Asher Lehrer-Small – LA School Report https://www.laschoolreport.com What's Really Going on Inside LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) Tue, 25 Apr 2023 20:48:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.4 https://www.laschoolreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/cropped-T74-LASR-Social-Avatar-02-32x32.png Asher Lehrer-Small – LA School Report https://www.laschoolreport.com 32 32 District Attorney launches broad criminal probe into Stockton school spending https://www.laschoolreport.com/district-attorney-launches-broad-criminal-probe-into-stockton-school-spending/ Wed, 26 Apr 2023 14:01:00 +0000 https://www.laschoolreport.com/?p=63898

Ron Freitas, district attorney of San Joaquin County, Calif., announced he would launch a criminal investigation into spending practices in the Stockton Unified School District. (San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office/Facebook)

A California district attorney announced Monday he will investigate “any and all wrongdoing” in the Stockton Unified School District after state auditors highlighted millions of dollars of possible fraud in board members’ use of pandemic stimulus funds.

It’s the next step in a process many in Stockton believe will result in criminal charges against its leaders and could force the school system to pay back over $7 million in federal relief money.

The district, which a top education researcher previously told The 74 was a “worst-case scenario” for its COVID spending, had been waiting on news of a criminal probe after a February report from state auditors highlighted questionable contracts. On Monday, they got their answer: Authorities will not only examine the auditors’ findings, but take an expansive look at other possible malfeasance.

“I launched a full-fledged, multi-agency investigation,” San Joaquin County District Attorney Ron Freitas said. “Make no mistake, any attempt to commit fraud on the backs of our children will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

His office is joined in the probe by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a possible nod to the auditors’ focus on federal funds. A spokesperson said Freitas’s office has not yet concluded who might be charged or the nature of any possible charges, nor could it share details on its timeline.

Former Superintendent John Ramirez and former Chief Budgetary Officer Marcus Battle, two leaders targeted by the auditors, both told The 74 they bear no culpability for any misappropriation of funds.

“From my viewpoint, the bulk of the transactions and questionable practices were initiated before my arrival in the district,” Battle wrote in an email to The 74. He added that “rumors about fiscal malfeasance” have long plagued the district.

“If the [district attorney] feels that he needs to do an investigation, I think that’s great,” Ramirez said. But he declined to comment on who might be at fault, citing a non-disclosure agreement he signed with the district upon leaving office.

In January, a shakeup on the school board put those who pledged to reform the district in the majority. Newly installed board President AngelAnn Flores, who said she previously called for auditors to look into the district, was “grateful” the district attorney is launching an investigation.

“I’m going to trust that the investigation process ill prove exactly what I have been shouting from the rooftop for almost two years now: that we have some bad actors and leadership … and all should be held accountable,” she said.

Stockton Unified already faces a $30 million budget deficit next year and could be forced to pay back millions more in misspent federal grant money.

“We are in a critical budget state currently,” Flores said. “It’s one of my stressors keeping me up at night.”

From left, Stockton Unified board President AngelAnn Flores, Trustees Kennetha Stevens, Alicia Rico, Ray Zulueta Jr, Cecilia Mendez (Linda Jacobson/LA School Report)

Stockton educator Silvia Cantu echoed a common worry in Stockton that budgetary woes could prompt a state takeover of the long-struggling school system. Working at a small school, she fears the move could lead the state to shut the doors of her workplace, George Washington Elementary.

“If the district has to make up money, it’s going to have to close schools and my school will possibly be one of them,” said the Stockton Teachers Association member. “I don’t think it’s right that the neighborhood or our school should be punished for the lack of knowledge and whatever these board members are doing.”

“They think they can take money and nobody cares,” she added.

Now, she’s awaiting the outcome of the probe and believes it should not be a matter of “if” but of “when” charges are announced.

Grand jury reports and previous coverage from The 74, including documents obtained under the Freedom of Information law, revealed several concerning uses of relief funds in the district, including:

  • The $7.3 million highlighted by the state auditor — for air filters designed to kill COVID, the bulk of which remain unused in a district warehouse.
  • Over $2 million to cover the six-figure salaries of 14 district executives, one of whom runs a popular website that regularly targets political enemies, including student activists and teachers.
  • $150,000 in startup costs to a program designed to help students curb pandemic learning loss. The district abruptly abandoned the project after five months of planning.

But Freitas, the district attorney, said his investigation “will not limit itself to the terms of the [auditors’] report,” and could include wrongdoing beyond questionable COVID stimulus funding.


This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

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National study reveals 1 in 4 teachers altering lesson plans due to anti-critical race theory laws https://www.laschoolreport.com/national-study-reveals-1-in-4-teachers-altering-lesson-plans-due-to-anti-critical-race-theory-laws/ Mon, 30 Jan 2023 15:00:00 +0000 https://www.laschoolreport.com/?p=63206

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

In the first national study of how the GOP’s classroom censorship policies have changed the teaching profession, thousands of educators expressed confusion over what they can and can’t cover in lessons. Nearly 1 in 4 said they have altered their curricula so parents and officials won’t find their teachings controversial.

Teachers said they had to skip over classic texts like To Kill a Mockingbird and avoid historical figures like famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass out of concern for parental complaints and possible legal blowback. One high school science teacher who the study quoted anonymously described an atmosphere of “fear and paranoia” around simply covering the content laid out within state standards.

The report, which was published by the Rand Corporation on Wednesday, surveyed over 8,000 educators from across the country. It asked whether officials had passed policies limiting the teaching of topics related to race and gender and, if so, how those rules had impacted their instructional decisions.

Confusion was so widespread, researchers found, that roughly one-quarter of teachers said they didn’t know whether they were subject to restrictions. Among teachers working in states that had enacted classroom censorship bills, less than a third actually knew that the laws were in place.

“At times there is that confusion about, ‘What am I allowed to say in the classroom, what am I not allowed to say?’ ” lead researcher Ashley Woo explained.

In Florida, where the state’s censorship bill also extends to higher education and the workplace, and where Gov. Ron DeSantis recently blocked a forthcoming Advanced Placement course on African American studies, the state Department of Education rejected the idea that their law might be unclear to teachers.

“If educators are confused about what can and cannot be taught in Florida schools, the blame lies solely on media activists and union clowns who purposefully sow confusion and mislead the public,” spokesperson Alex Lanfranconi wrote in an email to The 74.

Classroom censorship bills began to proliferate in 2021 as right-wing politicians advocated that schools overstepped in the measures they enacted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. As some districts added more books written by Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and Asian authors to their curricula and educated staff about how racism operates in society, predominantly white parents in many districts pushed back on the changes, calling them critical race theory.

Critical race theory is an academic framework used to examine systematic racism and is taught mostly in graduate school rather than K-12 classrooms. The term has become a GOP catch-all for lessons related to race. Americans largely support teachings that address racism, but support wanes drastically when the critical race theory label is applied, research shows.

Since 2021, legislation has been proposed in 42 states to curtail race- and gender-related teachings. In 18 states, the measures have passed into law, according to an Education Week tracker. In at least six states, the rules include penalties for educators or schools that do not comply.

Terrance Anfield teaches English as a second language in Kennesaw, Georgia, where a state law bans teachers from covering “divisive concepts.”

“The very concepts that will allow the development of our students to become well-rounded, inclusive members of society are being omitted from the classroom for fear of offending the wrong person or committee. This should not be an issue that has involved the districts of Georgia because CRT is typically taught at the collegiate level,” he wrote in an email to The 74.

In the aftermath of those changes, 1 in 4 teachers nationally said their school or district leaders told them to limit discussions of political or social issues in class, a previous Rand study found in August.

The non-partisan think tank’s most recent report now shows that a similar proportion of teachers, 24%, have altered their curricular materials in response to the controversy — regardless of whether or not they live in states that have classroom censorship laws on the books. Even in states with no rules limiting teachings on race and gender, 22% of instructors said the nationwide pushback influenced their selection of books and worksheets.

“The limitations are not just originating from state policies, they’re also coming from other places,” said Woo, the Rand researcher, explaining that educators frequently reported re-designing their offerings because of complaints from parents or “implicit” and “unspoken” messages from district leaders directing them to sanitize lessons.

Colin Sharkey, executive director of the Association of American Educators, emphasized that parents do have a right to transparency over what their students are learning. But at the same time, districts should avoid policies that have a “chilling effect” on educators, which can make schools “not a healthy place for learning,” he said.

In the face of pushback, some teachers still expressed resistance to censorship policies. The survey included a free response section completed by about 1,450 educators. Nearly 1 in 5 said they are continuing to include lessons related to race and gender, and made no mention of efforts to make the teachings less contentious.

“My students are more important than any board policy. If I get in trouble, then it would be worth it,” one educator wrote.

In a profession whose stress levels are paralleled only by doctors and nurses, navigating the supercharged climate has made educators’ jobs “even more difficult and less attractive,” in the words of one survey respondent, who teaches elementary school.

School staff may have their hands tied, caught between what is legal and what they think is right. A middle school science teacher said the school’s LGBTQ students are “knowingly suffering and there is nothing I can do about it without risking my job.”

In some cases, districts now require teachers to search for new classroom materials, go through cumbersome approval processes for new curricula or even run lessons by parents before leading them in the classroom, Woo explained. All those steps represent more work for teachers at a time when staff shortages already plague many states and districts across the country, she said.

“All of these things are potentially adding more to teachers’ plates in a time when we know teachers have already experienced a lot of stress,” she said.

Moms for Liberty, a national organization that supports school board candidates pushing for limitations on race- and gender-related lessons, did not respond to requests for comment on whether these policies could worsen teacher burnout.

To district leaders, Woo said, one clear takeaway from the study should be that educators need additional support to comply with a changing legal and political landscape.

“Teachers cannot and should not have to shoulder these challenges on their own.”


This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

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ACT scores fall to lowest level in 30 years https://www.laschoolreport.com/act-scores-fall-to-lowest-level-in-30-years/ Mon, 17 Oct 2022 14:01:00 +0000 https://www.laschoolreport.com/?p=62483

In yet another data point on missed learning during the pandemic, ACT scores from this year’s high school graduates dropped to their lowest level in three decades, according to a report released Wednesday.

