MONDAY, AUGUST 10 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU A
coronavirus pandemic
in July reversed course on an ag-
gressive reopening, and then last
week ratcheted back again to al-
most entirely remote. George-
town, George Washington and
American universities, all in the
nation’s capital, took similar zig-
zag paths toward remote open-
ings.
At American, a private univer-
sity with about 14,000 students,
officials had painstakingly pieced
together a plan to house about
2,300 students on campus in sin-
gle dorm rooms and teach
through a blend of in-person and
online methods. The school calcu-
lated classroom capacity under a
social distancing model, taking
into account whether seats were
fixed or mobile. It tracked how
many faculty members had health
concerns and who could teach in
person and when. Assembling the
course schedule, said AU Presi-
dent Sylvia M. Burwell, was like
solving a Rubik’s Cube.
By the end of July, that plan
went out the window.
“I’m disappointed,” Burwell
said. “We’re all disappointed.”
Burwell, who was health and
human services secretary during
the Obama administration, said
the trajectory of the pandemic
now dictates caution. She said she
spent weeks gathering facts and
enduring many sleepless nights
before deciding to shift course.
Now she’s pledging to make it
work.
In California, the leader of the
largest public university system in
the country saw this moment
coming months ago. Timothy P.
White, chancellor of the 482,000-
student California State Universi-
ty System, had announced on May
12 that most fall instruction on its
23 campuses would be remote. It
was at the time a shocking state-
ment of higher education’s vulner-
ability to the virus.
Now White says he is glad he
staked out a radical position. It
gave his faculty ample time to
prepare and freedom to innovate.
“It allowed a different mind-set,”
he said. The attitude: “Now, let’s
get to work and figure out how to
do it great.”
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]live in residence halls under a
strict public health regimen that
includes assigned sinks and show-
ers. Now U-Va. says the under-
graduate arrival will be delayed
because of the surge in v irus cases,
and face-to-face teaching will not
start until after Labor Day.
Some plans fell apart weeks
after they were announced. The
University of Southern CaliforniaHigher Education and Davidson
College.
The review found that 16 per-
cent planned a mix of approaches
and 26 percent had not yet decid-
ed.
Much remains in flux. The Uni-
versity of Virginia had announced
in June that students would be
invited to campus for classes
starting on Aug. 25. They wouldin July that all schools must re-
open. Then he said districts could
operate remotely for the first
three weeks. Then he extended
that for several more weeks. Local
health departments stepped in to
bar some districts from opening.
A few days ago, Abbott said the
decision was up to local school
officials.
John Kuhn, superintendent of
the 3,300-student Mineral Wells
Independent School District, said
he’s trying to follow the state’s
orders.
“But it’s not easy,” he said. “It
keeps changing.”
Kuhn said he has decided to
open schools for students who
want to come, but he is encourag-
ing parents to keep their children
home so there will be fewer in the
classroom and social distancing
will be easier. School starts there
next week.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R)
also ordered all districts open,
then later retreated, saying re-
mote learning would be all right
where coronavirus r ates are high-
est. On Friday, he made clear that
not all districts would be granted
that dispensation, telling Orlan-
do’s News 6 that he was concerned
that Hillsborough County, which
includes Tampa, plans to stay re-
mote.
“The law requires you to offer a
certain amount of in-person in-
struction,” DeSantis said, refer-
ring to his executive order. “I’m
concerned about it.”
For colleges and universities,
the tumult of campus closures in
March gave way to the chaos of
planning for reopening under vol-
atile and unprecedented condi-
tions. Some are bringing back
most of their students. Others are
bringing only certain groups —
freshmen, for instance. Still oth-
ers are telling students it’s best to
stay away for the fall. Many inter-
national students cannot get visas
to travel to the United States, and
others who are here are depen-
dent on colleges for emergency
housing.
No matter where they are liv-
ing, students are resigned to a
course catalogue with a heavy
dose of online learning. Classes
might be fully online or hybrid,
limiting face-to-face contact with
faculty members.
Dorm rooms, by default, will
become classrooms. Harvard Uni-
versity is inviting freshmen and
select others to live on campus,
but all of its undergraduate teach-
ing will be online.
Like their K-12 counterparts,
many colleges face pressure from
their faculties to shift to remote
learning. More than 350 faculty
members at the University of Iowa
signed a petition demanding that
classes be all online. There was
similar pushback from faculty
members at the Georgia Institute
of Technology.
As of last week, nearly 30 per-
cent of 3,000 institutions planned
to be fully or primarily online and
about 24 percent were fully or
mostly in person, according to an
examination by the Chronicle ofSome of the divide may trace to
the fact that rural areas tend to
lean more Republican and in
some cases have fewer coronavi-
rus cases. But the overall trend
worries Daniel A. Domenech, ex-
ecutive director of the American
Association of School Administra-
tors, which represents school su-
perintendents.
“It’s a very dangerous and ex-
plosive situation, and unfortu-
nately people are more inclined to
follow their political bent than to
do what is safe for their own fami-
lies and their own children,” he
said.
Trump and his allies have re-
peatedly pushed districts to open,
noting the importance of in-per-
son education for students’ aca-
demic and social emotional
growth, as well as for parents’
ability to work. Some administra-
tors and the parents they serve
seem to be listening.
In Washington County, Utah,
for instance, schools were accom-
modating the desires of a very
conservative community when
they opted to open for full-time,
in-person school. School begins
there this week.
