December birthday used to be a part of the family’s holiday rituals, Keaton was feeling his absence even more acutely.

But before she left, she was contacted by her caseworker, who relayed what the mother thought was good news: She was ready to close the case. Keaton told her to come by.

When the caseworker arrived, she told Keaton that the investigation had been completed, but the agency had indeed found evidence of neglect. The news hit her like a thunderclap, Keaton said, stirring fears for how she might appeal, what the findings might mean for her future employment having previously worked at a children’s summer camps, and, most of all, whether it opened the possibility of her daughter being taken away.

The message, Keaton said, was “imprinted in my mind throughout the holidays, along with the thought of, ‘What happens next?’” 

The caseworker instructed her to appeal, Keaton said. When pressed on the evidence behind the finding of neglect, Keaton said, the caseworker explained that her daughter’s school had taken weeks to respond to requests, and when they did, they cited her elementary schooler’s inconsistent 2019 summer school attendance as a strike against the family — data that Keaton said is “completely false.”

Staff at the elementary school did not respond to requests for comment and ACS said that it cannot disclose the details of individual cases. Keaton is awaiting paperwork in the mail that will provide insight into the exact reasons the educational neglect allegation was substantiated by ACS. 

Keaton believes her case was unproductive at best, and inappropriate at worst. She was trying to keep her daughter safe and had been putting together educational assignments for her despite, she said, not being provided materials by her school. She was also applying for medically necessary home instruction — a process through which the November ACS and DOE joint guidance instructs schools to support parents wary of COVID rather than reporting them to child services. 

“Based on the guidelines,” said Keaton, “ACS should not have been called.”

Lead Image: Paullette Healy at the front door with her younger child, Kira. (Asher Lehrer-Small)

It’s long been an underlying logic of pandemic safety for schools: In order to contain COVID transmission, identify which students and staff have been exposed to the virus and make sure they quarantine or test negative before coming back to class.

That wisdom appears to be changing, however, in the wake of the Omicron surge, which experts say may have now peaked in many U.S. communities, but continues to strain K-12 operations.

Three New England states — , and — have recently announced new guidance recommending a pivot away from individualized contact tracing in schools and toward strategies like symptom monitoring and home test kits for those worried that they may be sick.

“We are recommending that school health personnel increase their focus on identifying symptomatic individuals, rather than monitoring in-school close contacts,” Massachusetts Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley, Massachusetts wrote in a Jan. 18 . 

“Individuals identified as close contacts in school are very unlikely to contract or spread COVID-19,” he continued. “Therefore, extensive contact tracing and associated Test and Stay procedures are not adding significant value as a mitigation strategy despite the demand they place on the time of school health staff and school staff at large.” 

New York announced in mid-January that it was , which was for the general population rather than K-12 specific. And individual school systems including ; ; and have also opted to ease away from the practice, often ramping up other mitigation strategies instead.

Contact tracing puts a “​​now-impossible workload” on school districts, Berkeley Unified School District Superintendent Brent Stephens wrote in a Jan. 15 . The school system is now offering , regardless of exposure, and is investing in highly protective KN95 masks for students and staff.

A pre-Omicron study of classroom transmission in California and Illinois published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that roughly just out of every 100 school-based close contacts of positive cases, on average, ultimately got sick themselves — casting into doubt, for , the added value of the labor intensive practice of cross-checking rosters to track in-school exposure.

Then came the Omicron variant, spurring record-breaking infection levels. In Yonkers, New York, a . In Providence, Rhode Island, some classrooms had than present in class. Last week, across the country, more than caught the virus, a pandemic record and over four times more than at any point during previous surges.

The ultra-rapid spread made it next to impossible for some districts to accurately track exposures, school leaders said.

“Omicron is spreading more quickly than contacts can be traced. Contact tracing for this variant is ineffective,” wrote Lou Goscinski, superintendent of Maine’s York School District, in a Jan. 13 explaining that the practice would be discontinued.

Indeed, the timeline from exposure to transmission is than with Delta or other strains of the virus, scientists say. For districts that are practicing universal masking, that means “contact tracing doesn’t do much as a preventative measure,” said Danny Benjamin, co-chair of the at Duke University, which examines COVID-19 spread in schools.

“By the time you figure out who was in the room, were they really close, were they vaccinated, the list goes on and on, it’s now a couple of days after exposure and that child is now infectious,” Benjamin told The 74. “So [contact tracing] is not as helpful to contain the disease as we were seeing with the ancestral variant or the Delta variant.”

From a labor standpoint, too, Omicron made contact tracing less tenable, said Linda Mendonca, president of the National Association of School Nurses. Tracking exposure was already a heavy lift for school personnel, usually requiring nurses to scour seating charts from mealtimes, bus rides and classrooms every time a student would test positive. In many cases, that work continued into the weekends because schools needed to keep sick or potentially exposed students from showing up on Monday, she said. At some schools, nurses had to let the typical yearly screening of students’ eyesight and hearing go by the wayside because the contact tracing programs took up so much of their time.

Then after the winter holidays, skyrocketing caseloads pushed many schools’ case tracking programs past the breaking point.

“I heard many school nurses just saying, ‘This is not manageable. We can’t keep doing this at this … capacity,” Mendonca told The 74.

Regardless, the longtime school nurse chose not to comment on whether now is the right time to ditch contact tracing altogether.

“We’re waiting to see what the CDC comes out with,” she said, emphasizing the continued importance of mitigation strategies like masking, ventilation and vaccination.

The last update to CDC guidance on contact tracing in schools came in mid-October, according to the agency’s , which says the practice remains an effective strategy for reducing COVID spread in schools when used alongside other layered mitigation strategies.

But Benjamin is willing to take a stronger stance. Even amid Omicron, COVID transmission in schools remains low when all students and staff are wearing masks, he said. His team has a forthcoming paper that answers a key question: How many close contacts in fully masked schools develop infections after being exposed to the highly infectious variant?

“If everyone’s wearing masks, it’s still under 5 percent, but it’s no longer in the 1 percent range,” he said, referring to the secondary transmission rate in school under the earlier strains.

Those numbers combined with Omicron’s speed of transmission and the logistical headaches of exposure tracking lead him to believe contact tracing may no longer be a necessary or useful measure for schools that are universally masking. But for schools that aren’t mandating face coverings, he takes a different tune.

“In the unmasked districts, you probably want to [continue contact tracing],” said the Duke University doctor, explaining that the practice can help determine whether specific individuals who were exposed should mask going forward so as not to infect others and test, tactics known as mask to stay and test to stay.

“It interrupts the chain between a bunch of us infecting each other,” said Benjamin.

As cases begin to subside in some, but not all, parts of the country, many schools are now scrapping mask rules. Virginia Gov. Glen Younkin’s to let parents opt out of school face-covering requirements took effect on Monday (although it is now facing ). And two Long Island districts to end their requirement that students wear face coverings in school when the New York state masking mandate expires on Feb. 1.

A New York state judge, meanwhile, ruled on Monday night that the and can’t be enforced, but that decision was quickly stayed by an appellate court judge Tuesday afternoon. For now, until the appellate court decides whether to uphold or overturn the lower court’s ruling. The back-and-forth created at least temporary confusion for school leaders Tuesday and fueled school mask opponents, with the hashtag #UNMASKOURCHILDREN trending on Twitter.

Meanwhile, students themselves are spooked. In early January, young people in New York City staged a walkout to protest what participants said were unsafe conditions in schools. Thousands of students joined the demonstration, calling for more COVID safety mitigation measures and a temporary pivot to remote learning.

In the following days, students in ; ; and have also staged walkouts making similar demands.

Samantha Farrow, an organizer of the New York City walkout and a high school junior in the city, said that her school did not notify her when her desk-mate in French class left halfway through the school day after testing positive. The high schooler only found out about the exposure, she said, because that student texted her directly.

“No one tells students anything and it feels like we’re getting left out of the loop,” Farrow told The 74 in early January. “It’s not fair to us because we’re the ones being impacted by this.”

Since the start of the current school year, the gap had been closing, but in December, the Omicron variant sent school systems back into disarray. Between Nov. 28 and Jan. 9, Zearn use among students in prosperous school districts fell 2 percent. In school systems with concentrations of poverty, however, it plunged 13 percent.

Dramatic, yes, but the next discovery was the bigger surprise. While students who were able to attend school in person have better weathered the pandemic academically, Sharma was stunned to see that Zearn’s new data did not correlate to places where schools had shifted to distance learning because of the variant. 

This time, the gaps appear to be biggest where COVID-19 infection rates are highest.

