COIVD-19 Policy Update #114
COVID-19 Policy Update
MONDAY 9/28
TOP THREE
Children Have Low Risk: Britain’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health analysis, published in JAMA, found that children have 44% lower odds of catching COVID-19 than adults. However, the researchers noted the role that children and adolescents play in transmission of this virus remains unclear. The review based its findings on 32 studies from 21 countries, mostly in East Asia and Europe, involving nearly 42,000 children and adolescents and 270,000 adults.
Districts Report Drop in Enrollments: USA Today article on the dramatic number of students now coming back to school:
Clark County schools are down about 10,000 students.
Mesa Public Schools, Arizona's largest school system, started the year online with about 1,000 fewer students.
Dallas reported 10,000 fewer enrollments
Metro Nashville Public Schools' enrollment dropped by 4,200 students to 80,842 students this fall. Preschool enrollment was down 32%, and kindergarten enrollment was down by 15%
Austin Public Schools' enrollment dropped by about 5,000 students to 75,000 students.
On the 17th day of class, RISD enrollment was down by 2,105 students (a 5% drop).
But Boston Catholic schools that reopened for face-to-face instruction gained 4,074 students this year.
Parents and Flu Vaccines: 1 in 3 parents don't plan to vaccinate their kids against the flu this year according to a new University of Michigan poll. Of those who don't plan to vaccinate against the flu this year, 1 in 7 say it's because they don't want to risk exposing their kids to COVID-19 at a health site. Around 40% are concerned about side effects, while a third are worried the vaccine isn't effective.
FEDERAL
Presidential Debate: The first Trump-Biden debate will occur tomorrow, Tuesday, September 29, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Start time is 9 pm ET, and the debate will cover six topics across 90 minutes.
Presidential Transition: Incredible lineup for this Friday event: Josh Bolten, Andrew Card, Denis McDonough, Margaret Spellings, John Podesta, Valerie Jarrett, and Melody Barnes among others. Agenda and registration link here.
SCOTUS: On Saturday, President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the US Supreme Court. I won't dive into the broader politics but it did feel worth highlighting two aspects of the announcement that touch on education:
Judge Barrett would be the first mother of school-aged children to hold the position.
She mentioned remote learning during her remarks: "Our children obviously make our life very full. While I am a judge, I’m better known back home as a room parent, carpool driver, and birthday party planner. When schools went remote last spring, I tried on another hat. Jesse and I became co-principals of the Barrett e-learning academy. (Laughter.) And, yes, the list of enrolled students was a very long one."
Confirmation hearings will begin October 12 and last 3-4 days. The Committee is likely to report out the nomination Oct. 22 setting up a floor vote less than two weeks before the election.
ED: Secretary DeVos sent a letter to state education chiefs informing them that the Department will not enforce the interim final rule on equitable services related to funding received CARES Act. Previously, the interim final rule provided school districts with two formula options for calculating the amount of funding private schools should receive. Multiple federal courts ruled that ED's rule was invalid. According to the letter, the Department “strongly, but respectfully, disagrees” with the ruling and will enforce the CARES Act according to the court decision.
Feds Shipping Tests: Federal officials announced plans to distribute 100 million Abbott BinaxNOW tests to states and territories, starting with a shipment of 6.5 million tests this week. An additional 50 million tests will go to Historically Black Colleges and Universities and to nursing homes
STATE
California:
Los Alamitos High School teachers are considering a possible strike beginning Tuesday, Sept. 29, the first day their school is scheduled to reopen for in-person learning.
Teachers in Compton Unified School District are protesting a proposal to reopen schools on October 5 for select students, including those with moderate to severe special needs and English Language Learners. According to the district, two-thirds of the parents of those students say they are comfortable sending their children back to school to participate in small learning pods.
CA public media launches free educational resource for teachers and parents.
Florida: After a 29-hour school board meeting that included 18 hours of public testimony from 750 people, the Miami-Dade County School Board voted to reopen schools in mid-October with a staggered return for five-days-a-week instruction. The district had surveyed parents to ask whether they preferred in-school or remote learning for their children, and 51% said in-person.
Indiana: 78% of South Bend families who have completed a district survey say they want their children to return to in-person instruction, while 22% say they would rather continue with e-learning for the rest of the semester.
Nebraska: Great article on the steps Grand Island Public Schools took to reopen. Some highlights:
"It formed a 21-person pandemic response team, which created six design teams, recruited an outside medical advisory group, added hundreds more school district employees to dozens of subcommittees and produced three models for what school would look like this fall."