Exam-takers averaged 19.8 out of a possible 36 total points on the college admissions test, the first time since 1991 that nationwide results dipped below 20.

“There is no way to sugar coat these ACT results,” Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, told The 74. “College entrance exam scores have plummeted, reflecting substantive holes in student knowledge and abilities.”

Scores for students from low-income families were particularly worrisome. Those youth, who in many cases had to pick up part-time jobs during virtual learning or help out with child care, scored 17.4, on average. Only 8% hit college readiness benchmarks in all four subjects — math, reading, English and science — compared to nearly a quarter of their more affluent peers.

Declines can’t be attributed solely to the pandemic, experts say, as ACT scores have been decreasing since 2018. But the pattern has accelerated since COVID hit.

“The magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming, as we see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting the college-readiness benchmark in any of the subjects we measure,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a press release.

ACT scores from this year’s high school graduates dropped to their lowest level in three decades. (ACT)

The numbers provide new insight into the educational harms older learners experienced during the pandemic, said Thomas Dee, professor of education at Stanford University. In early September, the release of 9-year-olds’ reading and math scores via the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed unprecedented declines in learning among younger students, but until now there’s been less documentation of the impacts for high schoolers, he said.

“​​These latest [ACT] data should remind us to pay attention also to the experiences of recent graduates who spent most of their high school years under pandemic conditions,” Dee wrote in an email.

Samantha Farrow, a senior at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, said the standardized tests she’s taken identified gaps in her learning from the pandemic — Algebra 2 especially, which she took when classes first went online in the spring of 2020. She sat for the SAT rather than the ACT, but said many of her friends took both exams and found them difficult.

“There was still stuff in the SAT, like the Algebra 2 stuff, that I was just like, ‘I have no idea how to do it,’” she said. “I self-studied, too. I used Khan Academy, I did all that stuff. I just didn’t know how to do it. It’s just stuff that we missed.”

Courtesy of Samantha Farrow

The college admissions testing landscape has changed in recent years. About one-third fewer high school grads took the ACT in 2022 than in 2018, as many institutions have become test-optional and an increasing share of young people choose to forgo higher education. Six states — Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee and Wyoming — administer the exam to all students.

Amid widespread pandemic disruptions, which hit the most vulnerable students the hardest, declines in ACT results should hardly be unexpected, said Ronn Nozoe, CEO of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

“While these scores are alarming, they are certainly not surprising,” he wrote in an email. “School leaders and educators are doing everything they can. … We need our federal leaders to double down on supporting the academic and mental health needs of our students.”

In fact, schools across the country received an unprecedented windfall from the U.S. government’s COVID relief spending, with a total of $190 billion meant to revamp schools’ infrastructure and help students recover from pandemic losses.

“The trick now,” wrote Lake, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, “is to face up to the enormity and urgency of the challenge while still recognizing that we do have the tools to act now to fix this.”


This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

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Q&A: Seeing the nuances behind the chronic absenteeism crisis https://www.laschoolreport.com/qa-seeing-the-nuances-behind-the-chronic-absenteeism-crisis/ Mon, 08 Aug 2022 14:01:00 +0000 https://www.laschoolreport.com/?p=61848

Students who miss at least 10% of school days are more likely to face reading difficulties by third grade, less likely to earn a high school diploma and are at higher risk of juvenile delinquency. There’s a word to describe when students surpass this troubling threshold: chronic absenteeism.

It makes intuitive sense. Students who spend less time in the classroom have a harder time keeping up with their peers and may face difficulties developing positive relationships with school staff.

During the pandemic, rates of chronic absenteeism have skyrocketed, hitting 40% in the nation’s two largest school systems, New York City and Los Angeles, and reaching dangerously high levels in many districts in between. 

In many cases, difficulties with remote learningfear of COVID-19 spread in schools, poverty-related barriers such as students being forced to pick up jobs or a mix of those and other factors have added obstacles to students’ school attendance.

Jing Liu (University of Maryland)

But with all eyes on absenteeism as schools nationwide seek to recover from the lasting impacts of the pandemic, Jing Liu, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, argues that officials should begin by gaining a more complete understanding of the issue.

That starts with expanding what is usually a binary statistic — whether or not a student is absent 10% of days — into a multi-dimensional measure.

In two recent papers, Liu and co-authors find key differences based on when in the school year absences occur and whether they are excused or unexcused. The trends can help schools more quickly identify at-risk students, so they may intervene to support them in getting back on track, he said.

The 74 sat down with the researcher, over Zoom, to glean the key takeaways from his timely work.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Why do we care about absenteeism? What are the typical differences in outcomes between Student A, with perfect attendance, and Student B, who misses school a few times a month?

Jing Liu: We care about absenteeism for several reasons. First of all, students have to be in school to learn. So for any education policy intervention to work, you have to have students in school. 

Second, I have this new paper published with Dr. [Seth] Gershenson that shows there’s this strong impact of absenteeism on student learning in the short run and also for longer-run outcomes including high school graduation and college enrollment. So if we care about those outcomes, we have to reduce absenteeism. 

Lastly, absenteeism is also linked to drug abuse, crime, teen pregnancy, a host of undesirable outcomes. So cutting absences can also benefit students in those different aspects.

One pattern that you and your co-authors found in the April study that caught my attention is when a student has an unexcused absence early in the year it tends to precipitate increased levels of truancy later on in the year and in future grades. But that trend doesn’t hold for excused absences like a doctor’s appointment. So can you tell me a little more about what you saw there?

Sure. So for this study, we are able to use really nuanced data. We were able to look at the patterns in how absences evolve within a school year and also as students progress over grades. 

So what do we see? Unexcused absences grow pretty dramatically within a school year while the excused absences stay relatively stable over time. If we look at just absences in the first month, especially unexcused absences, you can do a pretty good job of predicting their [increased] trajectory in the rest of the school year. For students who are really disengaged in the first month, they are likely to be very disengaged for the entire school year.

Liu and his co-authors found that students who have a few unexcused absences at the beginning of the year tend to pile up many by the end of the school year, while those who have some excused absences to start the year generally do not miss class at increased rates later on. (Annenberg Institute at Brown University)

Why is that?

There’s some existing research looking at how absences beget absences. For example, if you’re missing a few mathematics classes at the beginning of the year, when you come back, you’ll find it harder to keep track of the content. And that may generate additional absences. 

It might also be related to personal relationships. Because if you are absent, now you are not having a strong connection with your teacher, with your classmates. And that might make you more disengaged, not wanting to come to class even more in the future. 

My research team is planning to do some surveys of students to understand more about their experience.

What sort of interventions should educators be thinking about to remedy those issues?

A first place to look is how to intervene early instead of waiting until the end of the school year. By just relying on the first month of absenteeism data and students’ reasons for absences, we can get a pretty good sense about who’s going to be the most disengaged. Although all loss of instructional time is bad, what we show is, really, those unexcused absences in middle and high school are driving the growth of absences. By looking out early, district leaders and school principals can decide with whom to intervene. Timing really matters.

Secondly, it’s very telling that growth of absences was linked to perception of school climate. We would want to intervene in terms of improving someone’s perception of school climate, so it’s either a sense of belonging or support of their learning. Starting there, I think we might be able to prevent the accelerating growth of absences down the road.

For school districts that want to operationalize some of this, is there a magic formula they could use instead of the typical 10% threshold that gives issues like absence type and timing their proper weight?

First of all, I think chronic absenteeism is still a useful metric. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, more and more states are using that as an indicator for school quality. Before we didn’t really actually have an indicator on absenteeism. So I don’t want to just critique [the approach]. 

However, we can do better than just using a binary measure [of whether absences are above or below 10% of all school days]. A lot of places are now collecting this detailed level data that includes the timing and also the type of absences. But they’re not systematically putting the data together and using it in useful ways. 

We are actually working with a middle school team in [an undisclosed district] to use those absenteeism data to create our own on-track/off-track indicator and see whether we can flag kids for a risk of disengagement very early in the school year. And then by intervening in a dynamic and targeted manner, we’ll see if we can change kids’ trajectory.

In hard and fast terms for a school leader who is collecting these data, when would you say is the right time to check in with the numbers and see which kids are at risk? Is it October 1, October 15? Halloween? 

I think one month after the school year starts, that’s what we did with our research. 

Although to actually address the question, we not only need a timing, we also need a threshold. So how many kids are going to be put in the bucket to intervene? We need a little bit more work to look at how setting different thresholds can change the results and how predictive those early absences are for other outcomes we care about. This is one of the first studies doing this kind of thing and we need a bit more research to provide more actionable suggestions.

In words that folks who aren’t statisticians can understand, can you say a little bit more about how you and your team crunched the numbers to get these results?

Basically, we just look at the growth of absences over time. So we basically put all the absences into weekly measures. So for example, for Jing, for me, if I’m absent for two classes in the first week, three classes in the second week, then we can see this growth by using a model and the number we get is just the slope. So we use this metric to indicate the level of engagement [in school].

Any last points? What topics haven’t we covered yet?

One detail is that as we look more deeply into the reasons for absences, we know that the excused/unexcused division is not perfect. Sometimes maybe an unexcused absence is just that the parent forgot to contact the school. And sometimes it’s really an unexcused absence, but the student is able to make up a reason. 

I remember when I turned 18 as a high school senior, that was when I could call myself out of school. So then I had a lot of “excused” absences.

Exactly. So from a practical perspective, given that the volume of excused absence is pretty minimal, I think if we are going to design interventions for use in practice, I probably would suggest school districts to not differentiate between absence types, because it creates an additional data collection burden and it probably won’t impact results that much.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

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Do masks in school work? As mandates fall, pair of new studies may finally put debate to rest https://www.laschoolreport.com/do-masks-in-school-work-as-mandates-fall-pair-of-new-studies-may-finally-put-debate-to-rest/ Wed, 16 Mar 2022 14:01:13 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=61110

Masked students in Garden Grove, California. (Paul Bersebach/Getty Images)

Schools that required students and staff to wear masks saw significantly less coronavirus spread than those that did not, a pair of brand-new studies reveal.