“While schools are open amidst Omicron surges, students from low-income communities are missing critical instructional time,” the report states. “While Omicron is everywhere, its inequitable effects are not.”

It’s a preliminary snapshot, Sharma says, but its implications merit immediate attention: Keeping schools open for in-person classes is not enough. Schools need better plans for preventing new disruptions from interrupting student learning. Zearn’s researchers aren’t certain what’s happening, but they have suggestions about what education leaders should consider.

“Districts that have remained open have experienced , either because they or someone in their family has contracted the virus or they have needed to quarantine for exposure,” the Zearn report notes. “In many districts, particularly those that serve students from low-income communities, the .”

has found that up to 12 million students still lack reliable internet connections. And while school districts have spent billions in federal relief funds on technology, it’s not clear to Sharma that students have adequate access to them this year.

“Do these kids have devices at home if they need to quarantine, if their parents need to quarantine, if their teacher is sick?” Sharma wonders. “Because it looks like they don’t. Why aren’t they logging in? My wondering is, have we spent money but not actually solved the digital divide? Are they letting the computers go home? I think they’re not.”

The data Zearn collects remains one of the nation’s only real-time indicators of children’s math participation and achievement. Economists at Opportunity Insights, jointly run by researchers at Harvard and Brown universities, as part of an economic tracker documenting the pandemic’s inequitable impacts on different socioeconomic groups. 

The 74 last year took a deep dive into how the Opportunity Insights data was showing up in schools. Academic assessments, surveys of student and educator mental health and other sources of information have since backed up many of the predictions researchers made in those stories.

When the gap yawned open again in December, Zearn researchers first compared locations where app use had plummeted against a closure tracker maintained by Burbio, which catalogues disruptions to in-person schooling nationwide. Surprised to see no correlation, they tried the same exercise using the New York Times’ interactive case-count tracker — to a very different result. 

In December, as Omicron’s disruptions were just beginning, McKinsey & Co. released an analysis that showed the achievement gap has widened by a third. Before the pandemic, students in majority-Black schools were nine months behind their peers. Now they are a full year behind.

The new disparity will compound existing gaps, Sharma predicts: “The kids who missed the most [at the start of the crisis] are now again missing the most.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation provide financial support to Zearn and The 74. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to Opportunity Insights and The 74.

In 2019, the Arizona mother of two sent her older daughter off to kindergarten in Scottsdale, Ariz.’s Cave Creek Unified School District.

But after Mac Ban saw the district’s tepid response to the pandemic, she started home-schooling her at taxpayer expense. Arizona’s publicly funded now underwrites her kids’ education. 

Similar scholarship accounts could soon do the same for millions of other students nationwide as a new raft of proposed laws makes its way through state legislative sessions this month, buoyed by parent anger at district policies. 

Mac Ban balked at homeschooling at first, envisioning herself isolated and sitting at home with her kids for most of the week. But the more she learned, the more attractive it seemed. After she disenrolled her daughter from a district school and applied for the ESA, the child began learning lessons from the “classical Christian” . Her total bill comes to about $200 per month. 

School choice advocates see hope in stories like these. As the omicron variant continues to wreak havoc on schools’ normal procedures and parents lose patience with lockdowns, quarantines, and mask and vaccine mandates — as well as curricula that some view as politically charged — advocates hope that more parents like Mac Ban will insist that taxpayers help pay for their kids’ educations outside of neighborhood public schools. 

School choice has always relied on a fragile left-right coalition, mostly between Black and Latino activists and centrist-to-conservative legislators pushing to rebalance the power structure of public schooling. That coalition has weakened over the past few years. But scholars such as Paul Peterson, who directs Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, now see an opening. 

“A couple of years ago, there was a feeling in the country that opposition to school choice was on the rise,” he told attendees at a at Harvard. “Some of the coalition and backing for school choice was eroding and the movement, perhaps, was breaking down. But in light of the pandemic, there is a contrary feeling emerging in the country today: We are finding the passage of new school choice legislation in states across the country, new tax credit programs, new education savings accounts programs, expanded charter school programs. There’s a lot of interest in opening up to parents opportunities that haven’t existed in the past.” 

While culture war issues like critical race theory could upend that coalition once again, the mood at Harvard was one of optimism. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who now chairs the nonprofit reform group , pointed to recent legislative successes in Missouri, West Virginia and Kentucky. “The legislatures are on fire right now for these kinds of things, so it’s all good. And I don’t see it going away. I really don’t.” 

Choice advocates got an unexpected boost in November when Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in increasingly purple Virginia, beating establishment Democrat Terry McAuliffe by . Youngkin pulled off the surprisingly solid victory in part by tapping into parents’ anger about public education, giving a voice to thousands who felt schools haven’t risen to the challenge of basic education during the pandemic. McAuliffe, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton, didn’t help his case during the campaign when, discussing over anti-racist education, said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” 

Derrell Bradford, president of the education advocacy group , told attendees at the Harvard conference that McAuliffe’s mistake was displaying “just a complete and utter tone-deafness” to parents’ experiences. “After a year-and-a-half, almost two years, of incredibly disrupted institutional experience that was visited on almost every family in the country, you probably shouldn’t say something like ‘Parents don’t matter.’ You can make it a school choice lesson, but there’s a lesson there about treating people poorly who’ve been treated poorly.”

Republican strategists such as Christopher Rufo, who last year the raucous campaign to fight critical race theory, now talks of families’  public schools that don’t sync with their beliefs. 

As the omicron variant dominates and infection rates , vaccine requirements for even the youngest children could anger parents further. And while many parents have fought for a return to , others are clamoring for remote options amid the recent surge: Recent polls find that about six in 10 parents of school-aged children favor virtual learning.

For the past year or more, parents have been voting with their feet: Public schools have shed millions of students, recent data show. In New York City, the nation’s largest system, 50,000 fewer students attended last fall than two years earlier, The New York Times — a 4.5 percent decline. 

Chicago Public Schools in October had lost about 10,000 students over the past school year, a 3 percent drop. Overall enrollment was students over two years. 

Across California, the nation’s most populous state, educators are awaiting updated figures, but estimated enrollment has dropped since 2018-19 by about nearly 184,000 students, or about 3 percent, CalMatters earlier this month.

A Tyton Partners issued in July found that since the beginning of the pandemic, an estimated 17.5 percent of children have switched schools at least once, 75 percent more than in average years. And nearly 80 percent of parents said they’d be “more active in shaping their child’s education” in the future. 

At the Harvard conference, Bradford said school closures during the pandemic in 2020 suddenly brought the system’s failures into “high and broad relief” for 60 million families — especially families of color and low-income families.

“If you are a Black kid in New York City, you were the least important person in America for the last two years,” he said. “And if you were a teacher in that system, you were the most important person in America during that time. And we made it very clear and explicit that that was the case. We have a system that is built upon that foundation, with those priorities. And it couldn’t get the majority of kids reading proficiently before the pandemic.”

Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, said she actually expected “a far higher percentage of families” to opt out of their neighborhood schools, given fears about COVID and “the volatile debates about safety protocols” over the past two years. 

That a mass exodus didn’t happen, she added, “says to me that families are valuing public schools and what a good public school is for: academics, of course, but [also] as centers of communities, where kids eat healthy meals, access health care, and find social and emotional supports.”

For her part, Weingarten has pushed to “have a different conversation” about school choice, one focused on what has worked in private settings during the pandemic — but that also treats public schools less as a commodity that families can buy than as a public good.

“We’re experiencing a crisis in our democracy in which our public schools have a really important role,” she said. “Why not try to figure out how to make this year, regardless of where we are, a year of recovery and revival for our kids and not have a year of winners and losers?”

As 2022 progresses, that seems unlikely.

EdChoice’s director of national research, Michael McShane, that since the beginning of 2021, more than a dozen states have created or expanded school choice programs. The group now says enacted seven new choice programs and expanded 21 existing ones. Robert Enlow, the group’s CEO, called 2021 “without a doubt” for school choice since EdChoice has been tracking it. 

In an interview, McShane said that until recently he was expecting upcoming state legislative sessions in 2022 to be “pretty quiet” on topics like school choice. “I think now that there is going to be a lot going on.” 

Part of the reason may be the billions in COVID relief funds that school districts have received to keep them afloat, he said: “In politics, things happen easier when there’s a bunch of money sloshing around.”

On the one hand, the money softens the blow of all of the student departures — but it also makes it harder for school districts to complain to state lawmakers about the effects of often small choice programs that draw students out of the public system. “This program that’s spending $25 million across the entire state, how can you possibly have a problem with it when you just got $2 billion from the feds?” he said.