"Starting in April, a logistics subcommittee headed by chief financial officer Virgil Harden began to procure the following: Roughly 100,000 three-ply cotton masks; hundreds more N-95 masks for school nurses; 500 gallons of hand sanitizer; hundreds of plastic glass shields; hundreds of gallons of sanitizing spray; dozens of atomizers to apply that spray; 1,200 no-touch thermometers; 600 Chrome books to distribute in case the district goes remote; hundreds of Verizon Wi-Fi hot spots for students without internet access; and exactly one omnidirectional 4G LTE network tower that soon will connect students who live within a two-mile radius of Howard Elementary to the Internet."
"After school leaders put into place dozens of new protocols at 23, the district’s 23 schools did indeed reopen their doors in August. But Grand Island Public Schools is now a month into school. It’s still open."
New York: NYC Principals Union votes 'No Confidence' in mayor and schools chancellor.
Pennsylvania: More than 200 of the state's 7,000 licensed day care centers have closed permanently since March.
South Carolina: More than 14,000 new students have enrolled at charter schools across the state since the end of last school year, bringing total enrollment to roughly 40,000. Charter authorizers believe they'll see an increase by more than 40% by the time this semester is finished.
Tennessee: Additional details on the learning lost report released last week. "Schwinn had said her estimates were informed by back-to-school testing data that was voluntarily shared by some Tennessee school districts, combined with national study and analysis by two groups. But asked later for details, members of her staff referred only to “national researchers using historical, Tennessee-specific data.” That data dates from 2014 to 2019, before the coronavirus emerged in the U.S. “These are estimated predictions. They certainly do not reflect every district in every part of the state."
Texas: The state’s most recent COVID-19 data shows encouraging trends with a decrease in positive cases in public schools. Out of 1,101,065 students on campus during the first week of school statewide, schools have reported 3,445 positive cases. Among the pool of 800,000 school staff personnel, 2,850 cases have been reported.
Washington: Students enrolled in the Kennewick School District online option won't be accredited by the NCAA. This means any potential collegiate athletes would have to make up the courses they would take in the program because their courses wouldn't count towards the NCAA requirements.
West Virginia: All of the state's public and private four-year institutions started their fall 2020 semesters a month ago and less than 1% of students and staff are testing positive for COVID-19.
INTERNATIONAL
UK: The University and College Union (UCU) said face-to-face teaching at universities should be halted until the government fixes "test-and-trace failures and curbs the spread of COVID-19." Outbreaks have occured at 23 institutions.
EU: Europe stays committed to in-person classes as school outbreaks are rare. “It is clear that children can pass on the virus to each other. It’s not that this doesn’t exist,” said Steven Van Gucht, the head of viral diseases at Sciensano, Belgium’s national public health institute. But in the weeks since Belgian schools resumed on Sept. 1, he said, few had triggered any cause for concern. Of Belgium’s 8,400 schools, 16 have closed fully or partially because of the coronavirus. That’s less than 0.2 percent of the country’s schools, and most closed due to staffing shortages after teachers contracted the disease in the community, Van Gucht said — not because the coronavirus spread beyond the initial person who got sick.
ECONOMIC RECOVERY
Surge of New Businesses: Via WSJ:
"Applications for the employer identification numbers that entrepreneurs need to start a business have passed 3.2 million so far this year, compared with 2.7 million at the same point in 2019.
"New filings among a subset of business owners who tend to employ other workers reached 1.1 million through mid-September, a 12% increase over the same period last year and the most since 2007."
"Despite widespread fears in the spring that venture-capital investment would dry up, deal activity fell just 6% in the first half of 2020, compared with the same period of 2019."
AEI's New Survey Center on American Life: The Center is dedicated to understanding the way cultural, political, and technological changes shape the lives of ordinary Americans. The Center will be home to a number of projects such as the American Perspectives Survey. It will introduce the American Life Blog as an outlet for journalists to find quick and current information on new data.
Community Colleges Can Be Engines of Economic Recovery: David Deming oped.
Tariffs: Some 3,500 U.S. companies sue over Trump-imposed Chinese tariffs. The suits, filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade, named U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and the Customs and Border Protection agency and challenge what they call the unlawful escalation of the U.S. trade war with China through the imposition of a third and fourth round of tariffs.
Supporting Children in Opportunity Zones: Economic Innovation Group webinar tomorrow with speakers from the RBH Group, DreamHouse ‘Ewa Beach, Pathways, EPT Holdings LLC, and YWCA USA will share insights on the needs of children in OZs, and provide details on the investment-ready projects featured in a new report from EIG outlining ways OZs can help support education.