One report, which was reviewed and approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tracked cases in 98 percent of school districts in Arkansas from August to October 2021. It found that COVID-19 incidence was 23 percent lower in fully masked districts compared to districts with no face-covering rule.

The other study, published in the journal Pediatrics on March 9 by Duke University’s ABC Science Collaborative, crunched data from 61 districts across nine states during the Delta and early Omicron waves, finding that masked schools had 72 percent less within-school spread than mask-optional campuses.

“​​The results of this study clearly show that universal masking reduces school transmission of COVID-19,” said Danny Benjamin, co-chair of the Collaborative, in a press release.

The findings come as many districts nationwide are moving away from mask mandates as the Omicron surge subsides. Only 31 percent of the largest 500 districts now require that students cover up, compared to 60 percent a month ago, according to data from Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic.

In late February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its guidance, now allowing schools to go mask-optional in areas where transmission is moderate or low — a move that researchers generally agree is reasonable.

But mask policy remains a contested issue in major districts such as Chicago, where the teachers union filed an unfair labor practice charge against Chicago Public Schools for lifting its face-covering mandate on March 14, and Los Angeles, where a safety agreement with the union may bar the nation’s second-largest district from unmasking until next school year. In New York City, even as the mandate dropped Monday, students, teachers and parents remain deeply divided on the issue.

Meanwhile, Florida lawmakers reached a deal this week to reward the 55 districts that followed Gov. Ron DeSantis’s directive by not requiring masks with $200 million while withholding any of that funding from the 12 districts that implemented a mandate.

Amid the controversy, the new studies may put to rest a more basic question that has hung over the issue of classroom masking since its inception: Do school mask mandates work in the first place?

In August, a New York Magazine article critiqued the existing body of evidence as not being able to prove that masks were the key factor in lower case rates among universally masked schools, because they didn’t have a direct comparison group. The difference could have instead been caused by factors such as distancing or increased ventilation, the piece argued.

But both the CDC and Duke studies compare fully-masked districts to unmasked districts, delivering statistically significant findings that bolster the research base for the effectiveness of K-12 masking.

Even if schools do decide to lift their face-covering rules during the current trough in cases, the results should give officials confidence that, should the virus worsen, masks remain an effective mitigation measure to stave off spread, said ABC Collaborative Co-Chair Kanecia Zimmerman.

“Especially in times with higher community infection rates and more transmissible variants, masking is a critical safety effort to support continued, in-person education,” said the Duke University pediatrician.

She and Benjamin’s analysis compared 46 universally masked, 9 partially masked and 6 mask-optional districts. In school systems where face coverings were required, it took over 13 positive student or staff cases to spur one instance of in-school transmission, on average. By comparison, it took less than four positive cases to trigger an instance of in-school spread in mask-optional districts. Partially masked districts fell in the middle with about nine cases, on average, spurring an in-school transmission.

The CDC study also examined 26 school systems that added a policy midway through the three-month observation period. In those instances, the masking rule corresponded with a drop in school COVID rates compared to community case rates.

CDC science brief states that “transmission within school settings is typically lower than — or at least similar to — levels of community transmission, when prevention strategies are in place in schools.” The study’s head author said that low vaccination rates among students and moderate to substantial transmission rate at the time of the research may explain why case rates were higher in this sample of Arkansas school districts than in the surrounding community.


This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

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Over 1 million HS grads skipped college in 2020. Only a tiny fraction re-enrolled in 2021 https://www.laschoolreport.com/over-1-million-hs-grads-skipped-college-in-2020-only-a-tiny-fraction-re-enrolled-in-2021/ Thu, 03 Mar 2022 15:01:56 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=61039

Students on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. (Al Seib/Getty Images)

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The first summer of the pandemic brought disappointing news to school counselor Marianne Matt.

Many of the seniors who she had supported through the spring college admission process at Capital High in Madison, Wisconsin — where about three-quarters of students are Black or Hispanic, and 4 in 5 qualify for free or reduced-price lunch — opted to abandon their post-secondary plans for fall. Even students who had won scholarships, she learned, decided not to enroll.

“Survival became the key,” Matt told LA School Report, explaining that, instead of college, many students picked up jobs to help their families make ends meet. “They became … the breadwinning part of the family.”

When the fall of 2021 rolled around, very few of those students were ready to return to their studies. One was working as a security guard, others were in fast food, another disclosed to the Wisconsin counselor that his mental health had taken a downturn during quarantine and that he couldn’t consider moving away from his family for college.

The pandemic, Matt said, “threw a wrench” into many students’ higher education plans.

Courtesy of Marianne Matt

Similar trends have played out for countless students across the country, new data reveal: More than a year after a surge of 2020 high school graduates chose to scrap or postpone their college plans, only a tiny fraction have now re-enrolled to pursue higher education.

Just 2 percent of students who opted to take time off after completing high school in 2020 matriculated a year later in 2021, meaning the vast majority did not take short-term “gap years,” but rather have put college plans on an extended pause — or nixed them altogether.

Nearly 1 million 2020 grads in the dataset, which comes from the National Student Clearinghouse, did not immediately enroll in college the following fall. Because the Clearinghouse tracks roughly half of the nation’s high school seniors, the true population-wide number may be closer to 2 million.

Those are worrisome statistics for experts who say the further that high school graduates delay post-secondary education, the more difficult their transition back to school becomes.

“In normal times, we know that the longer students stay out of school, the harder it is for them to come back and restart,” said Doug Shapiro, executive director of the Clearinghouse’s research center.

The nation’s first high school class to graduate amid the pandemic saw a considerable dip in college-going, with only 39 percent immediately enrolling in higher education compared to 43 and 42 percent of the 2018 and 2019 classes, respectively.

 Because of the increased pool of students who did not go straight to college, observers had hoped to see a bump in what they call “gap year enrollment,” or the share of students who matriculate a year later. But the 2 percent return rate is slightly lower than previous years.“There was a great expectation that this was a temporary blip due to the pandemic,” Shapiro told LA School Report. “Yet, here we are a year later … and hardly any of those students who stayed out last year have come back.”

There were steeper drop-offs in the share of graduates taking time off rather than enrolling in college in high-poverty schools attended mostly by students of color compared to predominantly white and affluent schools — and the numbers did not self-correct a year later.

Those disparities are yet another example, said Mauriell Amechi, a policy analyst with New America, of how COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on those who were already most vulnerable.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has and will continue to exacerbate some long-standing inequities facing historically underserved and marginalized populations in the American education system,” Amechi told LA School Report.

Courtesy of Mauriell Amechi’s personal website

If decreased shares of students of color are able to access college amid the pandemic, he said, that’s a racial equity issue with consequences that will reverberate for decades.

“Students that delay enrollment are less likely to pursue a college education,” he said. “We can’t allow this issue to go unaddressed because it would only contribute to growing disparities in the American workforce.”

Back in Madison, there’s some optimistic news from Capital High, albeit anecdotal. Recently, Matt has been hearing from 2020 graduates who are now ready to return to their studies. Multiple students have reached out asking for transcripts and letters of recommendation.

“Any student who had been college bound, I don’t think that they gave up on the dream completely,” she said.

Matt — who was named 2021 Wisconsin School Counselor of the Year — distributes her contact information to graduating seniors, knowing that many don’t have parents who are familiar with the college process. She works with about 200 students at a time, comfortably within the 250-student maximum recommended by the American School Counselors Association, meaning she has the bandwidth to provide some extra help, even post-graduation.

Nationwide, however, high school counselors work with an average of 311 students, and only 1 in 5 high schoolers attend a school sufficiently staffed with counselors. In such cases, many graduates seeking to finally enroll in college after multiple years off may have to navigate the path on their own.

Even for Matt’s students, she worries the extended time away from academics could make for a rough re-entry process.

“​​If you’re not practicing math everyday you start losing those skills,” she explained.

Given that, colleges and universities should make plans to help students re-adjust to school and studying, she said.

It’s an idea that Shapiro, at the Clearinghouse, echoes.

“If these students are to come back next year or two years further down the road,” he said, “they’re going to need more attention, more help, to make that transition.”


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Pfizer requests FDA authorize COVID shots for kids under 5 https://www.laschoolreport.com/pfizer-requests-fda-authorize-covid-shots-for-kids-under-5/ Thu, 03 Feb 2022 15:01:28 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=60804

Scott Olson / Getty Images

Children under 5 years old may be eligible for coronavirus shots as soon as the end of February — much earlier than previously expected.

On Tuesday, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that they requested the Food and Drug Administration authorize a two-dose regimen of their vaccine for children under 5. Meanwhile, the companies will continue to research the efficacy of a third shot.

In December, disappointing trial data showing that two smaller doses were safe for youngsters but, in children ages 2 to 4, did not produce a strong enough immune response threatened to extend the timetable before which young children would be eligible for COVID vaccines. But the FDA urged Pfizer-BioNTech to submit their initial trial data so that regulators could begin the review process, then to later submit numbers on a third shot once those become available, The Washington Post first reported. Results from the study of a three-dose regimen are expected to arrive in late March at the earliest.

“If they get the two-dose approved, then they can get going. And by the time the first round of two-dose people are ready to boost … if they have a third dose approved, then they’ll get through this course,” explained Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University. “But if they wait until they have all the data for the three-dose course, then they won’t even be able to get started.”

Even if three shots prove to be the optimal vaccination level for the age group, the Massachusetts doctor reassures parents that two doses provide far more protection than zero.

“Absolutely, it should give families some peace of mind having their children two-dose vaccinated,” he told The 74.

The news may bring some long-awaited relief to parents of children under 5 for whom the Omicron surge has been particularly frightening and stressful between spikes in pediatric hospitalizations and widespread day care center closures.

“As a parent of a 3-year-old, this news does feel like light at the end of (the) tunnel,” said Jorge Burmicky, assistant professor at Howard University, in a tweet sharing The Washington Post story.