As legislative sessions begin in several states, choice is on lawmakers’ minds. In Kentucky last week, lawmakers an expanded school choice bill that would give families tuition assistance for private education.

In Missouri, lawmakers last year approved a tax credit to fund a private-school tuition education savings account, and lawmakers are now pushing to the program before it even takes effect. They’ve proposed lifting a $25 million funding cap and dropping requirements that families who participate live in a city with at least 30,000 residents.

Youngkin, just a few days into his term in Virginia, backed a GOP-led effort in the narrowly divided state legislature that would the number of charter schools from fewer than 10 to about 200. The bill would allow the state Board of Education to create regional charter school “divisions” with the power to approve new charter schools, despite opposition from localities. 

Higher graduation rates … or winning the culture war?

Concerns about parents’ role in their kids’ education played a “huge role” in Youngkin’s Virginia election victory, McShane said, but more broadly, parents “want to be back to normal now. And the fact that things aren’t back to normal is leading to a lot of discontent.”

Whether from rolling quarantines, mask or vaccine mandates, he said, “I think all of this stuff is just going to continue to roil schools, and you’re going to have people that just want out — they don’t want their school’s vaccine policy to be set by 51 percent of their neighbors. They’re going to want to have the option to go to a school where it’s decided at the school level.” 

Whether the current push for school choice plays out in both blue and red states, however, remains an open question. 

Most of the recent legislation has prevailed in reliably Republican-controlled legislatures, even if a few of the with the endorsement of a Democratic governors, as in West Virginia — or despite a governor’s veto, as in Kentucky.

In reliably blue Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who was elected in 2018, campaigned on a promise to slash funding for a . But once he was elected, “he actually signed a bill to strengthen it modestly,” said Greg Richmond, a longtime school choice advocate who now leads the Archdiocese of Chicago Catholic Schools.

“It seems to be one these classic cases where it’s easy to say anything when you’re running for office, but when you get into office, you find out voters have an interest in the program you want to eliminate — you start to change your mind about it a little bit,” he said. “So he backed off.” 

But these days, Richmond said, even private Catholic school parents are talking about exercising their right to leave schools over concerns about so-called critical race theory or enforcing mask and vaccine mandates — the latter two are required by an executive order signed by Pritzker, and also apply to private school students. 

“Some people got very mad and wrote to me: ‘We should be fighting this [mandate]. This is tyranny. This is against God — this is Satan. If you don’t change it, I’m going to pull my kids out of your school and send them to public schools,’” Richmond recalled. “I was like, ‘What? That makes no sense.’”

But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that these parents “were paying tuition in order to avoid that stuff.”

The trend toward ideological reasons for opting out is worrying for the larger school choice community, said Richmond, who from 2005 to 2019 was CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. He was also the founding chairman of the Illinois State Charter School Commission.

A decade ago, he said, “you could get bipartisan support for statements like, ‘Parents ought to be able to choose from a range of options that best meet the needs of their kids.’ Now conservatives aren’t saying stuff like that anymore. It’s like, ‘We’ve got to do this to save America from the Satanic clutch of CRT.’”

The new rhetoric, he said, is “not in pursuit of higher graduation rates and test scores,” he said. It’s “choice in pursuit of winning the culture war.”

That risks alienating politically moderate or left-leaning teachers and parents who would otherwise support choice. If the only politicians who support school choice also happen to be hard-right culture warriors, “,” or Trump supporters, “that might be an Achilles heel of all this,” he said.

‘Every kid is unique’

Mac Ban, the Phoenix mother, said part of her decision to homeschool actually revolved around what she saw as a social justice sensibility creeping into the district — she has heard examples of math word problems that included references to white subjects stealing from Black subjects. Mac Ban said such ideas are “not appropriate for an elementary school student.”

Young children, she said, “need to learn the basics. They need to learn the fundamental things, and they need to learn to think on their own, to think critically, not be told that they are an oppressor.”

Mac Ban, a first-generation American — her family came to the U.S. from Communist-controlled Poland in the 1970s — said she was able to qualify for Arizona’s ESA because her younger daughter had an individualized education plan due to a diagnosed speech delay. Simply being in the same family qualified her older sister, the kindergartner, for ESA funds as well.

Her initial concern that she and her kids would be isolated quickly passed when they joined the Highlands Latin community. “By homeschooling, I don’t mean that I’m just sitting here with my daughters every day and we don’t see anyone …We do all kinds of group lessons, activities. I’m never home. We’re always out and about, doing different things,” she said.

Mac Ban likes having the ability to choose what lessons and subjects her daughter — now a second-grader — pursues.

“Every kid is unique, and the parents know what’s best for their child, ultimately,” she said.

There is a “COVID test supply crisis” that will impact Michigan schools, said Linda Vail, health officer for Central Michigan’s Ingham County, on Wednesday. The state is working to supply testing kits to schools in the highest-risk communities where COVID is most rampant, she . States from Florida to Washington have .

Last week, the Biden administration announced that it was “” on its commitment to keeping schools operating safely in person by providing an additional 10 million monthly COVID test to K-12 institutions nationwide — 5 million rapid and 5 million PCR.

In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed “test-to-stay” protocols that allow students and staff who may have been exposed to COVID to remain in school buildings, provided they test negative for the virus before walking through the front doors. 

But where testing supplies dwindle, it can cause in school operations.

Most schools across the country have managed to stay open in the three weeks since winter break. But an average of more than have been disrupted by brief closures or pivots to virtual learning as they navigated high caseloads and staff shortages, according to the K-12 data service Burbio.

Last week, over 980,000 new youth COVID cases were reported nationwide, according to the , the largest weekly total to date and nearly quadruple the highest tally previous to Omicron. 

To help weather the current surge, The 74 spoke with White House Senior Education Policy Advisor Mary Wall who explained how schools can make use of the newly available testing resources.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Testing in schools is such a key issue right now during the Omicron surge and some officials are saying that they might run out of supply soon. What is your message to school leaders on how to access testing?

Mary Wall: Sure. We’ve really made a lot of efforts to make sure that schools have everything they need to reopen and remain open safely and testing has been central to that effort. It was the core investments that this administration made, starting with the American Rescue Plan, that really helped to make sure that schools could be ready for this moment. 

Across the country there are many, many schools who are implementing testing right now and building on the existing testing programs that they already established. We know that schools are kind of coming at this from a lot of different places and a lot of different levels of experience, so we want to make sure it’s easy for everyone to access both the tests as well as [strategies for] implementing testing in school. 

The biggest headline is the $10 billion that we invested in the (ELC) program at the CDC. That gave $10 billion to states to set up testing programs for schools and we have seen significant movement from states doing just that. 

We’re building on that with the new announcement of the 5 million rapid antigen tests, as well as the expansion of capacity through to reach another 5 million [through PCR testing] with lab capacity each month.

So that $10 billion investment, those 5 million rapid tests and 5 million PCR tests, those are big numbers. I’m curious, what are the mechanics going on here? And what might some school leaders not understand that could be keeping them from accessing tests that are available to them?

Testing can be a challenging endeavor for schools, and schools have been asked to do a lot over the course of the pandemic. We’ve seen it as our charge to make it as easy as possible for schools to tap into resources. 

With the news we announced last week, we have put out steps for schools to take right away. The first and foremost would be tapping into the state’s existing testing initiatives. Every state has something set up for K-12 COVID-19 testing and it varies by state how exactly it looks. But we have created a resource on the CDC website that is basically a that the school can go onto right now and click to learn more about what their state is doing for K-12 testing. That page will lead them to how to get involved in their state’s program. 

If they want to make use of the 5 million antigen tests that we are now offering, those are usually requested by state health departments. And they are … submitting requests to the CDC for those (based on local need). But testing resources fueled by the $10 billion in ELC funds, those are available right now and schools can tap into those right away. 

Operation Expanded Testing, which is the free lab-based (PCR) testing capacity that we offer as the federal government, that is also available and open for service right now. Schools can go online to the , click on the link for the regional hub, and they can begin the process right away … and can get started in as few as seven days after that.

We also want to remind all schools that they are able to also connect to other testing providers that operate in their state and use their ESSR [Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund] dollars. So there’s $132 billion distributed through the American Rescue Plan for states and school districts. Testing is an allowable use of funds and we’ve seen many school districts [use] that funding stream to set up customized programs in their schools — and that’s been in large districts and in small districts. 

That’s fantastic. And after the announcement last Wednesday, what kind of responses did the U.S. Department of Education receive from K-12 leaders?

We’ve been getting a lot of interesting and exciting responses on testing. It kind of falls into a couple different categories.

