11/30/2021
WALL STREET JOURNAL
School Closures Aren’t Just for Covid Anymore
Remote learning turns out to be an easy fix for other problems—never mind the huge educational costs.
-By Leslie Bienen
When Reynolds Middle School shut down its classrooms for three weeks, it wasn’t because of Covid-19 cases. On Nov. 16, parents of students at school in Troutdale, east of Portland, received a brief email informing them the school would revert to online learning so that district officials could develop “safety protocols” and “social-emotional supports” to deal with disruptive student behavior, including fights.
Reynolds students aren’t alone in being stuck at home again. Thousands of schools in dozens of districts across the U.S. have taken previously unscheduled days off or moved back to remote learning for “mental health” reasons. Other schools have cut back time in school buildings because of staffing shortages or for “deep cleaning,” a pointless anti-Covid precaution.
“The shifts in learning methods and isolation caused by COVID-19 closures and quarantines have taken a toll on the well-being of our students and staff,” Reynolds Superintendent Danna Diaz’s email said. “We are finding that some students are struggling with the socialization skills necessary for in-person learning, which is causing disruption in school for other students.”
It seems perverse to respond to the problems caused by school shutdowns with more shutdowns—and to send middle schoolers the message that unruly behavior can get them out of school for three weeks.
As with Covid-19 shutdowns, low-income and minority students likely bear the brunt of the educational disruption. Reynolds Middle School is in eastern Multnomah County, and “east county” is shorthand for underserved, low-income and racially diverse. In October, the high school in the same district, as a colleague and I reported in these pages, switched to remote learning for 10 days because of a handful of Covid cases.
“We started seeing mental health closures around November 1st,” the Burbio School Tracker reported two weeks later. By Nov. 22, Burbio’s research team had identified 3,145 school closures for “mental health” out of a total 8,692 for the school year, the company’s president, Dennis Roche, said in an email. The large majority were in a handful of states: Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon and Virginia. Among them:
• The Detroit Public Schools said the district would go online on Fridays in December, citing “the need for mental health relief, rising COVID cases, and time to more thoroughly clean schools.” It later canceled in-person classes the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving. The district has 49,000 students, of whom 82% are black, 13% Latino and 78% eligible for subsidized lunch.
• Southfield, Mich., schools are also going remote one day a week, because of “staffing shortages.” This district is wealthier than nearby Detroit—only 36% of students need subsidized lunch—and its high-school graduation rate is 86%. But 94% of the students are black.
• At least a dozen Oregon districts, including Portland Public Schools, declared Nov. 12 a “professional development day” after juggling staff shortages all month. With many teachers taking the Friday after Veterans Day off, it became impossible to staff the buildings sufficiently to stay open. The head of the Portland Public Schools’ teachers union told Portland Monthly in early November that teachers wanted a weekly “asynchronous” day—on which students would be expected to study without teachers present—so teachers can use the time for planning.
• The Winston-Salem, N.C., district similarly ordered schools closed Nov. 12: “The ‘assignment’ for staff and students for that day is to ‘take care of themselves,’ ” Superintendent Tricia McManus said. “It will be a day to focus on the mental health of students and staff by showing kindness, community, and connection.” It also meant a four-day weekend, as the schools were already closing for Veterans Day.
Before Covid, school shutdowns happened on snow days and for genuine emergencies such as natural disasters, school shootings and occasionally outbreaks of infectious disease like flu, E. coli or, decades ago, polio. But without remote learning as an option, districts had to resume class as quickly as possible, or teachers and students would have to make up missed class days at the end of the year, cutting into summer vacation. Now school officials have an easy out—but one that comes at a huge cost to students. States could cut this option off by forcing districts to meet instructional-hour mandates only with in-person learning, but few have done so.
Many schools around the country closed during the 1918 influenza pandemic, but some—including those in New York, Chicago and New Haven, Conn.—didn’t, although the flu is more infectious in children than Covid-19 is. In November of that year, New York City Health Commissioner Royal S. Copeland told the New York Times that open schools were a boon to public health.
Copeland noted that some 750,000 of the city’s one million public-school students lived in “unsanitary and crowded” tenements with parents who “are occupied with the manifold duties involved in keeping the wolf from the door” and “simply have not the time to give the necessary attention to the initial symptoms of disease, even if they should have enough knowledge to recognize and meet them, which they rarely have.” In class, teachers could give students “the ‘once over’ ” and isolate symptomatic ones pending a diagnosis.
“Our control of the children in school secured them a degree of safety that would not have been possible if they had been allowed loose on the streets,” Copeland said. The article was titled “Epidemic Lessons Against Next Time.”
A century later, too many schools are failing to make students’ health and well-being their primary concern. They should revisit the lessons of 1918.
Remote learning turns out to be an easy fix for other problems—never mind the huge educational costs.