But nationwide, rates of pediatric vaccination remain low. As of Jan. 26, just 20 percent of children ages 5 to 11 were fully immunized, while 55 percent of those ages 12 to 17, who have been eligible for shots for longer, had received two doses, according to data published by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

As of November, nearly a third of parents of children ages 5 to 11 said they would “wait and see” before immunizing their kids in the most recent poll administered by the Kaiser Family Foundation on parents’ vaccine attitudes.

For this decision around immunizations for children 6 months to 4 years old, Linas believes federal agencies must be upfront about the expected authorization process. Without clear messaging that young kids may ultimately need to receive three shots — but that the initial authorization of a two-shot regime allows youngsters to safely get started — he worries the eventual pivot could erode some parents’ faith in the shots.

“If you don’t talk about it … it just creates this opportunity for misinformation, lack of trust, and then people shut down,” he said. “This is all about trust right now.”


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Senior White House Education Advisor on how schools can access COVID testing to curb Omicron amid ‘supply crisis’ https://www.laschoolreport.com/senior-white-house-education-advisor-on-how-schools-can-access-covid-testing-to-curb-omicron-amid-supply-crisis/ Wed, 26 Jan 2022 15:01:42 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=60762

Getty Images

The Omicron surge may be peaking in some regions across the U.S., but schools are still buckling under the weight of high student and staff caseloads — and as school leaders labor to keep their doors open, many districts have found themselves running short on a relied-upon resource: COVID tests.

There is a “COVID test supply crisis” that will impact Michigan schools, said Linda Vail, health officer for Central Michigan’s Ingham County, last Wednesday. The state is working to supply testing kits to schools in the highest-risk communities where COVID is most rampant, she said. States from Florida to Washington have also faced similar shortages.

Last week, the Biden administration announced that it was “doubling down” on its commitment to keeping schools operating safely in person by providing an additional 10 million monthly COVID test to K-12 institutions nationwide — 5 million rapid and 5 million PCR.

In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed “test-to-stay” protocols that allow students and staff who may have been exposed to COVID to remain in school buildings, provided they test negative for the virus before walking through the front doors.

But where testing supplies dwindle, it can cause severe hiccups in school operations.

Most schools across the country have managed to stay open in the three weeks since winter break. But an average of more than 5,300 schools per week have been disrupted by brief closures or pivots to virtual learning as they navigated high caseloads and staff shortages, according to the K-12 data service Burbio.

Earlier this month, over 980,000 new youth COVID cases were reported nationwide, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest weekly total to date and nearly quadruple the highest tally previous to Omicron.

To help weather the current surge, Asher Lehrer-Small spoke with White House Senior Education Policy Advisor Mary Wall who explained how schools can make use of the newly available testing resources.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Asher Lehrer-Small: Testing in schools is such a key issue right now during the Omicron surge and some officials are saying that they might run out of supply soon. What is your message to school leaders on how to access testing?

Mary Wall: Sure. We’ve really made a lot of efforts to make sure that schools have everything they need to reopen and remain open safely and testing has been central to that effort. It was the core investments that this administration made, starting with the American Rescue Plan, that really helped to make sure that schools could be ready for this moment.

Mary Wall (LinkedIn)

Across the country there are many, many schools who are implementing testing right now and building on the existing testing programs that they already established. We know that schools are kind of coming at this from a lot of different places and a lot of different levels of experience, so we want to make sure it’s easy for everyone to access both the tests as well as [strategies for] implementing testing in school.

The biggest headline is the $10 billion that we invested in the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity (ELC) program at the CDC. That gave $10 billion to states to set up testing programs for schools and we have seen significant movement from states doing just that.

We’re building on that with the new announcement of the 5 million rapid antigen tests, as well as the expansion of capacity through Operation Expanded Testing to reach another 5 million [through PCR testing] with lab capacity each month.

So that $10 billion investment, those 5 million rapid tests and 5 million PCR tests, those are big numbers. I’m curious, what are the mechanics going on here? And what might some school leaders not understand that could be keeping them from accessing tests that are available to them?

Testing can be a challenging endeavor for schools, and schools have been asked to do a lot over the course of the pandemic. We’ve seen it as our charge to make it as easy as possible for schools to tap into resources.

With the news we announced last week, we have put out steps for schools to take right away. The first and foremost would be tapping into the state’s existing testing initiatives. Every state has something set up for K-12 COVID-19 testing and it varies by state how exactly it looks. But we have created a resource on the CDC website that is basically a directory of every state’s approach that the school can go onto right now and click to learn more about what their state is doing for K-12 testing. That page will lead them to how to get involved in their state’s program.

A screenshot from the CDC’s webpage on states’ school COVID testing programs.

If they want to make use of the 5 million antigen tests that we are now offering, those are usually requested by state health departments. And they are … submitting requests to the CDC for those (based on local need). But testing resources fueled by the $10 billion in ELC funds, those are available right now and schools can tap into those right away.

Operation Expanded Testing, which is the free lab-based (PCR) testing capacity that we offer as the federal government, that is also available and open for service right now. Schools can go online to the Operation ET website, click on the link for the regional hub, and they can begin the process right away … and can get started in as few as seven days after that.

We also want to remind all schools that they are able to also connect to other testing providers that operate in their state and use their ESSR [Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund] dollars. So there’s $132 billion distributed through the American Rescue Plan for states and school districts. Testing is an allowable use of funds and we’ve seen many school districts [use] that funding stream to set up customized programs in their schools — and that’s been in large districts and in small districts.

That’s fantastic. And after the announcement earlier this month, what kind of responses did the U.S. Department of Education receive from K-12 leaders?

We’ve been getting a lot of interesting and exciting responses on testing. It kind of falls into a couple different categories.

One is, we’ve gotten a lot of really eager and positive feedback from districts who have already been doing testing. … Those [school systems] have really been eager to take this to the next level. I know there have been districts who are doing weekly screening, for instance, and are excited to expand that into a test-to-stay a program. There’s others who have been doing diagnostic testing and decided, we really want to expand the screening tests we’re doing in our schools to be on a weekly basis to cover more kids and this new investment is going to help enable that.

We’ve also heard from many districts who have not done testing and said that they’re eager to tap into it. They know that the current surge has really seen significant increases for caseloads, including with kids, and they want to make sure they can use this as a key line of defense in their school buildings. And so for them, you know, [our role has] been how can we help you set up testing successfully in your building. We’ve gotten started on this right away by offering technical assistance and support to school districts.

We’re offering more this week, we’re going to offer it every week for the next several weeks to make sure that no matter where you are in your testing journey, that if you’re a school who is interested in implementing testing that you’re able to do so. That you not only have the resources to do so in terms of tests, but that you also know how to use them effectively in your building.

Some people would say that the most recent expansion of K-12 testing is a great effort, but that it came too late to help schools respond nimbly to the Omicron surge. [Though of course, there might be subsequent surges.] I’m wondering what your response is there.

I disagree with that assessment. I think that we have made clear our commitment to keeping schools open safely. We’ve made that commitment clear through the American Rescue Plan, which provided $130 billion for K-12 schools through the Department of [Education] and $10 billion for K-12 COVID-19 testing. We’ve seen states take that money and set up testing approaches starting back in April of last year. So we are eager to build on that investment. And we saw across the country that schools who were already implementing testing strategies have been able to use it in this current surge very effectively.

And last question here. Clearly, the White House has put itself on the frontline of this testing shortage in schools. I’m curious whether the Department of Education also sees itself as responsible for helping to remedy the staffing shortages that many schools have been facing recently?

As an administration, we see the staffing issues that are occurring, and we take them very seriously.

We passed the American Rescue Plan specifically with the purpose of making sure that we could have more staff in school buildings, both to accommodate mitigation strategies like social distancing, but also to make sure that schools have all the people on hand that they need to make sure that students can come back safely and have their needs met after this completely unprecedented time.

First and foremost, we would want to remind school districts and states that they have that $130 billion to spend on additional staff, to retain the staff they have, to pay the staff they have more money, and really make sure that whatever personnel needs they have in response to pandemic can be met.

We’ve also really tried to make clear that there are existing flexibilities, either in ways that you approach retirees or others who were previously teachers, ways that you can hire bus drivers, creative uses of bringing more staff into buildings to make sure that we can meet the staffing needs of the school.


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Ask the doctor: Navigating the ‘new math’ of Omicron in schools https://www.laschoolreport.com/ask-the-doctor-navigating-the-new-math-of-omicron-in-schools/ Tue, 18 Jan 2022 15:01:46 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=60698

Clockwise, from top left: Kanecia Obie Zimmerman, Philip Chan, Rebecca Wurtz, Peyton Thompson, Kristina Deeter, Leana Wen (Duke University Department of Pediatrics, Brown University, University of Minnesota School of Public Health, UNC School of Medicine, University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine, George Washington University Public Health)

It’s a tricky moment in the pandemic for parents.

Mere weeks ago — though it may feel like a lifetime — K-12 operations seemed to be moving toward something of a pandemic equilibrium. Studies had confirmed that COVID spread less in classrooms than the surrounding community, children as young as 5 had gained access to vaccinations and, according to the White House, 99 percent of schools were open for in-person learning.

Then came the Omicron variant, sweeping over the country like a tsunami and plunging nearly all aspects of everyday life back into deep uncertainty.

In the weeks since, daily reported COVID cases in the U.S. have exploded, breaking pandemic records. More children are being hospitalized with the virus than ever before. And positivity rates among school communities have reached levels that were previously unheard of: 18 percent in Chicago, 25 percent in Yonkers, 36 percent in Detroit.

While most districts reopened as planned after the holidays, nearly 4,800 schools closed their buildings for all or part of the first week of January, according to the data service Burbio.

Even where classrooms did reopen, many parents chose not to return their children. In New York City, for example, nearly a third of students did not show up on the first day back from break and on Friday when parents were also dealing with a morning snowfall, attendance plummeted to 44.5 percent.