One is, we’ve gotten a lot of really eager and positive feedback from districts who have already been doing testing. … Those [school systems] have really been eager to take this to the next level. I know there have been districts who are doing weekly screening, for instance, and are excited to expand that into a test-to-stay a program. There’s others who have been doing diagnostic testing and decided, we really want to expand the screening tests we’re doing in our schools to be on a weekly basis to cover more kids and this new investment is going to help enable that.

We’ve also heard from many districts who have not done testing and said that they’re eager to tap into it. They know that the current surge has really seen significant increases for caseloads, including with kids, and they want to make sure they can use this as a key line of defense in their school buildings. And so for them, you know, [our role has] been how can we help you set up testing successfully in your building. We’ve gotten started on this right away by offering technical assistance and support to school districts. 

We’re offering more this week, we’re going to offer it every week for the next several weeks to make sure that no matter where you are in your testing journey, that if you’re a school who is interested in implementing testing that you’re able to do so. That you not only have the resources to do so in terms of tests, but that you also know how to use them effectively in your building.

Some people would say that the most recent expansion of K-12 testing is a great effort, but that it came too late to help schools respond nimbly to the Omicron surge. [Though of course, there might be subsequent surges.] I’m wondering what your response is there.

I disagree with that assessment. I think that we have made clear our commitment to keeping schools open safely. We’ve made that commitment clear through the American Rescue Plan, which provided $130 billion for K-12 schools through the Department of [Education] and $10 billion for K-12 COVID-19 testing. We’ve seen states take that money and set up testing approaches starting back in April of last year. So we are eager to build on that investment. And we saw across the country that schools who were already implementing testing strategies have been able to use it in this current surge very effectively.

And last question here. Clearly, the White House has put itself on the frontline of this testing shortage in schools. I’m curious whether the Department of Education also sees itself as responsible for helping to remedy the staffing shortages that many schools have been facing recently?

As an administration, we see the staffing issues that are occurring, and we take them very seriously. 

We passed the American Rescue Plan specifically with the purpose of making sure that we could have more staff in school buildings, both to accommodate mitigation strategies like social distancing, but also to make sure that schools have all the people on hand that they need to make sure that students can come back safely and have their needs met after this completely unprecedented time. 

First and foremost, we would want to remind school districts and states that they have that $130 billion to spend on additional staff, to retain the staff they have, to pay the staff they have more money, and really make sure that whatever personnel needs they have in response to pandemic can be met. 

We’ve also really tried to make clear that there are existing flexibilities, either in ways that you approach retirees or others who were previously teachers, ways that you can hire bus drivers, creative uses of bringing more staff into buildings to make sure that we can meet the staffing needs of the school.

In remarks where he took a swipe at Chicago’s recent labor dispute that shut down its public schools, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Thursday he was ” with the teachers union a temporary remote learning option.

While the mayor referred to United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew as his “good friend,” he did not indicate that the city and the union had reached an agreement on what a “quality” remote option would look like. A sticking point may be whether the union would allow classroom teachers to livestream their in-person lessons to remote students.

More than once, Adams described any possible remote learning option as temporary and strongly reiterated his position that students needed to be in school. “We’ve lost two years of education. Two years” he said. “The fallout is unbelievable. Math and English. English is is not as bad as math, but the numbers with math, they are frightening.”

One day after Mayor Eric Adams said it would take six months to develop a solid remote learning program, the head of the New York City teachers union pressed for quicker action and the schools chancellor said he was working on a plan.

But it might be at odds with how teachers want to deliver virtual learning, leaving students, parents and educators unclear about a path forward as the highly transmissible Omicron variant sweeps through the state and nation.

“We’ve called for a remote learning program since September, and we believe we need to do this,” United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said. “I think Mayor Adams is really thinking it through, because it is just the fact there’s over 200,000 children who haven’t been in school for over two weeks.”

Mulgrew’s remarks came during a town hall meeting Wednesday evening with roughly 15,000 UFT members and again Thursday morning on . 

“We need to set something up, because we hope this is the last wave,” he said, “but we do not know if it is. So, I think it’s time for the city really to think about it and contemplate it.”

Adams’s ​​estimate that it will take roughly six months for city schools to include virtual options would effectively push remote learning off until the end of the school year. He made the comments Wednesday during a conference call with officials, including more than two dozen city and state legislators who sent him a letter in the first week of January calling for a pivot to remote learning through Jan. 18 to slow the spread of the virus.

Meanwhile, , schools Chancellor David Banks told a parent advisory council Thursday morning that the city was in talks with the union to create a remote option for this year, but needs to iron out the details. 

“My goal is to create an option that will take us at the very least to the end of the school year,” Banks said at a virtual meeting. “If I could figure out a way to do a remote option starting tomorrow I would … It’s not quite as simple as that because you have to negotiate this stuff with the unions.”

According to Chalkbeat, Banks suggested that one way to have remote learning immediately would be to do away with an agreement with the union that prohibits schools from requiring teachers to livestream their lessons and urged parents to take their demands for a remote option directly to their local UFT chapter leaders. 

The back-and-forth was prompted by one of the most chaotic weeks in NYC schools since the pandemic first shut down classes in March 2020. Fear of the Omicron variant sparked widespread school walkouts by NYC students, who say they feel unsafe on campus and at risk of contracting the virus and bringing it home to their families. Worried parents have also been keeping their children home in : The New York City Department of Education reported Wednesday’s at 76.34 percent. 

The figure is a marked improvement from last week when more than 300,000 students skipped class. 

While some reports show the city might have already hit its peak, the infection rate remains troubling with roughly  The fast-spreading Omicron variant now has scores of . 

Studies have generally shown remote learning has led to compared to in-person instruction. In its earlier incarnation in NYC schools, it also posed staffing challenges with one set of teachers instructing children remotely while another set worked with them in the classroom. 

Mulgrew, whose union represents nearly 200,000 public schools educators and school-related professionals, among others, said the city needs a reliable means to connect with those students who are unable or unwilling to come to campus. 

“We have to make sure we are getting to all of the children because the learning loss we’ve seen already … is quite large,” he said. “But on the remote option, we don’t want to go back to 65 percent of the children staying home. So, for parents, I’m going to ask again, please if we have this option use it judiciously. And again, think about giving us consent for testing your child and really contemplate about getting your child vaccinated. Because these are two of the things the school system needs right now for keeping your child and all of the children safe.”

That leaves Superintendent Susan Enfield balancing keeping athletic programs running — which requires students to test three times a week — against maintaining an adequate supply of kits for the test-to-stay program and students displaying symptoms.

“We have a few thousand [tests] right now,” she said. “At the rate we’re going through them, that’s not going to last us more than a couple weeks.”

On Wednesday, the Biden administration to address the demand, announcing it will send 5 million rapid and 5 million lab-based PCR tests to schools each month to support screening and test-to-stay programs, which allow students to remain in class after exposure.

During a surge, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency will organize testing sites in or near schools for students, staff and families. The new resources are in addition to the $10 billion for school-based testing released last year.

In Highline, and in districts across the country, the has been sagging under the weight of Omicron and increased testing protocols. Requirements that students test after the holidays, combined with test-to-stay procedures, have created fierce competition for kits at the same time similar mandates are being enacted in other parts of society. at testing facilities, sold-out stores and are contributing to that President Joe Biden hasn’t managed the need for testing as well as he handled the vaccine rollout.

Republicans, but also some Democrats, the administration’s response to the Omicron outbreak at a Senate committee meeting Tuesday, accusing top health officials of acting too late to make more tests available. 

“I’m frustrated we are still behind on issues as important to families as testing, and supporting schools,” Senate education Chair Patty Murray said during the hearing.

Biden is expected to discuss his “whole-of-government” response to the surge Thursday. According to the White House, the administration has been finalizing contracts with companies at-home tests through the Postal Service and completing work on a government website where people can order them. Starting Saturday, insurance companies will be required to cover the cost of at-home tests, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Monday.

But while distributing tests to everyone who wants one might be “admirable,” districts need a more targeted approach, said Julia Rafal-Baer, who recently left Chiefs for Change to launch ILO Group (for “in the life of”), where she consults with districts on pandemic recovery efforts.

Districts, she said, “need to count on a consistent supply of tests with a real focus now on those who are mildly symptomatic,” she said.

Even as they scramble to have enough tests on hand, educators are thinking ahead to a time when testing asymptomatic students won’t be necessary. Districts, Rafal-Baer said, need to begin looking at “shifting protocols” in order to keep schools open as more students get vaccinated. 

