[Cross-posted from the San Francisco Chronicle]
By Dennis J. Ventry, Jr., Monica Gandhi and Deborah Simon-Weisberg
Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders have unveiled another plan to prod public schools across California to reopen. It provides $2 billion to districts that resume in-person instruction by March 31, another $4.6 billion to address learning loss, and punishes districts that fail to reopen by the deadline.
The plan is bound to fail.
It will fail for the same reason other plans, perks, and persuasion have misfired over the last 12 months: It provides no money and no strategy to overcome the kind of false and unscientific thinking that closed schools a year ago. And because the plan avoids mandating the number of days and hours a school must open to receive new funds, it permits the forces peddling pseudoscience to scare administrators, teachers, and parents into embracing a hybrid model (part in-person, part remote) that would be even worse than what we have now.
A year ago, with scant knowledge of a novel pathogen, the thinking was that kids would be the primary drivers of COVID-19, while schools would be super-spreaders and school closures would save lives. “We were wrong,” says Dr. Jeanne Noble, head of the UCSF Emergency Department’s COVID-19 Response. After intensive research and study, the scientific consensus is that adults are the primary drivers of the virus, and schools can be sanctuaries with significantly lower infection rates than surrounding communities. Moreover, low school rates mean low to zero school-to-home rates.
But some players in the open school debate continue to advocate as if it were March 2020.
The head of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, Matt Meyer, recently articulated this unscientific thinking. Schoolchildren “play a significant role spreading infections,” and “act as vectors for transmission,” Meyer falsely stated. He also cited a CDC report indicating in-school transmissions can be controlled in communities with low rates of spread. He was right about that. But he ignored the CDC’s more important finding that even in communities with high rates of spread (i.e., 100/100,000 daily cases), in-school transmissions can be close to zero. Inexplicably, Mr. Meyer says Berkeley teachers won’t return to classrooms until Alameda County’s rate falls below 4/100,000 (it is 8.2/100,000, and falling).
This thinking not only ignores science, but the experience of open schools.
Private schools in the Bay Area have been open since last fall, with preschools open earlier, safely educating and caring for the kids of parents across the state. In Marin County, schools have been open since September with over 1 million in-person “student days” and zero student-to-teacher transmissions. In San Francisco, private schools have taught in-person classes to K-12 students for 6 months also with zero student-to-teacher transmissions. Studies report similar findings across the country, even in communities with significantly higher case rates than the Bay Area.
In short, a year into the pandemic we know unequivocally that schools can reopen safely to in-person full-time learning. Key mitigation strategies are essential, and include universal masking, social distancing, basic hand hygiene, and proper ventilation focused on open doors and windows and eating outside. In fact, proper masking for teachers (cloth mask over medical mask or medical mask with knotted ear loops and tucked-in sides) combined with sufficient distancing (3 feet rather than 6 feet) is as effective as vaccines in reducing COVID transmissions. Mitigation procedures are complementary so a stronger mask will allow less distancing. And once teachers are vaccinated, social distancing will be even less necessary since vaccines are so protective against severe disease and definitively decrease transmission. President Biden and Governor Newsom both have committed to vaccinating teachers this month.
We also know what is not required to reopen schools safely: universal child COVID testing; keeping kids 6-feet apart at all times; low community case rates; or infrastructure changes.
Yet these realities are muted in the debate to reopen schools, and nowhere to be found in Newsom’s new plan. Without an educative component, there is no counterpoint to the false and unscientific claims of powerful forces.
The head of the California Teachers Association, E. Toby Boyd, insists that schools will remain closed until every teacher is vaccinated. At the same time, Mr. Boyd has falsely questioned the efficacy of those vaccinations. He’s further falsely claimed that “all research” shows that universal testing of teachers and students is required for safely reopening schools.
This is not true. Vaccinating and testing are not prerequisites to reopening schools, although vaccination will lead to uncompromised safety for teachers in the school setting, which we support. The efficacy rate for preventing hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID-19 is 100% for all three vaccines now deployed in the United States. Vaccines are also effective against coronavirus variants, and banish any doubt about opening schools.
Meanwhile, the harm unleashed on California schoolchildren mounts. “Every place you look—signs of social phobia and isolation all the way up to suicide attempts — screams crisis,” says Dr. Noble of UCSF. Local hospitals report the devastation: twice as many kids requiring mental health services: 75% more requiring immediate hospitalization; a 130% increase in kids hospitalized for eating disorders; child psychiatry beds full; the highest number of suicidal children on record. And that’s just those who make it to hospitals; for others, the mental illness wins.
Beyond the crushing emotional toll of closed schools, reports indicate potentially insurmountable educational deficits. These include substantial learning loss among California schoolchildren in English and math with a disparate impact on low-income, English-learner, and underrepresented students (here, here). One study estimates that while all students could lose 5-9 months of learning by June 2021, students of color could lose 6-12 months.
The academic slide will have lifelong impacts on “a lost generation of students.” In combination with the crisis in students’ mental health, closed schools “will be a worse pandemic than COVID.”
The scientific consensus long abandoned its thinking of March 2020. Those hawking pseudoscience have not. Renewed efforts to open California’s public schools need to advocate a year’s worth of science so that the same thinking that closed schools a year ago doesn’t win again.
UC Davis Law Professor Dennis J. Ventry, Jr. Ph.D., JD is the parent of a Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) student. Monica Gandhi M.D., MPH is a professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases Doctor at UCSF. Deborah Simon-Weisberg MD is the parent of a special education student in the BUSD and the program director of the Family Medicine Residency Program at Lifelong Medical Care.
