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Dr. Scott Atlas, a former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover shares his views on the reopening of schools in the fall amid the coronavirus pandemic. youtu.be/E09ABafKugk?t=12 ... See MoreSee Less
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Kids Need to Go Back to School, with Precautions
By JIM GERAGHTY
If you think you’re having a tough time getting through this pandemic, think about how the world’s children are coping. In the U.S. in about mid-March, with little warning, school and all youth activities just stopped. Everyone muddled through with “distance learning” as best they could — a tool that in normal circumstances could be a useful addition to regular in-person classes but is a poor substitute overall. All sports ended; all movie theaters closed; every indoor hangout from shopping malls to gyms is either closed or risky; summer jobs are few and far between; most summer camps are closed. Some kids are managing to get along with socially distanced play dates and Zoom hangouts . . . diverting even more of their lives online, a phenomenon many parents weren’t thrilled about before the pandemic.
Unless you’re old enough to have survived the 1918 pandemic, our kids are going through something completely different from anything we ever experienced. Everyone who studies mental health in children is sounding the alarm; it’s not just the fear, stress, and anxiety, it’s the isolation. To the extent we can get kids safely interacting with each other again — making each other laugh again — we need to do that. We cannot allow our kids to pay the price for grownups’ ideological differences or fears of lawsuits. Yes, any reopening of schools will involve some element of risk. Our job as responsible grownups is to figure out how to mitigate those risks, not to throw up our hands and tell kids to turn into hikikomori shut-ins until there’s a vaccine.
My reader who is the head of research for a top-ten hospital in this country weighed in, noting that he’s “seeing way too much overreaction and panic about the fast-approaching school year.”
He writes in, “count me in the ‘schools need to reopen’ camp, and not this crazy two days in-three days out stuff either. The statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics, declaring ‘all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school,’ is right on target.”
“The general public isn’t very good at being able to juggle two or three ideas at the same time, like example opportunity costs in any economic analysis,” he notes. “The good thing about the AAP statement is that it makes the competing risks very clear.”
My medical-researcher reader observes that we now have research on the experiences of places where schools have reopened, and the evidence indicates that reopening did not trigger a second wave of infections. “Australia is a good place to study for several reasons,” this researcher writes. “It’s mid-winter there, so they’re in the middle of their school year, they have a very good public health and reporting infrastructure, and the schools and communities are comparable to what we have here. The catch is that their overall case prevalence is less than ours.” He also points to recent experiences of the Netherlands and United Kingdom.
This medical researcher notes that school during the pandemic will necessarily look and operate differently than before. “Rather than isolating individual kids from each other, the schools that have successfully reopened are isolating cohorts,” he observed. “Children stay together with the same class all day rather than mixing with other classes in their grade at lunchtime or recess. When they’re in the classroom, the guidelines from countries that have reopened are pretty consistent: space students’ desks as far apart as feasible without forcing some students to stay home — (which in practice means desks about 1 meter apart — and keep the teacher separated from the front row as far as feasible (because adults are at more risk than children). If one teacher teaches math and another teaches reading, have the teachers move instead of the children. Have music, art, and other activities in the regular classroom instead of sending classes from one room to another. Large group activities such as chorus and assemblies are going to have to be canceled or done online.”
Many things will be challenging, and we can’t have 100 percent isolation in the school setting. Plus, there will be individual children and adults who will need some kind of special accommodations because they are at unusual risk, not just worried about getting sick. The key is not to let the exceptions be the rule.
This researcher found more “best practices” after reviewing examples from other countries:
“Open the school year in phases. If your school is Kindergarten through fifth grade, start with just first and fifth grades the first week, add in second and third grades the second week, and then all grades attend school after that.”
“Stagger drop-off and pick-up times, maybe five or ten minutes apart, per grade. This will mean some inconvenience for parents and siblings, but it will reduce mixing of children by a lot.”
“Keep corridors in junior high and high schools one-way: That also greatly reduces the number of students coming into contact with each other. Passing times might also be staggered by grade to reduce the number in the halls at any one time.” I know many schools are trying to minimize the number of times middle and high schoolers change classes and are contemplating having the teachers move from classroom to classroom. Clearly, this won’t work in every situation; some classrooms might have particular equipment needed for instruction: science lab, shop class, home economics, gym, art, library, music, etc. If high schools do go with the one-way hallway options, this means teens will need more time between classes.
“Few countries are forcing elementary-age children to be masked: more are asking secondary school children to do so. Much as we’d like to be able to say otherwise, masks make only a small difference, but they do make a difference, mainly by reducing the potential for an asymptomatic person to spread an infection.”
(“Masks make only a small difference, but they do make a difference.” Why do so many people have a hard time understanding this concept? Why does this have to turn into the Hatfields and McCoys, where either an establishment requiring a mask or a person not wearing a mask has to be treated as a provocation on par with assassinating Archduke Ferdinand?)
Passions are running high on this subject; on a local Facebook page, one parent contended that parents who send their kids to school this fall will need to answer for it to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates. I believe this is classified as an “Omega-level Helicopter Parent.” This researcher recommends, “if you’re a school-board member or school administrator, spend this week looking over all the guidelines and reports from places like Ireland, the U.K., Denmark, Australia, and the Netherlands so you are well-armed with facts when the concerned suburban empathy moms come trying to overrule you.” ... See MoreSee Less
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