“Any kind of shutdown at this point is going backwards,” she said, “and it’s going backwards to a point that we know is devastating.”

For now, COVID testing is part of keeping schools open.

Mara Aspinall, an adviser to the Rockefeller Foundation and a biomedical diagnostics expert at Arizona State University, said that in 2020, commitments from the foundation and governors to purchase tests allowed manufacturers to accelerate production. 

Through the , rapid tests went directly to schools and nursing homes. The federal government’s of BINAXNow tests also ensured states and districts a dependable inventory.

But before the Delta variant, when cases were declining, demand for testing tapered off. Such fluctuations, Aspinall said, make it hard for “manufacturers to anticipate whether their product will be sold when it’s available, or whether it will sit in a warehouse and expire.”

, which makes BINAXNow, shut down a lab in June and then restarted production when the Delta variant drove up demand.

‘Can’t justify going remote’

Whether schools can back off testing and tracing asymptomatic students, however, is still a matter of considerable debate, especially at a time when positive cases are reaching all-time highs.

Florida officials last week said they would begin to those who are at higher risk for getting severely sick from COVID-19, which contradicts guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One infectious disease expert the switch as a “recipe for disaster.”

In the Cobb County Schools in Georgia, leaders said they would increase access to testing but no longer require , in keeping with new state guidelines. Superintendent Chris Ragsdale said contact tracing — tracking down all possible close contacts of a student who tests positive — has drained staff resources.

The district’s COVID was last updated Dec. 17, before the holiday break, but according to the county health department, community transmission is , with 2,657 cases per 100,000 residents. 

“Giving up on contact tracing feels one step closer to giving up entirely on any pretense of mitigation,” said Cobb parent Alan Seelinger, among those who have advocated for masks and remote learning during COVID surges. “Our continued pleas for the superintendent and school board majority to make our schools safer feel pointless.”

But to Ragsdale’s point, tracing takes up staff time when schools are already coping with shortages. Washington superintendent Enfield, a former high school English teacher who is one of two finalists for superintendent in San Diego, taught a sixth grade science class Monday. She’s also sent all central office staff members with teaching certificates to cover classrooms. 

With student absentee rates about 20 percent, Enfield said some teachers have pushed for remote learning, but as long as 80 percent of kids are coming to school, “I can’t justify going remote right now,” she said. 

In addition, some schools are severely short-staffed because teachers are sick. “If you have a critical mass of staff at school out, you’re not talking about remote learning, you’re talking about no learning,” she said.

Considering COVID risk

If districts see declining support for testing students without symptoms and not enough staff members to trace close contacts, they should make decisions based on the level of COVID risk in a school community, said Leah Perkinson, a manager at the Rockefeller Foundation.

Immunocompromised students, those in multigenerational households with essential workers and those in contact with many people on a daily basis should be prioritized for screening, she said.

“The risk that they come into the school with COVID is higher, the risk of them spreading to others is higher and the consequences of infection are more dire than they are for their non-immunocompromised peers,” she said.

Calls for updated guidance regarding COVID testing are also coming from health care providers. 

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and its PolicyLab last week released for K-12 schools that suggest possible testing for those with mild symptoms and discontinuing weekly testing for students and staff unless transmission is high — and even then, just on a voluntary basis.

“Our guidance goes further than that of CDC’s in allowing more exposed but asymptomatic children and staff to return to school and reducing staff burden for contact tracing and weekly testing of asymptomatic individuals,” according to the document.

Elizabeth Lolli, superintendent of Dayton, Ohio, schools, decided to partner with her county’s health department for testing to avoid overwhelming staff and drawing criticism from families over COVID protocols.

“There’s enough controversy to keep everybody away from the reason that we’re here — so we can focus on kids,” she said. 

But the district still requires students to get tested if they’ve been out sick, and drive-through lines at the at the Montgomery County fairgrounds stretch around the track, with waits up to an hour.

Before the most recent outbreak, some education leaders were also hearing administrators ask: “What’s the end game for this?”

“At some point, that’s a fair question,” said Jason Leahy, executive director of the Illinois Principals Association. He added that some schools are sending students home because they don’t have rapid tests on hand. But then students are absent while waiting for results of PCR tests.

“COVID is not going away. We have to figure out how to live with it,” he said. “We need the CDC to step up and give an idea of what that would be.”

It will take roughly six months before New York City schools can add remote learning options, Mayor Eric Adams told elected officials Wednesday morning.

The timeline, which effectively means no virtual instruction through the end of the 2021-22 academic year, represents a stark rejection of the concerns of students, parents and teachers worried for the safety of in-person learning as the Omicron variant continues to cause roughly 40,000 new COVID cases per day in the city. 

On Tuesday, thousands of students walked out of class, protesting what they said were unsafe conditions. In the first week of January, over two dozen city and state legislators signed a to Mayor Adams calling for a temporary pivot to remote learning through Jan. 18 to slow the spread of the virus.

Adams’s estimate that it will take about six months for city schools to include virtual options came during a call with officials responding to their request for a virtual option. 

New York state Sen. Jabari Brisport was on the call and is one of the officials who co-signed the letter. 

“At first, the talking point (from the mayor) was that they would get back to us later at a future meeting about the remote option,” Brisport told The 74. “Near the end, when pressed again on a remote option, the pushback was that he wanted to do it the correct way and have as many stakeholders involved as possible, and make sure it works the best for students and teachers and that that process will probably take six months.” 

Adams has repeatedly said that he does not want to close schools or revert to remote learning in face of the current upheaval, but has not said publicly before when a remote option might be viable.

When asked about his statements Wednesday, Adams’s spokesperson Amaris Cockfield told The 74: “Today the mayor held a private question-and-answer session with lawmakers to discuss existing plans to keep children and teachers safe and keep schools open. He’s committed to working together with lawmakers in pursuit of the best outcomes for students and staff.”

Dora Chan, a senior at Brooklyn Technical High School and an organizer of Tuesday’s New York City student walkout, said the mayor’s stance feels “hypocritical.” Adams cited wanting time to engage with stakeholders, she said, but in her mind, the stakeholders have clearly spoken: the students by walking out this week and the teachers by rallying for a temporary remote option.

“We can’t wait six months. Six months is going to be in June,” added Samantha Farrow, another walkout organizer and Stuyvesant High School junior. “The mayor should be more empathetic and should be more timely with these decisions because what’s happening right now is happening right now.”

Studies have generally shown that remote learning has led to compared to in-person instruction. Numerous political leaders have maintained their emphasis on keeping schools open for in-person learning, including President Joe Biden, who announced Wednesday that his administration was sending millions of COVID-19 tests to schools to weather the Omicron surge.

Chan and Farrow acknowledged the flaws of virtual learning, but argue that, temporarily, it’s the only safe choice.

“When people … say remote learning is bad, I totally agree. I’ve been through it,” said Chan, who spent her entire junior year online. “But we’ve reached that point where it’s absolutely necessary to go back to [virtual instruction]. Obviously, we’re hoping that this is just for a bit until we get these COVID cases under control.”

This month, the high schooler said she’s stayed home from school because she lives with her grandparents and does not want to bring COVID home.

Farrow has returned to classrooms, but said the lax virus protocols worry her. Recently, her desk-mate in French class left halfway through the school day after learning their COVID test had come back positive. Farrow only found out about the exposure, she said, because that student texted her directly. On Monday, she said six separate friends told her that they were positive for COVID.

A spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education declined to comment on Adams’s position, telling The 74 that they prefer the mayor’s press office explain his remarks.

Brisport, himself a former math teacher in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, said he supports Adams’s vision for community input into how best to structure remote learning. But he doesn’t think that plan needs to be mutually exclusive with an immediate, temporary virtual shift.

“I think this is an area where we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” he said. “I would support having an imperfect remote option now, and then having this really well thought-out one in six months.”

In the first week back from holiday break in the nation’s largest school district, the daily attendance rate never topped . On Monday, rates rebounded slightly to 76 percent, but a large share of students remained absent, indicating widespread hesitation over safety conditions.

“A temporary remote option needs to be available to parents while infections continue to rise,” State Sen. Jessica Ramos wrote in a Jan. 6 explaining her letter to the Adams administration calling for temporary virtual learning. “Children are a critical unvaccinated population & families need to be able to make choices without fear of truancy.”

“People are coming to school positive,” said one student, explaining their COVID fears.

Students who walked out of class Tuesday that they were given mandatory detention for their choice to protest.

“As a former teacher,” Brisport said, “if all my students walked out of my classroom citing safety concerns, then I would take that to heart and see if there was something I could do differently as opposed to doubling down, which is not what we’re seeing from the current administration.”