The unprecedented case numbers usher in a “new math,” in the words of Harvard University infectious disease specialist Jacob Lemieux, for understanding and navigating life as the variant circulates.

“It’s likely that Omicron COVID is going to be so ubiquitous that every child will be exposed repeatedly at school and elsewhere,” Rebecca Wurtz, professor of health policy at the University of Minnesota, told LA School Report.

For many parents, that may be an unnerving reality.

The questions swirl: Do vaccines work against Omicron? How much protection does my child get from a cloth mask? What about an N95? What should I do if my kid tests positive?

The risk calculus can quickly become overwhelming.

Amid the widespread anxiety, and as pandemic fatigue continues to creep, LA School Report spoke directly to health experts for clarity on how to understand the virus during this latest stage — with many of their takeaways offering reassurance.

Experts also weighed in on hot topics like what masks to wear in school, how to handle positive cases and the recent, controversial move from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to cut its recommended quarantine time for infected individuals from 10 to five days.

Here’s what they had to say:

1. Are schools safe for children right now?

Yes, under the right circumstances, doctors agreed.

“I think for school districts that have a high vaccination rate, I think for school districts that have mandated indoor masking and I think for school districts that have appropriate ventilation and distancing … they’re going to be OK,” Philip Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health, told LA School Report.

Numerous academic studies underscore that when schools employ multiple mitigation strategies together — like masks, distancing and ventilation — transmission of the virus happens less frequently in classrooms than in the surrounding community.

“Teachers and students are far more likely to be infected at social gatherings, restaurants, etc. than at school,” George Washington University Professor of Public Health Leana Wen wrote on Twitter.

Even as thousands of schools across the country announced closures in the early days of the new year, President Biden implored K-12 leaders to continue in-person learning.

“The president couldn’t be clearer: Schools in this country should remain open,” said White House advisor Jeff Zients during a Jan. 5 press briefing.

Health experts say classrooms are safe, even amid Omicron, as long as schools double down on mitigation measures like masking and ventilation. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)

But school leaders are running into a roadblock: not enough staff due to high shares of K-12 workers testing positive for the virus. Where COVID spread is especially rampant, it may be the right call to take a brief pause on in-person learning, said Kristina Deeter, a physician at Renown Children’s Hospital in Reno, Nevada. Teachers, she added, should not be coming into school if they’re sick.

In Chan’s Rhode Island, the majority of schools are open, though a handful had to close due to positive cases. The father of a 10-year old and a 14-year old, Chan said he felt confident sending his children back to their public school classrooms after the winter break. Both are fully vaccinated and wear surgical masks inside the building.

“I’m reassured that they’re protected, even against the Omicron variant,” he said.

2. Do vaccines work against Omicron?

The unanimous response from health professionals came in the form of a three-letter word: Y-E-S!

(Doctors, often technical and somewhat restrained in their email responses, answered this question using more exclamation than any other.)

Omicron has caused more breakthrough infections than other strains, they acknowledged, but emphasized that the immunizations have overwhelmingly succeeded at their key functions.

“The vaccines are still doing what they are intended to do: preventing severe infection and death,” said Peyton Thompson, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

“Deaths are declining despite the rapid rise in cases, thanks to vaccination,” she added.

And while it remains possible to catch the virus if you have received two, or even three shots, each dose of the vaccine provides an added layer of protection. Such cases tend to be mild, explained Wurtz.

“Breakthrough infections are almost always asymptomatic or trivial. Occasionally flu-like. So, yes, we can count on our vaccinations to keep us from getting really sick,” the Minnesota professor wrote in an email to LA School Report.

Seven-year-old Milan Patel receives a COVID-19 vaccine at a school-based Chicago clinic in November. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Children under the age of 5 are not yet eligible for shots, and are not expected to gain access until this spring at the earliest, Pfizer announced on Wednesday.

In the meantime, “the best way to protect kids under 5 is to vaccinate all of the people around them – their older siblings, other family members, day care providers [and] teachers,” said Wurtz.

3. Boosters for kids — yay or nay?

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday authorized third doses for 12- to 15-year olds and, on Tuesday, the CDC recommended an extra shot for immunocompromised children as young as 5, five months after the initial two-dose series.

Deeter recommends that those who are now eligible receive their third doses.

“Many of our vaccines are actually three-shot series,” she told LA School Report, citing the Hepatitis B immunizations, for example.

“My message to teenagers is this: you got your first shot, you got your second shot, you’ve got to finish the series.”

4. Why are so many children being hospitalized with COVID?

The answer, doctors say, boils down to two factors: vaccination rates and community spread.

Nationwide, pediatric COVID cases and hospitalizations are at a pandemic high, the latter surging 66 percent in the last full week of December to an average of 378 daily admissions.

But at the same time, vaccination rates among young people remain much lower than adults. Less than a quarter of children ages 5 to 11 have received a single dose of the COVID vaccine, and just over half of adolescents ages 12 to 17 have been fully immunized, according to data published by the American Academy of Pediatrics. By comparison, nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults have received both shots.

The overwhelming majority of hospitalized pediatric COVID patients are unvaccinated, physicians report. “This is tragic, as the vaccine could have kept these children out of the hospital,” said UNC-Chapel Hill’s Thompson.

And regardless of vaccination status, the ballooning pediatric hospitalization levels do not mean that the Omicron strain is more severe to kids than previous variants.

“​​In large part, this is a numbers game,” said Kanecia Zimmerman, a study lead on Duke University’s ABC Science Collaborative, which guides school leaders on how to navigate COVID policy.

Even though surging caseloads nationwide have meant that more children have tested positive for the virus in recent weeks, “the proportion of hospitalized children remains small among the number of infected children,” the pediatrician explained.

5. What kind of masks are “good enough?”

The extreme transmissibility of the Omicron variant has spurred numerous districts, some in red states, to reinstate mandatory masking rules — and has also reignited debates over which face coverings are most effective at protecting against infection.

There’s no doubt that the N95 and KN95 models do a better job of filtering out viral particles from the air, doctors agreed. They have a layer of polypropylene, a type of plastic, that can trap the virus. Compared to a cloth mask, they can extend the time it takes to transmit an infectious dose of COVID by over seven times. If both the infected and exposed individuals are wearing N95s or KN95s, compared to both wearing cloth masks, transmission can take up to 50 times longer.

That said, Chan admits that the N95 and KN95 masks can be uncomfortable, and some may find it harder to breathe while wearing them.

“With my kids, I send them to school with surgical masks,” he said, noting that he himself will slip on an N95 before walking into crammed indoor spaces like the grocery store.

A cloth mask, a surgical mask and a KN95 mask

But whether you opt for a simple surgical mask, or something beefier, here’s his bottom line: “The cloth masks just aren’t quite as good as other types of masks,” said the Rhode Island doctor.

6. How should my child’s school be testing students and staff for the virus?

In December, the CDC endorsed “test-to-stay” guidance that allows students and teachers who may have been exposed to the virus to take rapid tests and return to the classroom if their results are negative.

It’s a helpful approach, Duke’s Zimmerman believes. Through the Delta variant wave, 98 percent of people who were exposed to the virus were never ultimately infected, she said — meaning that without test-to-stay, the vast majority of quarantines are forced to miss class without ever having gotten sick.

But testing can be costly and a heavy logistical lift. Furthermore, COVID tests are in short supply nationwide. To cut down on the total number of noses to swab, schools in her state of North Carolina target resources to lunchtime exposures, where children drop their masks, she explained, eliminating the possibility of quarantine among less-likely cases where both students are masked.

Also important, according to Zimmerman: testing location. If students need to travel to an off-site area to receive their tests, it can exclude youth without access to transportation from participating in the program, forcing them to miss class for quarantine and creating further setbacks for the students already most affected by the pandemic.

“Offering testing at individual schools (not centralized locations) is critical for [the] success of this program because it is more likely to provide equal opportunity to all eligible staff and students within the district,” said the Duke pediatrician.

7. How should I navigate quarantine if my child or I test positive?

In late December the CDC reduced its quarantine guidelines for those who test positive for the virus from 10 days to five, a move that divided many in the medical community.

The takeaway, according to the doctors we spoke to? “Yes, returning to school or work five days after a known infection when someone is no longer symptomatic is fine,” said Wurtz.

Emphasis, they noted, is on no longer being symptomatic. Many individuals will continue having symptoms well beyond the five-day quarantine recommendation. If that’s the case for you or your child, you should continue to isolate until symptoms subside, or test results come back negative, as you may continue to be infectious, doctors said.

“Come back symptom-free,” said Deeter.

8. How long will the Omicron surge last?

A bit of good news here.

Though epidemiologists don’t know for sure how long the Omicron surge will last in the U.S., cases have begun to subside in South Africa, where the variant was first identified in late November. Some believe the peak in many American communities will arrive before the end of January.

“In most countries that saw Omicron, it went up sharply, which is happening now in the U.S., and it came down sharply,” said Chan. “There should be a steep decrease in the near future for us.”


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‘We are here’: Debates over teaching history exclude Native people, Rhode Island Indigenous parents say https://www.laschoolreport.com/we-are-here-debates-over-teaching-history-exclude-native-people-rhode-island-indigenous-parents-say/ Wed, 08 Dec 2021 15:01:26 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=60524

Chrystal Baker and her daughter Nittaunis on the water at the University of Rhode Island’s bay campus, where the 19-year old studies marine biology. (Asher Lehrer-Small)

Growing up in Charlestown, Rhode Island, Chrystal Baker remembers reading a textbook in history class that said the Narragansett Indigenous people, who have lived in southern New England for tens of thousands of years, were extinct.

“We’re not extinct,” the young student ventured, nervous about contradicting the lesson, but feeling she had to speak up. “I’m a Narragansett.”

No response came from her teacher or classmates, recalls the Chariho Regional School District alum, who graduated in 1986.

“It just didn’t matter,” she said. “You were insignificant.”

Now, decades later, Baker has two children in the same school system who have navigated similar experiences of hurt and invisibility. Sometimes, the racism has been overt, like when a classmate muttered the N-word at her daughter in middle school. But more often, it comes in the form of quiet erasure and inaccurate tropes.