Credentials Matter Phase 2: announcing a redesigned CredentialsMatter.org as well as published two new reports, including a case study on the short-term ramifications of COVID-19 on credential demand.
LEARNING PODS
Olympia Parents Form ‘Co-op Style’ Learning Pods: In a co-op style learning pod, money isn’t necessarily exchanging hands. Parents make informal agreements with other parents to arrange childcare and provide the mentoring and tutoring. Also, the Olympia School District partnered with the city of Olympia and created a Childcare Relief Program. The program operates at seven school buildings and is staffed with childcare providers from the Boys and Girls Club of Thurston County, South Sound YMCA and Olympia Parks, Art, and Recreation.
Library Homework Help: The Bexley Public Library launched a new online learning portal and virtual homework help called Education Station.
Teachers Find Higher Pay and Growing Options in COVID Pods: Via WSJ: "The 39-year-old Ms. Rand put out her résumé. Eight groups of families contacted her within three days. She now makes more money teaching six first-graders from six families in Wellesley, Mass. They are following their public school’s curriculum, and she’s added cooking, yoga and earth sciences, with lots of hands-on experiments. She loves that there are no rules and administrative red tape, and no sitting through long meetings."
Kalamazoo: The public school system is launching learning hubs in a partnership Kalamazoo Youth Development Network to provide students in-person support for distance learning. The district identified 842 students in need of extra support during virtual learning including students with disabilities, English language learners, students without reliable internet, those missing from virtual learning in the spring and those experiencing housing or food insecurity.
Schoolcations: Post from The Points Guy exploring the various ways parents are using hotels and travel during remote learning.
J Pod: Another baby orca welcomed in an endangered pod in B.C. Has nothing to do with COVID or education, but I like killer whales and am grateful to Robin Lake for sharing the story.
Prenda: Microschool provider Prenda reported an incredible growth to over 4,000 enrollments. The enrollment growth is also leading to a surge of hiring.
RESOURCES
Fewer People Have Developed COVID-19 Antibodies: A new study published in Lancet found that fewer than 10% of people infected with COVID-19 developed antibodies. Data from more than 28,000 U.S. patients on dialysis revealed that only about 10% of people who were infected with COVID-19 actually developed antibodies by July, and fewer than 10% of this group had been diagnosed with the illness using antigen or PCR testing.
AFT on Vaccines: Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, told Axios that her union would support requiring in-school teachers to take a COVID-19 vaccine, once one has been approved and is readily available.
Vaccine and Children: Axios: "We know much less about a child vaccine than we do about an adult one, but do know that the ethical issues could prove even thornier."
CDC Study Shows Poverty Can Increase Chances of COVID Infections: The study looked at income-based disparities in Utah and found that the risk of becoming infected in a low-income community could be three times greater than in a high-income one. "Extreme deprivation could compound transmission." The CDC found that lower-income individuals were less likely to be able to work from home, were more likely to fill essential worker positions, and were less likely to have health insurance.
In Internet Dead Zones, Rural Schools Struggle With Distance Learning: A third of rural America has little or no Internet. "I wish that every single time a big project was done, you had to put in conduit and fiber in the ground," Nevada's broadband development manager Myers Campos says. "Just like you do water and sewer, just like you do gas, just like you do electricity."
The New Helicopter Parents Are on Zoom: "The school has set up a system called Schoology, which connects every caregiver with their child’s schoolwork. Every time she (and I) submitted an assignment, my phone dinged, signaling that I may (and should?) check on her work. Meanwhile, her teacher graciously ignored the big elephants — me, along with about 10 other parents — in the virtual room." There are also some helpful suggestions in the piece.
How Tutoring Programs Can Combat the “COVID-19 Slide”: New J-PAL report summarizing the results from 96 randomized evaluations. Summary of findings include:
Across all studies included in the analysis, tutoring programs consistently lead to large improvements in learning outcomes for students.
Tutoring programs led by teacher or paraprofessional tutors are generally more effective than programs that use nonprofessional (volunteer) or parent tutors.
The effects of tutoring programs tend to be strongest among students in earlier grades
While overall effects for math and reading tutoring programs are similar, reading tutoring tends to be relatively more effective for students in preschool through first grade, while math tutoring tends to be more effective for students in second through fifth grade.
Tutoring programs conducted during school tend to have larger impacts than those conducted after school.
Run Into the Week: Like little orphaned elephant Khanyisa. This video shows the herd running to meet her with a "greeting ceremony" of trumpeting, roaring, and protectively surrounding her.