The governor told reporters that he doesn’t foresee any new mandates being in place anytime soon, despite COVID surges and the highly transmissible omicron variant spreading across Florida and elsewhere.

 “To impose  any type of mandate on people is crazy,” DeSantis said. “Schools in Georgia and North Carolina are closed, which is absurd. Have we not learned anything people?” he said.

DeSantis made the remarks at a Jan. 5 press conference, announcing funding to support infrastructure and job growth.

But the focus became COVID.

DeSantis encouraged Floridians to continue to test and ensured that home tests from the Biden administration will be sent out soon.

The first people to receive the home tests will be the senior citizens of Florida, so they won’t have to worry about waiting in long lines for COVID testing, the governor said. 

Meanwhile, DeSantis claimed that the omicron variant is “more like the flu” and if teachers and students aren’t feeling well, to simply stay home.

According to the Miami Herald,  thousands of teachers are calling out sick in Miami Dade public schools, raising concerns for educators, families and Florida residents. 

Based on  Jan. 4 data reported over a seven-day period (Dec. 28-Jan. 3), COVID cases rose to infections  in Florida, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s the second highest of all states and the District of Columbia. Coming in first is New York, which includes cases from New York City and New York State combined.

Overall, Florida’s COVID-cases added up to 4.36 million — lower only than Texas and California.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

From kitchen counters and living room couches, their kids are home signing onto laptops and other devices for virtual classes as Omicron disrupted plans to open many schools nationwide — or parents kept their children home voluntarily. 

While remote learning offered some parents and educators peace of mind as COVID surged, its return is also full of troublespots and roadblocks, from finding childcare to connectivity issues, to overseeing their kids’ classes while working from home.

The 74 bent our ears towards parents: First we created a survey and asked parents what options they want and how their districts are handling the latest COVID crisis. Then we turned to social media for real-life updates from those on the frontlines at home.

The poll, which has received responses from 146 parents so far, showed that most want their children learning in-person:

But parents were divided about whether schools should offer a remote option:

Here’s what the moms and dads of America are saying about having their kids at home again:

That look when you realize you’re facing another stint of remote learning:

With his child once again learning in a tiny New York City apartment steps away from his bed, this parent was wondering what year it was. 

This reminded us that it’s not always easy learning remotely, so  students are calling on the adults in their lives for extra support.

Scattered throughout The 74 survey were a few small victories — like this note from a Colorado parent:

Logging onto school from the kitchen table wasn’t the return from holiday break these kids expected, but they were still excited to see their friends and teachers virtually. 

In the 74’s survey, many parents expressed concern for their children’s safety as a reason for keeping them home, but were also worried over the lack of the quality of remote learning.

This mom captured how her son is handling the transition from holiday break to remote learning, and offered his teachers an apology: “It’s not you. He’s struggling.”

Knowing that many kids grapple with learning from a screen, this mom/educator took to Twitter to share top tips for navigating remote learning:

One Virginia parent told The 74 their children have turned to sports for social interaction during remote learning.

Feeling for those who don’t have the flexibility to work from home with their kids, this Georgia mom says she would have quit her job if her son weren’t old enough to stay home alone for remote learning.

Going remote puts parents who don’t work from home in a pinch for childcare, as James Fogarty noted in The 74’s survey.

So, should schools still be open or is remote learning safer? This parent admits they don’t know what’s best — but knows how their child feels about it.

Do you want to share your family’s experience with returning to class during the Omicron surge? Take our poll! if you are having trouble viewing the poll.

Mere weeks ago — though it may feel like a lifetime — K-12 operations seemed to be moving toward something of a pandemic equilibrium. Studies had confirmed that COVID than the surrounding community, children as young as 5 had gained access to vaccinations and, according to the White House, of schools were open for in-person learning.

Then came the Omicron variant, sweeping over the country like a tsunami and plunging nearly all aspects of everyday life back into deep uncertainty.

In the weeks since, daily reported COVID cases in the U.S. have exploded, . More children are being with the virus than ever before. And positivity rates among school communities have reached levels that were previously unheard of: in Chicago, in Yonkers, in Detroit.

While most districts reopened as planned after the holidays, nearly closed their buildings for all or part of the first week of January, according to the data service Burbio. 

Even where classrooms did reopen, many parents chose not to return their children. In New York City, for example, nearly a third of students did not show up on the first day back from break and on Friday when parents were also dealing with a morning snowfall, attendance plummeted to

The unprecedented case numbers usher in a “new math,” in the words of Harvard University infectious disease specialist Jacob Lemieux, for understanding and navigating life as the variant circulates.

“It’s likely that Omicron COVID is going to be so ubiquitous that every child will be exposed repeatedly at school and elsewhere,” Rebecca Wurtz, professor of health policy at the University of Minnesota, told The 74.

For many parents, that may be an unnerving reality.

The questions swirl: Do vaccines work against Omicron? How much protection does my child get from a cloth mask? What about an N95? What should I do if my kid tests positive?

The risk calculus can quickly become overwhelming.

Amid the widespread anxiety, and as pandemic fatigue continues to creep, The 74 spoke directly to health experts for clarity on how to understand the virus during this latest stage — with many of their takeaways offering reassurance.

Experts also weighed in on hot topics like what masks to wear in school, how to handle positive cases and the recent, controversial move from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to cut its recommended quarantine time for infected individuals from 10 to five days.

Here’s what they had to say:

1 Are schools safe for children right now?

Yes, under the right circumstances, doctors agreed.

“I think for school districts that have a high vaccination rate, I think for school districts that have mandated indoor masking and I think for school districts that have appropriate ventilation and distancing … they’re going to be OK,” Philip Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health, told The 74.

Numerous academic studies underscore that when schools employ multiple mitigation strategies together — like masks, distancing and ventilation — transmission of the virus happens less frequently in classrooms than in the surrounding community.

“Teachers and students are far more likely to be infected at social gatherings, restaurants, etc. than at school,” George Washington University Professor of Public Health Leana Wen wrote on .

Even as thousands of schools across the country announced closures in the early days of the new year, President Biden implored K-12 leaders to continue in-person learning.

“The president couldn’t be clearer: Schools in this country should remain open,” said White House advisor Jeff Zients during a Jan. 5 press briefing.

But school leaders are running into a roadblock: not enough staff due to high shares of K-12 workers testing positive for the virus. Where COVID spread is especially rampant, it may be the right call to take a brief pause on in-person learning, said Kristina Deeter, a physician at Renown Children’s Hospital in Reno, Nevada. Teachers, she added, should not be coming into school if they’re sick.

In Chan’s Rhode Island, the majority of schools are open, though a handful had to close due to positive cases. The father of a 10-year old and a 14-year old, Chan said he felt confident sending his children back to their public school classrooms after the winter break. Both are fully vaccinated and wear surgical masks inside the building.

“I’m reassured that they’re protected, even against the Omicron variant,” he said.

2 Do vaccines work against Omicron?

The unanimous response from health professionals came in the form of a three-letter word: Y-E-S!

(Doctors, often technical and somewhat restrained in their email responses, answered this question using more exclamation than any other.)

Omicron has caused more breakthrough infections than other strains, they acknowledged, but emphasized that the immunizations have overwhelmingly succeeded at their key functions.

“The vaccines are still doing what they are intended to do: preventing severe infection and death,” said Peyton Thompson, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. 

“Deaths are declining despite the rapid rise in cases, thanks to vaccination,” she added.

And while it remains possible to catch the virus if you have received two, or even three shots, each dose of the vaccine provides an added layer of protection. Such cases tend to be mild, explained Wurtz.

“Breakthrough infections are almost always asymptomatic or trivial. Occasionally flu-like. So, yes, we can count on our vaccinations to keep us from getting really sick,” the Minnesota professor wrote in an email to The 74.

Children under the age of 5 are not yet eligible for shots, and are not expected to gain access until this spring at the earliest, Pfizer on Wednesday.

In the meantime, “the best way to protect kids under 5 is to vaccinate all of the people around them – their older siblings, other family members, day care providers [and] teachers,” said Wurtz.

3 Boosters for kids — yay or nay?

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday and, on Tuesday, the CDC recommended an extra shot for as young as 5, five months after the initial two-dose series.

Deeter recommends that those who are now eligible receive their third doses.

“Many of our vaccines are actually three-shot series,” she told The 74, citing the Hepatitis B immunizations, for example. 

“My message to teenagers is this: you got your first shot, you got your second shot, you’ve got to finish the series.”

4 Why are so many children being hospitalized with COVID?

The answer, doctors say, boils down to two factors: vaccination rates and community spread.