“In history class, it’s mostly the history of the colonizers,” said her daughter Nittaunis Baker, 19, who graduated from Chariho High School in spring 2021 and now attends the University of Rhode Island.

“We didn’t really talk about Native people that much,” she said.

Nittaunis Baker, who is a member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe, in her high school graduation photo. “Being a member of my tribe is very important to me and my culture is very important to me as it gives me a sense of being and identity,” she said. (Courtesy of Chrystal Baker)

Even now, as the topic of how to teach U.S. history in schools is receiving an unprecedented level of public attention, Indigenous parents say the debates still largely exclude lessons on Native people.

“It’s [been] very Black/white centric,” said Samantha Cullen-Fry, a member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe who has two young children in the West Warwick School District. She agrees that highlighting the Black experience is important, especially in wake of the police murder of George Floyd. But efforts to diversify K-12 curricula are incomplete, she says, if they fail to accurately teach about Native people.

When English colonists first came to New England in the 17th century, the Narragansett people had been living in the region for some 30,000 years — making the vast majority of North American history, chronologically speaking, Indigenous history. In the following centuries, Native people have continued to live in the region.

“There is no United States history, there is no Rhode Island history, without Indigenous history,” the West Warwick mother told said.

Across the country, fights over critical race theory have elevated conversations over social studies curricula to the central stage in many school boards and state legislatures. CRT is not an ideology, but rather a scholarly framework that views racism and inequality as ingrained in law and society. Still, in Oklahoma, a bill to restrict its teaching led to the removal of classic books such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Raisin in the Sun from reading lists, according to a recent ACLU lawsuit. In Texas, the crackdown prompted a school administrator to call for an “opposing” perspective on the Holocaust.

The Ocean State has emerged as a hotbed for the controversy. Over the summer, a South Kingstown mother made national headlines for filing more than 200 public record requests investigating if the district taught terms like “systemic racism,” “white privilege” or the “1619 Project.” Education writer Erika Sanzi, a former Rhode Island teacher and school board member, has become a national spokesperson opposing CRT and other curricular changes her group, Parents Defending Education, see as divisive.

And although Rhode Island was not one of the dozen states to enact laws restricting teaching on race and gender, a bill to do so was introduced by state legislators in spring 2021, though it failed to pass.

Its author, Rep. Patricia Morgan, did not respond to questions from The 74 asking whether topics such as the 1675 Great Swamp Massacre, which took place just miles outside the Chariho school system’s present day boundaries, would be among the “divisive concepts” that the bill sought to ban. In the event, 1,000 English colonial soldiers, joined by about 150 Pequot and Mohegan soldiers, attacked and burned a Narragansett stronghold, killing hundreds, including women and children. In late October, the Rhode Island Historical Society transferred the 5-acre South Kingstown site back to the Narragansett Indian Tribe, nearly three and half centuries after the deadly event.

The Rhode Island State House in Providence. In the 2021 legislative session, Republican representatives introduced a bill to ban teaching “divisive concepts” in school, though it failed to pass.

The Rhode Island State House in Providence. In the 2021 legislative session, Republican representatives introduced a bill to ban teaching “divisive concepts” in school, though it failed to pass. (Lane Turner/Getty Images)

In Chariho schools, where more than 9 in 10 students are white, alumni of the district who are Indigenous and graduated in recent decades have recounted experiences of being steered away from college by their counselors. In nearby Narragansett Regional School District, Cullen-Fry had to spend a post-grad year doing unnecessary pre-college work, she said, because her counselor did not send in her paperwork, assuming she couldn’t afford higher education. The experience, she learned later at a high school reunion, was shared by numerous peers of color.

Chariho Assistant Superintendent Michael Comella said he was not aware of Indigenous students having had issues with the district’s college counselors in the past, but mentioned that the school system is working with local Narragansett leaders to improve school policy and providing professional development sessions on equity and inclusion for teachers. He said teachers typically cover the Great Swamp Massacre in fifth grade during lessons on King Philip’s War.

“The district remains committed to ensur[ing] that we account for all important information and history as it relates to our tribal community,” he wrote in an email to The 74.

Though there is much more work to do, the elder Baker appreciates that the Chariho district has made some efforts to better serve its Native students. The high school has a Native American student advocate on staff and, recently, has begun engaging in conversations with Indigenous parents about further improvements.

“This isn’t about bashing the Chariho school district,” she said. “This is about recognizing that there are issues that have affected past and present generations of Indigenous students who have attended this school system and they need to be addressed on behalf of present and future generations.”

Chariho has formed an anti-racism task force that has been meeting since the fall of 2020 in pursuit of more equitable school policies, practices and curricula. Some residents, such as the Bakers, say that the changes are sorely needed, but others staunchly oppose them.

“I do not support, at this point, the anti-racism task force,” audience member Jim Sullivan said during public comment at a Nov. 9 school committee meeting. “I am concerned about their bringing racism into the Chariho system.”

“We are not domestic terrorists,” he added, referencing escalating tensions nationwide at board meetings that recently prompted the National School Boards Association to send a letter to the White House requesting increased support and security.

School boards across the country have seen protests against the perceived encroachment of critical race theory into curricula. (Robert Gauthier/Getty Images)

The pushback does not phase endawnis Spears, who recently joined the Chariho School Committee after a member’s resignation. Spears, who does not capitalize her first name, is a member of the Navajo Nation, with ties also to the Chocktaw, Chickasaw and Ojibwe people. Diverse perspectives, she believes, are necessary to the development of all children.

“I want to ensure that teachers have everything they need to prepare their students — all of their students — to be able to navigate citizenship in the United States,” she said. “That includes Indigenous histories.”

“The lack of nuance around Indigenous histories also is a form of erasure,” she added. “It continues the process of erasing Native people from this landscape.”

Statewide, Lorén Spears, executive director of the Tomaquag Museum for Indigenous history, culture and arts in Exeter, Rhode Island and related to endawnis Spears by marriage, believes officials must work to better represent the state’s Native students.

“I think it’s been very teacher-by-teacher, the improvement, rather than the system of education improving,” she said on a recent episode of the Boston Globe’s Rhode Island Report podcast. “I would like to see, you know, the Department of Education really take an active role in ensuring that the history is inclusive and includes Native people.”

State social studies standards do not stipulate that schools teach specific aspects of Native history or culture, said the Rhode Island Department of Education, instead leaving those decisions up to districts.

“If materials [that districts] use presently from a publisher do not adequately address Indigenous representation, [the state education department] would strongly encourage school leaders to develop materials they can use to meet the standards,” Communications Director Victor Morente wrote in an email to The 74.

Chrystal and Nittaunis Baker (Asher Lehrer-Small)

Accurately representing Native Rhode Islanders means addressing certain truths that may be difficult, said the younger Baker. But covering those facts in schools, rather than mythologized narratives of harmony between colonists and Native people, doesn’t mean placing blame on any students, she said.

“The establishment of this country was pretty much the murder of a lot of Indigenous people, including my ancestors,” she said. “I don’t think that [white] kids should feel ashamed because it’s not really them. It’s their ancestors.”

It’s only shameful when students shy away from those histories, she believes. “If they refuse to acknowledge that that happened, then you kind of become complicit in not recognizing the struggles that [Indigenous] people went through.”

In school, the only time she remembers a lesson on Indigenous people was a brief mention in fifth grade around Thanksgiving. She doesn’t recall any lessons on the Great Swamp Massacre. Additionally, in high school, outside of class, she had a teacher who held a reading group focused on Native sciences, which discussed Braiding Sweetgrass, a book written by a member of the Potawatomi Nation. She enjoyed the experience, and wishes there could be official courses devoted to such topics.

“Even having a class just on the history of Indigenous peoples, like how they have classes on ancient Greek and Roman things, that would be really cool,” said the college freshman, who is studying marine biology. She receives free tuition at URI thanks to her status as a member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe.

Teachers can cater Indigenous history and culture to learners of any age, said Cullen-Fry, who works as an educator at the Tomaquag Museum. For example, many classes visit the museum in November, Native American Heritage Month. She corrects the youngsters’ misconceptions about Thanksgiving, teaching them that it’s traditional in many Indigenous cultures to celebrate 13 Thanksgivings, one for each of the year’s moon cycles.

States such as Oregon have moved in recent years to require that schools teach lessons on Native history and culture, and to bring tribal educators into the state’s teaching force.

But until such shifts, large and small, are incorporated into Rhode Island schools, the Baker family will celebrate progress on a more personal level.

When Nittaunis walked across the graduation stage in May 2021, she was adorned with tribal jewelry and ornamentation, passed down from her ancestors. Her mother, after so many of her own personal experiences of feeling that her Indigenous identity was erased by the world around her, wanted people to know: Another Indigenous child just graduated from Chariho High School.

The proud message was simple.

“Society doesn’t think that we’re here,” the elder Baker said. “We are here.”


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As threat of Omicron variant looms, school closures continue ticking upward https://www.laschoolreport.com/as-threat-of-omicron-variant-looms-school-closures-continue-ticking-upward/ Thu, 02 Dec 2021 15:01:47 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=60481

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Even before the World Health Organization labeled the Omicron coronavirus strain a new “variant of concern” Friday, school closures were continuing to increase across the country.

Last week, 621 schools across 58 districts announced new closures for a variety of reasons including teacher burnout, staffing shortages and virus outbreaks, according to counts from Burbio, a data service that has tracked school policy through the pandemic. Since the start of the academic year, 9,313 campuses across 916 districts nationwide have added extra days off.

The numbers suggest that nearly 10 percent of the nation’s roughly 98,000 K-12 schools have experienced closures this year. In Maryland, more than 3 in 10 schools have been affected by at least one day of disruption this academic year. In North Carolina, where such events have been most frequent, the number is above 4 in 10.

Now, schools already struggling to keep classrooms open could face further challenges should the recently identified Omicron variant, which has already begun to show up in U.K. schools, fuel a COVID surge this winter.

