Pa. not planning school shutdown
and secondary education, said state officials are examining research beyond Pennsylvania. Mr. Stem cited studies in France, where a coronavirus lockdown is being eased to allow elementary students to return to in-person instruction. Researchers are assessing the impact it has on community transmission before allowing high school students to return to classrooms.
Additionally, Mr. Stem said department officials are looking at what is happening in schools inside and outside of Pennsylvania and how it affects the transmission levels.
“We will use those results to inform our next steps,” he said.
On Thursday, Gov. Tom Wolf announced new COVID19 mitigation measures that take effect Saturday and extend through 8 a.m. Jan. 4. The ones affecting the schoolage population include suspending youth sports and extracurricular school activities during that three-week period in an effort to keep children safe outside of school so they can remain in or return to classrooms.
Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine has said the recent spike of coronavirus cases among all age groups, including school-age children, is “alarming.”
In the news release outlining the measures, Dr. Levine said there have been more than 37,500 coronavirus cases among children age 5 to 18 since the beginning of the pandemic. But she said 9,500 of those cases have been reported in the past two weeks.
A spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, voiced support for the order as a way to keep the state’s health care system from being overwhelmed.
“It is imperative that Pennsylvania reverse the rising levels of community spread that we’ve seen in recent weeks,” said PSEA spokesman Chris Lilienthal. “Experts have said that it’s more likely for the virus to enter and spread within a school if it is spreading rapidly in the larger community. We all need to do our part to stop the spread across Pennsylvania, which will make our communities and our schools safer for everyone.”
Mr. Lilienthal added that the union is calling on school district leaders to follow the state’s public health guidelines without exception, including transitioning to remote instruction when the guidelines recommend it.
Over half of the state’s schools have moved into remote instruction, Mr. Stem said Friday.
Mr. Ortega and Mr. Stem said that all 500 school districts as well as some private schools returned attestation forms. By signing those forms, school officials commit to complying with the Department of Health’s face covering order as well as its direction on actions to take when positive cases show up in a school if they are offering in-person instruction.
Or if a district is currently offering fully remote instruction, its leaders affirm they will continue to use that instruction delivery until the county where they are located no longer has substantial disease transmission for two consecutive weeks.
Districts are required to place their attestation form on their websites, which Mr. Stem said is the first layer of enforcing those commitments. Beyond that, he said if calls come through the Department of Health about districts not adhering to them, the Education Department does have a system in place to investigate them.
However, educators point out the Health Department’s complaint form specifically directs complaints about public or private schools to be directed to local school leaders.
“To this point in time, overwhelmingly we’ve seen thoughtful leadership among our school district leaders, among our school boards and our local communities,” Mr. Stem said. “Where there are exceptions to that, both the Department of Education and Department of Health will respond fully and accordingly.”
Mr. Ortega acknowledged that last spring’s order to halt in-person instruction created inequities. He said the department did everything it could to figure out ways to provide additional resources and assistance to educators in districts that struggled with delivering education remotely or are challenged to provide instruction while complying with CDC guidelines.
That includes entering into a partnership with the Public Broadcasting System to pilot datacasting that will allow students to download lessons, videos, slideshows, worksheets, web pages and other instruction transmitted over television air waves and received by a student’s home computer, without the need to connect to the internet.
Mr. Stem said the federal government is showing no indication of granting waivers to states to skip administering mandatory standardized tests as it did last year.
The state is “extending the testing windows to hopefully allow sufficient time for more districts to return to in-person instruction to be able to administer the assessments in a safe way,” Mr. Stem said.