Nationwide, pediatric COVID and are at a pandemic high, the latter surging 66 percent in the last full week of December to an average of 378 daily admissions.

But at the same time, vaccination rates among young people remain much lower than adults. Less than a quarter of children ages 5 to 11 have received a single dose of the COVID vaccine, and just over half of adolescents ages 12 to 17 have been fully immunized, according to data published by the . By comparison, of U.S. adults have received both shots.

The overwhelming majority of hospitalized pediatric COVID patients are unvaccinated, . “This is tragic, as the vaccine could have kept these children out of the hospital,” said UNC-Chapel Hill’s Thompson. 

And regardless of vaccination status, the ballooning pediatric hospitalization levels do not mean that the Omicron strain is more severe to kids than previous variants.

“​​In large part, this is a numbers game,” said Kanecia Zimmerman, a study lead on Duke University’s , which guides school leaders on how to navigate COVID policy. 

Even though surging caseloads nationwide have meant that more children have tested positive for the virus in recent weeks, “the proportion of hospitalized children remains small among the number of infected children,” the pediatrician explained.

5 What kind of masks are “good enough?”

The extreme transmissibility of the Omicron variant has spurred , some in red states, to reinstate mandatory masking rules — and has also reignited debates over which face coverings are most effective at protecting against infection.

There’s no doubt that the N95 and KN95 models do a better job of filtering out viral particles from the air, doctors agreed. They have a layer of polypropylene, a type of plastic, that can . Compared to a cloth mask, they can extend the time it takes to transmit an infectious dose of COVID by over seven times. If both the infected and exposed individuals are wearing N95s or KN95s, compared to both wearing cloth masks, transmission can take up to 50 times longer.

That said, Chan admits that the N95 and KN95 masks can be uncomfortable, and some may find it harder to breathe while wearing them.

“With my kids, I send them to school with surgical masks,” he said, noting that he himself will slip on an N95 before walking into crammed indoor spaces like the grocery store. 

But whether you opt for a simple surgical mask, or something beefier, here’s his bottom line: “The cloth masks just aren’t quite as good as other types of masks,” said the Rhode Island doctor.

6 How should my child’s school be testing students and staff for the virus?

In December, the CDC endorsed “test-to-stay” guidance that allows students and teachers who may have been exposed to the virus to take rapid tests and return to the classroom if their results are negative.

It’s a helpful approach, Duke’s Zimmerman believes. Through the Delta variant wave, 98 percent of people who were exposed to the virus were never ultimately infected, she said — meaning that without test-to-stay, the vast majority of quarantines are forced to miss class without ever having gotten sick.

But testing can be costly and a heavy logistical lift. Furthermore, COVID tests are in nationwide. To cut down on the total number of noses to swab, schools in her state of North Carolina target resources to lunchtime exposures, where children drop their masks, she explained, eliminating the possibility of quarantine among less-likely cases where both students are masked.

Also important, according to Zimmerman: testing location. If students need to travel to an off-site area to receive their tests, it can exclude youth without access to transportation from participating in the program, forcing them to miss class for quarantine and creating further setbacks for the students already most affected by the pandemic. 

“Offering testing at individual schools (not centralized locations) is critical for [the] success of this program because it is more likely to provide equal opportunity to all eligible staff and students within the district,” said the Duke pediatrician.

7 How should I navigate quarantine if my child or I test positive?

In late December the CDC reduced its quarantine guidelines for those who test positive for the virus from 10 days to five, a move that divided many in the medical community.

The takeaway, according to the doctors we spoke to? “Yes, returning to school or work five days after a known infection when someone is no longer symptomatic is fine,” said Wurtz.

Emphasis, they noted, is on no longer being symptomatic. Many individuals will continue having symptoms well beyond the five-day quarantine recommendation. If that’s the case for you or your child, you should continue to isolate until symptoms subside, or test results come back negative, as you may continue to be infectious, doctors said.

“Come back symptom-free,” said Deeter.

8 How long will the Omicron surge last?

A bit of good news here. 

Though epidemiologists don’t know for sure how long the Omicron surge will last in the U.S., cases have in South Africa, where the variant was first identified in late November. Some believe the peak in many American communities will arrive of January.

“In most countries that saw Omicron, it went up sharply, which is happening now in the U.S., and it came down sharply,” said Chan. “There should be a steep decrease in the near future for us.”

Watch a full replay from the hearing: 

Lightfoot compared the situation to the movie “Groundhog Day,” insisting “there is no basis in the data, the science, or common sense for us to shut an entire system down when we can surgically do this at a school level.”

Martinez emphasized the district’s empowerment of school principals: “There is no evidence [that schools aren’t safe]. Now, what is real is cases are rising and we have said, the best solution is to do it at the school level. Our principles are empowered, our teachers are empowered, they have safety committees, we have invested in the filtration systems…”

CTU spokesman Chris Geovanis said that while some schools implement all COVID mitigation strategies, not all do.

Geovanis said the union doesn’t hold Martinez responsible for the lack of agreement and instead faults Lightfoot, who has control over the school district. “It says nothing about Pedro. He’s not the boss,” ​​Geovanis said, accusing the mayor of wanting to appease parents in wealthier parts of the city, saying she’s siding with “the business class who relies on CPS for free child care.”

Shortly after the press conference CTU voted to halt in-person instruction, and classes were immediately canceled on Wednesday as a result. Read Linda Jacobson’s full report on the reactions to the Tuesday evening vote.

With a of over 1 million daily COVID cases reported on Monday and more than this week temporarily closed or pivoted to remote instruction, educators and families are being thrust back into the existential struggle over keeping schools open.

The second half of the 2021-22 school year began with a growing list of shutdowns, including major urban districts such as Atlanta, Milwaukee and Cleveland. In Philadelphia, leaders on Monday night announced that on Tuesday, though stopped short of shutting down the entire district.

Other top school systems such as New York City and Chicago have moved forward with plans to reopen in person, but have hit snags along the way: In New York, nearly a third of students did not show up for classes on Monday, and in Chicago, a late night vote Tuesday held by the teachers union demanding to teach remotely Wednesday.

The reactions from weary parents ranged widely. “It’s chaos,” National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues The New York Times, pointing out that when schools nix plans for in-person learning at the final hour, it leaves families scrambling for child care options. 

On the other hand, with the Omicron variant rampant post-holiday, Cleveland parent Tiffany Rossman was glad schools stayed closed to start the new year. She and her teenage daughter both tested positive for the virus in December, and she fell quite ill despite her vaccination, she told The 74. The mother worried that opening classrooms after the holidays could lead to infected kids spreading the virus.

Rossman acknowledged, however, that “if I had small children and needed to go into the office then I don’t know what I would do.”

While a handful of school systems had planned before the winter break to be remote for short stints in January or to close for testing, the vast majority of announcements were made last minute as record-high COVID case rates came into view. Yonkers Public Schools started classes this week remotely after of students who took rapid tests over the holidays were COVID positive. Detroit announced that school would be closed Monday through Wednesday after rapid testing revealed a positivity rate. Districts are open for in-person learning in and , but officials there had to shut down eight and 12 school buildings, respectively, for lack of staff.

“A lot of it was last second, and it continues to be,” Dennis Roche, co-founder of the K-12 data tracker Burbio, told The 74.

The , and school systems are exceptions to the trend, he noted, as each district had planned before the holidays to take a handful of days in the new year for students to receive rapid tests. As it currently stands, classrooms are set to open in all three districts in the coming days. Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, does not re-open until Jan. 10, but has said it intends to test all students before it does.

Over the weekend, Roche watched Burbio’s jump from 1,591 to 2,181, and again on Tuesday to 3,556. Shutdowns were concentrated in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, where current COVID rates are among the .

Amid the chaos, the Biden administration has maintained that schools should keep their doors open wherever possible and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended booster eligibility to two separate groups of children this week.

“I believe schools should remain open,” the president said during a on the current Omicron surge. And in fact, despite some conspicuous closures, the vast majority of the nation’s roughly 98,000 public schools have returned from the holiday break in person. 

Hedging slightly in a conversation on Fox News Sunday, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona added: “We recognize there may be some bumps in the road, especially this upcoming week when superintendents, who are working really hard across the country, are getting calls saying that some of their schools may have 5 to 10 percent of their staff not available.”

“For anyone who has gone remote, we want to similarly keep on engaging with them, and make sure that they can come back as quickly as they can,” a senior White House official told The 74 Tuesday.

Federal policymakers underscore that districts can draw on American Rescue Plan dollars as well as multiple other devoted to helping K-12 facilities stave off COVID through purchasing tests and other mitigation measures.