“This is only going to make matters worse,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association, said. “We already see that most districts are short-handed.”

Earlier in November, lack of substitute teachers forced multiple large school systems to announce unplanned closures as teachers took additional time off around Veterans Day and Thanksgiving.

Shutting down is a last-resort option that schools should seek to avoid, said Domenech. But sometimes it’s school leaders’ only viable choice, he said.

“If they have a staff that’s on the verge of burnout and they keep pushing them, they’re only going to lose more staff. And that’s going to result in more closures and fewer kids being in person.”

Now, with K-12 staff stretched thin in districts across the country, health experts are scrambling to understand the threat posed by the new variant, which Moderna’s President Dr. Stephen Hoge described as having a “Frankenstein mix” of mutations.

In South Africa, where Omicron was first identified Nov. 24, the strain has contributed to a sharp spike in cases, leading doctors to believe that it is more transmissible than previous versions of the virus. But whether those cases are more severe, and exactly how much protection is delivered by the vaccines, remains unclear.

The South African doctor who first discovered the variant told the BBC on Sunday that symptoms have generally been “extremely mild.” But other experts point out that these initial observations are only based on a very small sample size.

“This variant is a cause for concern, not a cause for panic,” said President Joe Biden in an address to the nation Monday morning.

Health experts, the president said, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, believe that existing COVID vaccines will continue to provide a degree of protection against the new strain, especially for individuals who have upped their immunity through booster shots. But it will be one to two weeks before scientists gain more precise results on just how effectively antibodies built up through vaccination neutralize the Omicron variant, Dr. Kavita Patel, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, told CNBC on Monday. Still, there’s reason to be hopeful, she said.

“The current vaccines don’t just generate the variant-specific antibodies. They try to generate kind of a broad antibody response,” said the Washington, D.C.-based physician.

Because of the Omicron variant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday strengthened their language on booster doses to recommend that all adults “should,” rather than “may,” receive a third shot six months after their second. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported Monday evening that Pfizer-BioNTech plans to request that extra vaccine doses be authorized for 16- and 17-year olds, after initial booster data out of Israel showed positive results within that age group.

While the details of the new variant come into focus, Atlanta-based pediatrician Jennifer Shu said K-12 buildings need to keep their guard up to stave off in-school transmission.

“It’s important for schools to continue protective measures such as masking, hand washing, physical distancing when possible, disinfecting, optimizing ventilation, etc. to limit the spread of COVID-19,” the doctor wrote in an email.

At this point, Domenech said he is not aware of any school leaders within his network having changed their safety procedures in response to the emergence of the Omicron variant.

Over the course of this school year, many districts have moved to introduce ‘test-to-stay’ measures that allow students potentially exposed to the virus to skip quarantine, provided they test negative for COVID on a rapid test. The WHO confirmed Sunday that existing PCR tests do accurately detect infection from the Omicron variant, but studies are ongoing to determine the effectiveness at recognizing the new strain of the rapid antigen testing employed in most test-to-stay schemes.

Since September, there have been over 1.7 million new pediatric coronavirus cases, and in the week before Thanksgiving, children accounted for about a quarter of new infections, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Weekly youth cases are on the rise, up 32 percent as of Nov. 18 over the previous week to 142,000, but they are well below their peak in early September of 252,000.

Over 19 million youth have received at least one vaccine dose, President Biden said in his Monday address. Over 99 percent of schools nationwide are now open for in-person learning, he pointed out, compared to less than half this time last year.

The new strain further underscores the importance of continuing efforts to boost vaccination rates within school communities, said Domenech, and raises the stakes for immunizing newly eligible children.

“The bottom line here is that unless we get to the point where the majority of people are vaccinated, where we can get to that herd immunity point, these variants are going to keep coming [and] kids are going to get infected,” he said.


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CDC approves Pfizer shots for kids ages 5 to 11, roll out to begin Wednesday https://www.laschoolreport.com/fda-panel-recommends-authorization-of-pfizer-shots-for-kids-ages-5-to-11/ Thu, 28 Oct 2021 14:01:56 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=60319

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Updated, Nov. 2

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on Tuesday evening endorsed the unanimous vote of a CDC vaccine advisory panel recommending Pfizer-BioNTech’s pediatric coronavirus vaccine for use in children ages 5 to 11. Her sign-off means shots can begin Wednesday for some 28 million children in this younger age group. The CDC approval comes after the Food and Drug Administration on Friday authorized the shots for emergency use in 5- to 11-year-olds. Children’s hospitals and pediatrician’s offices across the country told CNN that they have received their doses and would be ready to administer shots to children as soon as they got the green light. “As a mom, I encourage parents with questions to talk to their pediatrician, school nurse or local pharmacist to learn more about the vaccine and the importance of getting their children vaccinated,” Walenksy said.

 

Members of a federal advisory panel voted overwhelmingly Tuesday evening to recommend the authorization of a pediatric dose of Pfizer-BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, setting in motion a process that could make shots available for the age group by next week.

The 17-0 vote, with one abstention, represents a key step toward vaccine access for approximately 28 million U.S. children — and means that virtually all K-12 students could soon be eligible for shots.

The Food and Drug Administration panel endorsed giving children one-third the dosage for adults in two shots spaced three weeks apart. The group’s vote is non-binding, but the FDA typically follows its recommendations in the days after a decision, according to The New York Times.

Next, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has Nov. 2 and 3 meetings scheduled for their own panel of experts to weigh in on the matter, after which emergency use authorization could soon be issued.

FDA committee members cast their votes after considering the efficacy data of the Pfizer-BioNTech shots and the cumulative toll of COVID-19 on children and families.

Shots for kids were 91 percent effective at preventing infection, the pharmaceutical companies’ trial showed. Only three out of over 3,000 inoculated children experienced breakthrough infections, compared to over a dozen who had received the placebo.

Only three inoculated children out of over 3,000 experienced breakthrough infections in the Pfizer-BioNTech trial. (FDA via YouTube)

Immunity and side effects for 5- to 11-year-olds were comparable to those produced by the larger dose in 16- to 25-year-old patients, the data showed. No new safety problems or cases of heart inflammation were observed in the trial. Israeli studies have found myocarditis to occur in less than 1 in 5,000 vaccinated teenage males, so it’s possible the condition would have been too rare to have been detected in the main study.

However, even in worst-case scenarios where adverse cases run on the high side of what officials expect, the benefits of shots for kids still supersede the potential dangers, according to modeling presented by Hong Yang, senior advisor at the FDA’s Office of Biostatistics and Epidemiology.

“The benefits clearly outweigh the risks,” she said.

Over the course of the pandemic, nearly 2 million children between the ages of 5 and 11 have fallen ill with the virus, 8,300 have been hospitalized, and close to 100 have died, making COVID-19 one of the top 10 causes of death among the age group, said Peter Marks, who heads the FDA division that oversees vaccine approvals.

In addition to preventing cases and hospitalizations, minimizing learning disruptions was a key consideration for advisory committee members.

Since August, over 1 million K-12 students have been affected by school closures due to COVID, Dr. Fiona Havers, a viral diseases specialist at the CDC told committee members during the Tuesday hearing.

“The school closures and the disruption has been enormous,” said the FDA’s Jeanette Lee. “We have to weigh that against the benefits we would see [from] the vaccine.”

Over 1 million students have been affected by COVID school closures this year. (FDA via YouTube)

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation for Teachers, celebrated the panel’s recommendation as a win for school safety.

“This is huge news in our ongoing effort to keep our kids safe from COVID-19. For nearly two years, parents have been living in fear, worried that their child could get sick at school, day care, or in daily life, but now they finally have FDA-approved protection to add to the long list of vaccines we use to keep our children protected from transmissible diseases,” she said in a statement. “Educators, school staff and healthcare professionals are eager to work together with parents to help get America’s kids vaccinated in the places they trust, including public schools and community centers.”

At least one committee member, Cody Meissner, who ultimately voted to recommend the vaccine for authorization, expressed hesitation about how greenlighting shots for 5- to 11-year-olds may play out for school policy.

“I’m just worried that if we say yes, that the states are going to mandate administration of this vaccine to children in order to go to school and I do not agree with that. I think that would be an error at this time,” he said during the Tuesday hearing.

Vaccine mandates have become a flashpoint in the ongoing culture wars now consuming school boards nationally. Only a handful of school districts, mostly in California, have enacted coronavirus vaccine requirements for eligible students. The Golden State’s two largest school systems, Los Angeles and San Diego, are currently defending their policies in court.

California is also the only state to mandate shots for eligible students, though the policy will likely not go into effect until July 2022.

A third of parents with children ages 5 to 11 said they would get their child vaccinated “right away” once they were eligible, according to a Sept. 30 Kaiser Family Foundation survey, while a third said they would “wait and see” and a quarter said they would “definitely not” vaccinate their younger children. A more recent survey by ​​the COVID-19 Vaccine Education and Equity Project reported that two-thirds of parents with children in the age group said they would immunize them once the shots are authorized.

Vials of the pediatric vaccine will be colored orange, to differentiate from adult doses. (FDA via YouTube)

When shots do ultimately roll out for children, vials will be colored differently to avoid confusion with the more potent adult formula, said William Gruber, senior vice president of Pfizer Vaccine Clinical Research and Development.

Immediately after the FDA panel’s vote, Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, took to Twitter.

“They got it right,” he said.


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New report: How to build culturally affirming schools, according to over 100 Black teachers https://www.laschoolreport.com/new-report-how-to-build-culturally-affirming-schools-according-to-over-100-black-teachers/ Tue, 26 Oct 2021 14:01:41 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=60299

Ricky Townsend is a math teacher in Georgia and a Teach Plus fellowship alumni. (Teach Plus)

Recruiting a diverse staff and building a “family-like” school culture are among the key action steps more than 100 Black educators recommend school leaders follow in a recent report released by Teach Plus and the Center for Black Educator Development.

The paper presented the findings of focus groups conducted during the spring and summer of 2020, compiling the perspectives of 105 Black teachers from across 12 states. Educators in the group had an average of 12 years of classroom experience, though some were newer to teaching and others were more veteran.