“As restrictions lifted, we felt —
and the community felt — that
would be in the best interest of
students to get them back on as
normal a schedule as possible,”
said Steven Dunham, director of
communications for the district.
“We are trying to put into place
every safety precaution we can,”
Dunham said. “We are also trying
to fulfill the requests of the par-
ents in this community.”
The district is requiring stu-
dents and staff members to wear
masks, as ordered by Utah Gov.
Gary R. Herbert (R). But Dunham
said that “ a significant number of
parents” have asked the school
board to defy the order, some-
thing the board has declined to do.
The pressures in more liberal
communities often cut the other
way, with teachers unions saying
it is not safe to reopen campuses.
The American Federation of
Teachers passed a resolution en-
dorsing actions including strikes
to protest any orders to return to
classrooms, and teachers in New
York City have threatened to walk
out over the issue. The newly in-
stalled president of the National
Education Association said she,
too, supports strikes if needed to
get the attention of decision-mak-
ers.
“Our members are looking at
every option that they have in
their toolbox to get those in
charge to listen to them when they
say their schools are not safe,”
NEA President Becky P ringle said
in an interview. In her inaugural
speech, she promised financial
help to any affiliate that concludes
its reopening plan is not safe for
teachers.
Pressure to keep schools open
has been intense in Texas and
Florida, two states where Republi-
can governors ordered them open
and then backed off as infections
continued to climb.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) saidsaid Michael Casserly, executive
director of Great City Schools, a
lobbying group for large districts.
Chicago Public Schools an-
nounced last week that it would
begin the year online, after plan-
ning a hybrid system. Districts
across the country have pushed
back their opening dates. Last
week, the first week of school in
Georgia’s Cherokee County
School District, administrators
sent 14 letters to parents, each
disclosing new coronavirus cases.
That included 13 students,
r anging from first to 12th grades,
and a few teachers. More than 300
students who had been in contact
with them were directed to self-
isolate for 14 days.
“Our parents wanted a choice
for their children, and we deliv-
ered — it is not perfect, and we all
know that, but perfection is not
possible in a pandemic,” Superin-
tendent Brian V. Hightower said
in a message to the community on
Friday.
Another Georgia high school,
in Paulding County, drew national
attention after students posted
pictures and video of their peers
walking without masks in tightly
packed hallways. Now, six stu-
dents and three staff members
there have tested positive for the
virus, according to a letter sent to
parents over the weekend. And on
Sunday, the superintendent said
the school would go online only
for Monday and Tuesday and
would announce plans beyond
that on Tuesday evening.
Last week, Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity changed its mind and said
classes would be fully online, dis-
couraging even those who had
signed leases from returning to
Baltimore. Students at Washing-
ton University in St. Louis faced
the opposite problem when the
school said on July 31 that all
dorm rooms would be converted
to singles, leaving juniors and se-
niors scrambling to find housing
at the last minute.
In Congress, talks over a pan-
demic relief package collapsed
last week, leaving no clear path to
providing schools with funding
that l awmakers in both parties
agree is urgently needed.
“We knew how to close schools,”
said Annette C. Anderson, an as-
sistant professor of education and
deputy director of the Center for
Safe and Healthy Schools at Johns
Hopkins. “But we have no idea
how to properly reopen schools.”
The result of this chaos is un-
certainty for students and their
parents, with profound ramifica-
tions for health, learning, emo-
tional development and econom-
ics in schools that open and those
that don’t.
Of the 20 largest K-12 districts,
17 plan to begin the year fully
remote. The big outlier is New
York City, by far the nation’s larg-
est district, which plans a hybrid
system and has withstood intense
pressure from teachers and others
to reverse course.
On Friday, New York Gov. An-
drew M. Cuomo (D) gave the
state’s 732 school districts the go-
ahead to open in person if they
like, as long as the state’s low
coronavirus infection rates stay
low.
Across the country, school dis-
tricts have wildly different plans
based on their geography, infec-
tion rates and partisanship.
Four percent of rural districts
and 21 percent of suburban dis-
tricts have announced fully re-
mote plans, compared to 55 per-
cent of urban systems, according
to a study of 477 districts chosen as
a representative national sample
by the Center on Reinventing Pub-
lic Education at the University of
Washington at Bothell.
Robin Lake, the center’s direc-
tor, also reviewed parent surveys
from districts across the country
and was struck by how divergent
views are.
“Some are saying they are terri-
fied,” she said. “Others are saying,
‘I think this whole covid thing is a
farce.’ ”
Like so much in the United
States, decisions appear to be fall-
ing along partisan lines, with
schools in Republican areas far
more likely to open than those in
Democratic communities.
Polling shows Republicans are
far more likely than Democrats to
say going back into school build-
ings is safe. And an examination of
district plans compiled by Educa-
tion Week suggests that campuses
are more likely to be open in
conservative communities than in
liberal ones.
Education Week’s database in-
cludes 153 districts in states won
by Hillary Clinton in 2016. Of
them, 67 percent plan fully remote
learning this fall.
Of the 307 districts in states
won by President Trump in 2016,
58 percent plan to hold fully or
partly in-person classes.
SCHOOLS FROM A
School year has barely started, but give it a ‘C’ for chaos
JUSTIN LANE/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
Teachers in New York and their supporters protest the reopening of schools this fall. Districts nationwide have dramatically different
plans depending on infection rates and politics. Some plan a full return; others a mix of in-person and remote learning, or online only.AfterBeforeBeforeGUTTERS
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