To help schools stay open, the CDC in December endorsed “test-to-stay” practices allowing students and staff who may have been exposed to the virus to remain in the classroom if they test negative for COVID. 

The federal agency also took the controversial step on Dec. 27 of reducing its recommended quarantine timeline for infected individuals, including teachers and students, from 10 to five days. The move divided many health experts, leaving numerous observers to wonder whether the CDC was after .

But several school officials appreciated the chance for teachers and students to return more quickly to the buildings.

“Anything that will help the schools to stay open is welcome,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, told The 74.

Nationwide, pediatric COVID and are at a pandemic high. But top infectious disease experts say that the vast majority of serious infections are among unvaccinated youth. Under a quarter of children ages 5 to 11 have received a single dose of the COVID vaccine, and just over half of adolescents ages 12 to 17 have been fully immunized, according to data published by the .

​​“Most of our pediatric population is still undervaccinated,” said Kristina Deeter, a physician at Renown Children’s Hospital in Reno, Nevada. Even though the Omicron variant has generated more breakthrough infections, the pediatrician assured that the vaccines continue to be successful at their key function: preventing severe illness and death.

“We’re still so much safer having received the vaccine,” she told The 74.

For youth who have received both shots and are ready for a booster, the Food and Drug Administration on Monday and, on Tuesday, the CDC recommended an extra shot for , five months after the initial two-dose series.

Amid the widespread concern and flurry of new pandemic policies, a bit of good news regarding the giant spike in cases also surfaced on Sunday. In South Africa, where the Omicron variant was first identified, the surge in infections driven by the hyper-transmissible strain has , giving health experts hope that the U.S may follow a similar course in the weeks to come.

Still, other mutations of the virus may arise further down the road, Deeter pointed out. The only long-term path to move beyond the pandemic, she said, is getting immunized.

“If there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s going to come through vaccination.”

”I don’t think we should be considering remote options,” Cardona said Tuesday in an interview with The 74. “Our students deserve more, not less, and our parents have done enough to help balance school closures the first year of the pandemic.”

The secretary’s comments, however, come amid a sharp increase in schools already shifting to remote learning, either because of or . According to , which tracks schools’ response to the pandemic, there are 646 school closures this week, up from 356 last week. Following the holiday break, 421 closures are expected, but that’s still less than a fifth of the number of closures in August, when the Delta variant postponed the return of many students to in-person learning. 

Cardona’s comments amplified those made by the president in an afternoon news conference Tuesday.

“Today, we don’t have to shut down schools because of a case of COVID-19,” Biden said. He urged parents to vaccinate their children and said the best way to protect those under 5, not yet eligible for vaccines, is to ensure their family members and caregivers are fully vaccinated and have had a booster. “The science is clear and overwhelming,” he said. “We know how to keep our kids safe.”

The president announced several steps to increase COVID testing availability and expand capacity at hospitals. The administration will deliver 500,000 at-home tests to those who want them, starting in January, open more pop-up vaccination clinics, and make emergency response teams available to hospitals.

On Friday — the last day before the holiday break for many schools — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released two studies showing that test-to-stay procedures can prevent lost instructional days due to quarantine. Cardona said he didn’t have a hand in pushing for the announcement before the break, but that, “our teams talk regularly.”

“I was glad they were able to communicate it early enough,” he said. “As we’re thinking about 2022, we can use test-to-stay, as we’re thinking about how to utilize the [American Rescue Plan] funds, we can use test-to-stay to limit quarantine and keep our children in school.”

The secretary added that there’s room for improvement in providing up-to-date numbers on school closures. The National Center for Education Statistics produces data on the percentages of students attending school in-person or remotely, but are released monthly, compared to Burbio’s weekly update, and in the past, have frequently been months behind. The latest data, released last week, reflects in-person and remote learning as of Dec. 3.

“We’re going to continue to refine those systems, especially if there’s an increase in spread,” he said.

According to the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which has tracked school closings and openings since the beginning of the pandemic, only eight states have provided schools with detailed guidance this school year on when they should consider closing. 

Cardona said it’s important to not only know what percentage of students are in school, but “what’s causing potential, short-term remote learning options or what they need in order to keep their schools open.”

“What I’m hearing from school districts is already questions about going remote. I think it’s irresponsible at this point to do that,” he said. 

“We have all the tools to keep schools open and safe: Vaccinations, testing, improvements in ventilation, tens of billions of dollars have gone to schools … If I hear of a single school district that goes remote but keeps bars open what that says to me is: They don’t care about kids — and they don’t care about COVID. Because bars spread COVID. Schools generally don’t — not if you put in place mitigation efforts.”

“I’m worried that city leaders are going to give up on kids and not do the right thing.” See Dr. Jha’s full comments:

See some of our recent coverage about COVID, Omicron and schools (sign up here to receive our daily updates): 

—Tracking School Closures: As Omicron threat looms, school closures continue ticking upward (Read more) 

—Push to Vaccinate: A COVID vaccine advocacy group in Boston by youth of color, for youth of color (Read more) 

—Mandatory Boosters: Some states start requiring school staff booster shots as Omicron fears fuel nationwide vaccination spike (Read more) 

—T�����-�ٴ�-���ٲ���: As schools brace for winter wave, CDC endorses test-to-stay to keep students in school (Read more) 

“You better listen,” she said emphatically. “You better listen to what parents are telling you. Did we just see the elections that happened this fall? People who are out of step on charter schools and are running for elective office are going to be out of office.”

Veney is Senior VP of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which recently analyzed data from 42 states showing an influx of 240,000 students into charter schools during the 2020-2021 school year – the highest growth seen in six years. 

“Parents are holding us all accountable,” she added. “They are demanding more for their kids. We need more, not fewer public school options. We need to equip all public schools to have the nimbleness and the flexibility that we see in the charter sector.”

Veney expressed these views during an online panel Wednesdy presented by The 74 and the Reinventing America’s Schools project of the Progressive Policy Institute. Listening to parents – so many of whom were frustrated and angered by how their schools reacted to COVID – was among the central themes of the discussion.

Jessica Sutter, who represents Ward 6 on the District of Columbia State Board of Education, said, “Parents made a lot of different choices during the pandemic,” noting that her ward saw a 950-student increase in charter school enrollment and a 300-student increase in homeschooling. 

“Parents are looking for schools that are responsive to them,” she said. “Watching parents move, they’re moving to places where they feel like the school heard them and reached out to say, ‘what kind of measures do we need to have in place to make you feel safe about sending your children back to the building; what kind of communication is going to be helpful this year, post-pandemic, knowing how difficult last year was for you and your students?’”

“And we saw really wonderful things from some of our public charter schools in making that happen,” Sutter said. “We saw Friendship Public Charter Schools reaching out to parents, saying, ‘we’re going to do onsite testing for 100 percent of students and faculty every day,’ and they did that before that was the common practice citywide.”

Katrina Merkerson, a mother from Birmingham, Ala., spoke about moving her son into the i3 Academy during the height of uncertainty about the pandemic in the summer of 2020. “This was July; school was slated to start the first week of August and there were no answers coming from the district; none at all,” she said.

A friend told her about i3 Academy, and after going through the enrollment process, Merkerson said, “It was absolutely the best decision that I made for my son.”

“In the pandemic,” she said, “parents were scrambling around because nobody knew what was going to happen. But i3 Academy had a plan in place already.” She said that the school stayed open throughout the pandemic and that her son is thriving in his education. “He’s a 6th-grader now at the middle school, and he is just off the chain.”

A.J. Crabill, the Deputy Commissioner for Governance of the Texas Education Agency, said has not seen traditional public schools innovating ways to improve student achievement at the systemic level. “Most of the innovation that I’ve seen has been: how do we educate in the middle of a pandemic.”

He added: “My sense is that the only way that traditional public schools see a significant resurgence in enrollment is through improving the quality of instruction. I don’t think there are gimmicks that work. I think either we have schools that dramatically demonstrate improvement in student outcomes or we don’t. 

“And whether they be charter schools or traditional district schools, the ones that can demonstrate improvements, I hope, will grow…and the ones who can’t I hope will go away.”

Crabill also noted how critically important it is for all schools to learn from this pandemic. “As I visit with professors and researchers across the country, many are already looking at how can we dig into the data that the pandemic provides to learn what can we do from a policy level in public education…. What are the strategies that work and what are the strategies that don’t work?”

“I suspect,” he added, “the schools that had more in-person instruction are going to show greater results, and that’s going to be a clear policy description for future pandemics. I think of this as our starter pandemic.”