Counterpoints, COVID in schools

The Chronicle Herald's Dec. 4 headline, “COVID-19 shuts Citadel High,” might be enough to tip the balance.

Parental anxieties and educators' concerns about COVID-19 spread are rising and Education Minister Zach Churchill is under mounting pressure to close schools, once again, or to extend the winter holiday break.

Isolated cases have surfaced at four out of nearly 400 schools in the province: Auburn Drive High, Graham Creighton Junior High School, Northeast Kings Education Centre, and St. Margaret's Bay Elementary School. So compared to most other provinces, student and staff exposures are extremely rare, so far.

Shutting all schools down was the automatic response when COVID19 first hit between March and June of 2020. Eight months into the pandemic, public health authorities, ministries of education, and school superintendents are singing a different tune: keeping students in school is the first priority as we prepare to ride out the second wave of viral infections.

All of us are far more acutely aware of the accumulating academic, human, and social costs of shutting down schools, falling unevenly upon children and teens in the most disadvantaged communities. Combating the relentless virus and keeping regional economies intact will not likely be greatly advanced through system-wide shutdowns.

With COVID-19 infection rates spiking outside of our region, school closures are becoming a distinct possibility, if only as a temporary respite, for shaken-up students, fatigued teachers and bewildered parents.

Setting a relatively low infection positivity number, such as the three per cent figure applied in closing New York City schools, is unwise because, by that standard, all schools will ultimately close at some point this school year.

What's emerging is a “flexible response” doctrine embracing a fuller arsenal of strategies and borrowing the phrase popularized by former U.S. Secretary of State Robert Mcnamara in the early 1960s. Banishing the devastating pandemic, much like vanquishing the Russian nuclear arms threat, requires a carefully considered set of options and a calibrated range of responses.

Our current approach, a case-bycase strategy, has proven reasonably effective in provinces and districts with lower transmission rates. Isolating COVID-19 cases and suspending exposed classes is the usual approach, but here entire schools are closed for a few days to sanitize the premises out of “an abundance of caution.” It works as long as the local public health system can sustain contact tracing and isolate children and staff who have exposures. It's faltering in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta, where the numbers of infections exceed the capacity for contact tracing.

Keeping schools open here may require some more ingenious and flexible policy responses to ride out the second wave:

SHORT, TIME-LIMITED SCHOOL CLOSURES

Extending school holidays is emerging as the most expedient way of applying an education “circuit breaker.” Starting the Christmas holidays early, as in Quebec and Alberta, and extending the break into January 2021 are the latest “quick fixes” gaining traction from province to province right across Canada. It's much easier to extend school holiday time because that policy response resonates with teachers and education support workers and is more minimally disruptive for working parents.

DUAL-TRACK STUDENT CHOICE MODEL

Giving students and families the choice of completing courses inperson or online (as in Ontario) caused an array of unanticipated, disruptive and unpredictable consequences. Students and parents in more affluent neighbourhoods in the Toronto District School Board chose in-person schooling, while online enrolment was highest in the district's poorest and most racialized communities.

School schedules were constantly changing as students bailed out of in-person classes, generating unexpected demand for online courses. Hundreds of thousands of students in Toronto, Peel and York Region have shifted online, rendering the two-track strategy essentially unsustainable over the longer-term.

MIXED IN-PERSON AND VIRTUAL HYBRID BLENDED LEARNING MODEL

Moving to a hybrid learning model on a so-called “rotation system” is a response full of implementation bugs. Some Ontario school districts have resorted to dual track delivery models with classes combining in-person and video streamed classes. Since September 2020, New Brunswick has implemented a hybrid blended learning model with alternating days in all high schools with decidedly mixed results. Curriculum coverage suffers, with losses estimated at up to 30 per cent of learning outcomes, and student participation rates are reportedly low during the hybrid off-days in the checkerboard high school schedule.

SUSTAINING ELEMENTARY CLASSES AND GOING ONLINE IN UPPER GRADES

Younger children benefit more from teacher-guided instruction and do not spread the virus as readily, judging from Kindergarten to Grade 6 in-person classes in Denmark and British Columbia. Splitting larger classes in junior and senior high schools in urban or suburban school zones is prohibitively expensive, so school districts tend to resort to shifting everyone to online classes. Teacher training is critical and evidence-based research has identified a set of effective strategies for successful online teaching.

Closing all schools should be the last resort this time around. Total shutdowns should only be considered if and when transmission rates turn schools into vectors and staff infection rates make it impossible to provide a reasonable quality of education.

The latest health science research has opened our eyes to “a more complex picture” of the very real risks and the realities of this rapidly changing, unpredictable public health crisis. There's no perfect solution, but adopting a “flexible response” strategy, attuned to regional and local pandemic conditions, still makes the most sense

Paul W. Bennett, ED.D., is director of Schoolhouse Institute, Halifax, N.S., and author of The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools (Montreal: MQUP, September 2020).