As education leaders decide whether to reopen classrooms in the fall amid a raging pandemic, many are looking to a standard generally agreed upon among epidemiologists: To control community spread of the coronavirus, the average daily infection rate among those who are tested should not exceed 5%.
But of the nation’s 10 largest school districts, only New York City and Chicago appear to have achieved that public health goal, according to a New York Times analysis of city and county-level data.
Some of the biggest districts, like Miami-Dade County in Florida and Clark County, Nevada, home to Las Vegas, are in counties that have recently reported positive test rates more than 4 times greater than the 5% threshold, the data shows.
The alarming spread of the virus has prompted a growing number of districts to announce they would rely on online instruction in the fall. The superintendent of the nation’s sixth-largest district, in Broward County, Florida, on Tuesday recommended full-time remote learning despite pressure from the state’s governor and President Donald Trump. That followed an announcement on Monday that California’s two largest districts, Los Angeles and San Diego, will teach 100% online.
“I’m just super frustrated and really disappointed that our nation, our states and our communities have not exercised the discipline that they need in order to get the coronavirus under control,” said Robert W. Runcie, the Broward superintendent. “Now the futures of our young people are collateral damage from our inability to take this thing seriously.”
In recent days, Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta; Arlington, Virginia; and Oakland, California, have also announced plans to start the school year remotely.
The broad national move to keep schools shuttered represents a deepening crisis for the nation’s tens of millions of schoolchildren, who are already falling behind academically and socially during the pandemic.
The decisions will also require working parents to continue to carry a heavy burden of ad hoc child care and home schooling, which is presenting families with impossible trade-offs.
Many European and Asian nations have been able to reopen schools safely after controlling the spread of the virus using tools such as widespread mask wearing, testing and contact tracing. Some American health experts believe that operating schools may be safer than generally acknowledged, given research suggesting that young children are less likely than adults to either contract the coronavirus or to spread it.
But the fact remains that the United States has failed to control the spread of the coronavirus, making it difficult to apply the reassuring news from abroad. Local and state leaders must now decide on the best course of action between two bad choices: either open school buildings and take the risk that educators, students and parents become ill, or keep them shuttered and hinder the development of tens of millions of children.
“These are like wartime decisions,” Runcie said. “This is literally like sending people into battle, and without appropriate tools.”
In the United States, districts are increasingly splitting into three groups: those that plan to teach online only, those that will allow families to choose between in-person and at-home instruction, and those offering a hybrid approach, with students spending some days in classrooms and some learning remotely.
Many large districts fall into the third category, although more are moving into the first as the virus continues to rage in their regions.
The 5% positive test rate was not developed specifically for schools, but it has emerged as a metric that many districts are considering when making plans.
The number comes from a general threshold established by public health experts, who say that a positive test rate of less than 10%, and ideally under 3%, is generally needed to control and suppress the spread of the virus in a community.
The World Health Organization encourages governments to reopen their economies only if their positivity rates are below 5% for at least two weeks. But the rate is a reliable indicator only when there is widespread testing, and many states are still not testing enough.
This week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, a Democrat, announced that schools across the state could only reopen in September if they were in a region where the average daily infection rate was below 5% over a two-week period. None of the state’s 10 regions currently have an infection rate over 2%.
Jim Malatras, an aide to the governor, said the state “wanted to establish an objective number so schools can plan.”
In Florida, which has five of the nation’s largest school districts — Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough, Orange and Palm Beach counties — officials have taken a different approach, aggressively pushing schools to resume operations.
Last week, the state’s education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, who was nominated by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, issued an emergency order asking districts to reopen “brick and mortar schools with the full panoply of services.”
But fully staffing the Broward school system to maintain social distancing between students and staff members would require at least $230 million in new funding, Runcie said, because of the need to hire thousands of additional teachers to reduce class sizes to an average of 14 students.
In California, where case numbers have been soaring, reopening schools has become a moving target. Just two and a half weeks ago, when Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed the state budget, it included strong language that discouraged schools from operating exclusively online.
But as cases climbed, concerns about too much online instruction quickly morphed into concerns about too little school safety. California is using the 5% positivity threshold as a guideline — one that has grown increasingly distant in many places. In Los Angeles County, home to the nation’s second-largest school district, the positivity rate has averaged 9% over the past seven days.
“We had hoped it wouldn’t get to this point,” said the Los Angeles schools superintendent, Austin Beutner. “All of a sudden, in the middle of June, everything just went through the roof.”
The decision by Los Angeles and San Diego to teach online is expected to be influential. Several other large districts in the state, including San Bernardino, Santa Clara and Oakland, will start the year remotely, and this week the public schools in Pasadena and the entirety of Stanislaus County in the Central Valley said they would delay in-person learning at least for the first weeks of August.
Even in Orange County, California, where a cluster of conservative officials has aggressively pushed for reopening, larger districts have been hearing from teachers’ unions and nervously eyeing the local test positivity rate, which averaged 14.6% over the last seven days.
On Monday, the county’s Board of Education voted to recommend that schools reopen without social distancing and other precautions. But their recommendation is not binding, and on Tuesday, the Santa Ana Unified School District, the county’s second-largest, announced it would pivot from a planned hybrid reopening to distance learning.
“While we hope at some point to have our students attend our schools alongside their classmates and teachers, now is not the time,” the superintendent, Jerry Almendarez, said in a statement.
In the Northeast, parents and school leaders face a very different landscape. New York City, the nation’s largest district with some 1.1 million students and 1,800 schools, was center of the nation’s outbreak this spring. Now the city’s average positive test rate hovers around 2% — the lowest among the country’s largest school districts.
That leaves New York virtually alone — with the exception of Chicago, the third-largest district, where the city had a 5% positivity rate — in having the virus sufficiently under control to satisfy the public health threshold. Still, New York City will likely offer in-person instruction only one to three days a week when the school year begins in September.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has made the return to classrooms a priority, but he signaled greater flexibility on Tuesday amid a steep uptick in virus cases. The state’s guidelines require districts to offer in-person education five days a week, although parents could choose to have children learn online only.
The Houston Federation of Teachers, a union that represents 6,500 educators, had blasted the state’s plan for reopening campuses as “unacceptably vague and hardly adequate.” In a letter sent to the school district on Sunday, teachers asked to delay classroom instruction until the area had seen a decline in new cases for at least 14 days and achieved the positive test rate of less than 5%. That is far from the current landscape in greater Houston, which in recent days had a positive test rate of 13%.
“No one wants to be inside the school building more than teachers,” said Maxie Hollingsworth, a math teacher at a Houston elementary school. But Hollingsworth said she was not comfortable returning to her classroom and risking infection; her daughter has asthma and is at higher risk of complications from the coronavirus.
“The plain truth to me,” she said, “is it is immoral to reopen schools without the things we need in place.”
Texas officials are closely watching the national landscape, and it is possible they will modify the five-day-a-week requirement. The Houston Independent School District, the nation’s seventh largest with 209,000 students, is expected to make an announcement on Wednesday about plans for the academic year.
Rising virus counts in Clark County, Nevada, are complicating plans for the nation’s fifth-largest district to provide 326,000 students with two days per week of in-person learning.
“The No. 1 aspect is safety,” said Linda Cavazos, the vice president of the district’s board of trustees. “We may be looking at having to change the entire thing to distance learning.”
Nery Martinez, who has two teenage children and was laid off from his job as a bartender at the Caesars Palace casino because of the pandemic, said he preferred online instruction, despite the financial impact that supervising his children’s learning would have on his family once he goes back to work.
“Face to face is a lot of risk,” he said. “I need to make the money to pay rent, but I want to be here to protect them.”