The report offers key insights on how to build school environments that feel welcoming for Black educators, such as ensuring that curricula include the perspectives of historically underrepresented groups. The authors also recommend that leaders provide opportunities for teachers of color to participate in mentorship programs and focus groups to debrief their experiences, especially in schools with majority-white faculty, where Black, Indigenous, Hispanic or Asian educators may be one of just a few colleagues who share their racial identity.

Teach Plus

The findings come at a crucial time, as Black teachers are leaving the profession at higher rates than many other groups due to myriad issues including professional isolation and burnout. Currently, about 7 percent of all teachers nationwide are Black compared to 15 percent of all students.

Research underscores the academic and social benefits that teachers of color deliver for young people of all races, but particularly for students who share their same racial identity. Many experts point to teacher diversification as a pressing need in public education, yet nationwide, 79 percent of educators remain white compared to only 47 percent of students.

“We know that students of color, particularly Black students, if they have a Black teacher, they’re more likely to succeed in school,” Sharif El-Mekki, founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, told The 74. But all too often, he noted, teachers of color are met with hostile work environments that leave them simultaneously overburdened and isolated — what he calls the “invisible tax” of being one of the few Black, Indigenous, Hispanic or Asian educators at their school.

The report co-published by El-Mekki’s team and Teach Plus points out numerous systemic reasons for the current teacher diversity gap. The often-celebrated 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case, for example, integrated U.S. students but not educators — spurring tens of thousands of Black teachers across the South to lose their jobs. Many of them were more qualified and effective than their white peers because teaching, albeit in segregated schools, was one of the few professions widely available to African Americans with advanced degrees during Jim Crow.

Today, teacher preparation programs continue to feed disproportionately high shares of white educators into the field, thanks in part to certification exams that ​​have long been the target of concerns for racial bias.

“The challenges to [boosting teacher diversity] are deeply embedded and calcified in our public schools,” said El-Mekki, who previously worked as an educator and principal in Philadelphia, in a press release. “Undoing them will require intentional and comprehensive effort by teachers, principals, district and state leaders.”

“Hiring people of color is not enough to create culturally affirming schools,” added Kyle Epps, a Philadelphia teacher cited in the report. “Schools need to have systems, programs, and curriculum in place whose main goals are to foster and celebrate people of color.”

Some first steps toward implementing such measures may be holding meetings and launching surveys through which parents can share their voices, teachers suggest.

“It is imperative that leaders cultivate a culture where families and communities have a platform to advocate for their kids and are given opportunities to play a role in decisions that impact learning and student success,” said Mississippi teacher leader Nicole Moore, who was also featured in the paper.

The group of Black educators who spoke to Teach Plus and the Center for Black Educator Development identified key recommendations for school leaders looking to foster more welcoming environments for their teachers of color. The paper includes practical resources such as self-reflection worksheets for teachers to help examine their own biases and tools to deepen curricular materials with real-world examples that relate to students’ own lived experiences.

Travis Bristol (UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education)

“[The report] addresses not only what an affirming school culture looks like, but also provides clear and concise action steps teachers, educational leaders, and policymakers should take to transform school culture for Black teachers — in service of their students,” said Travis J. Bristol, assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a Teach Plus board member.

Similar action steps, however, have recently come under fire in classrooms and rowdy school board meetings across the country. As some schools have begun to acknowledge and discuss systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a nationwide backlash (El-Mekki calls it a “whitelash”) against the perceived propagation of critical race theory in education has put a target on activities like implicit bias trainings or books written by Black authors. In one Texas town, it even led teachers to wrap their own personal bookshelves in caution tape, as administrators cracked down on classroom collections.

That’s not stopping El-Mekki or the Center for Black Educator Development.

“This idea of policing … Black minds and Black intellectuals is nothing new,” he told The 74. “Doing racial justice work takes courage and bravery.”

His organization will next month hold a conference to uplift Black male educators, who currently make up just 2 percent of all U.S. teachers.

But dismantling racism in schools, he underscores, is everyone’s responsibility — white folks included.

“It’s part of being an educator,” said El-Mekki.

And lest the path toward improvement seems daunting, the report cites Arkansas educator Iesha Green, who reminds principals and officials that, for key guidance, they need look no further than their colleagues who show up to classrooms day after day.

“My advice for leaders who wish to create culturally affirming schools is to learn about the nuances of various cultures and then listen to and work collaboratively with the practitioners who know the students best—teachers,” she said.


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Exclusive analysis: CDC COVID youth vaccination figures clash — sometimes by double-digits — with locally reported rates https://www.laschoolreport.com/exclusive-analysis-cdc-covid-youth-vaccination-figures-clash-sometimes-by-double-digits-with-locally-reported-rates/ Thu, 21 Oct 2021 14:15:18 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=60275

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris tour the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia in March 2021. (Eric Baradat / Getty Images)

As schools work to mitigate COVID spread in classrooms and get a handle on how many teens have been immunized, they may not be able to rely on vaccination data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In many cases, CDC numbers clash with locally reported vaccination rates, an analysis from The 74 reveals, including multiple instances of double-digit gaps between local and federal counts. In some counties, the agency’s data indicate that the share of 12- to 17-year-olds who have received at least one vaccine dose is impossibly high — 101 percent in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and 104 percent in San Francisco County, California, for example.

The lack of clarity takes on heightened significance as the country moves to vaccinate another swath of the K-12 population, with coronavirus shots for children ages 5 to 11 currently under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and expected as soon as early November.

Inaccuracies in CDC data could have implications for the nationwide understanding of vaccine uptake among young people. The widely cited youth COVID immunization rate calculated by the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, is based on CDC numbers.

“Our method is to clearly state the source of our data,” Suk-fong Tang, senior database analyst for the AAP, told The 74. But due to time limitations and the vast quantity of information, she said, “it is not possible at this time to validate everything that we use.”

“We work with [CDC] data with the faith that the data really captures the large trends,” the AAP expert continued. “It may not be, you know, accurate down to the single-digit counts.”

While the CDC does not publish youth immunization data directly, it releases vaccination rates and raw counts for those over 12 and those over 18 by county. Using those numbers, The 74 calculated the rate of inoculation for 12- to 17-year-olds via a method that Tang confirmed produced a “highly similar” youth vaccination figure as the AAP. (Click here to see the math.) Those rates frequently deviated from local reports, indicating possible flaws in the federal agency’s vaccination counts, population counts, or both.

For example, CDC data downloaded by The 74 Sept. 30 indicate that in Queens County, New York, 86 percent of teens have received at least one vaccine dose, while NYC Health said the county’s figure was actually 74 percent. In an especially extreme case, federal data for Coconino County, Arizona, indicate a 93 percent one-dose vaccination rate for 12- to 17-year-olds, while Coconino Health and Human Services reported a 57 percent rate.

Coconino County officials explained the gap in an email, saying they use a “more enhanced data cleaning process” than the state or the CDC.

Other areas such as Fairfax County, Virginia; Marin County, California; and Howard County, Maryland, reported youth vaccination rates that closely aligned with federal counts, differing by under 5 percentage points.

The CDC did not respond to the discrepancies identified by The 74, and did not provide comment when asked for the reasons behind them, despite over a half-dozen requests made over more than a two-week span. The agency did send a link to information on its vaccination data reporting protocols, which explained that their population counts are based on the Census Bureau’s 2019 estimates, meaning that their percentages could be inaccurate if individuals moved counties in the last two years.

Population shifts may not completely account for the discrepancies. Outside experts also said issues such as double-counting vaccinations or delays in reporting data upstream to the federal government could contribute to inaccuracies.

‘Flying blind’

Data woes have plagued the CDC throughout the pandemic, said Ali Mokdad, who, after years monitoring vaccine coverage at the federal agency, is now a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington.

“We’re flying blind,” he said, pointing out that U.S. decisions around Pfizer booster shots were based on data from Israel and Qatar, where vaccination numbers are collected in a more standardized fashion, due to a dearth of reliable U.S. data.

From the CDC’s decision to scale back tracking for breakthrough infections to their flip-flop on indoor masking for vaccinated individuals, the agency has come under fire at multiple points throughout the pandemic.

In past months, the epidemiology professor said, many Americans received unauthorized booster doses by crossing state lines or lying about their vaccination status thanks to lax immunization tracking. “We don’t know [exactly how many people are] vaccinated or not, and what types of vaccines they have received and when.”

That can become a life-or-death problem, said Mokdad. “When you know how many people are vaccinated, you know what immunity you have in your community,” he explained. “[But if you don’t] know how many people are vaccinated … you can’t get a handle on how many people are susceptible in your own community and then that will sustain a surge.”

In instances where local vaccination numbers are above CDC counts, it’s possible that states have been slow to report their most recent immunization data, Emily Pond, a researcher for the Johns Hopkins University vaccination tracker, told The 74 — she calls that glitch “data lag.” Where the CDC count is higher, Pond explained, federal overseers may have access to vaccination counts that local departments of health do not, such as coronavirus immunizations that occurred at army bases or on tribal lands through the Indian Health Service.

In Navajo County, Arizona, for example, Assistant County Manager Bryan Layton said via email, “We openly acknowledge the inherent challenges of tracking and reporting case data and vaccine rates in a rural county that is home to 3 different sovereign tribal entities: the White Mountain Apache Tribe, the Hopi, and the Navajo Nation …. The Navajo Nation … uses a series of service areas that do not necessarily conform to county or state jurisdictions.”

Still, local reports in Navajo County say 19 percent of residents under 20 years old have received at least one dose of the vaccine, compared to CDC numbers that put the rate for 12- to 17-year-olds at 98 percent — a gap that likely can’t be fully explained by Indian Health Service data absent at the local level.

“I have a red flag when any [vaccination rate] is above, like, 90 percent,” said Pond. Differences between CDC and local figures, she said, can be rather common.

‘A lot of moving parts’

To get a better sense of the frequency of discrepancies between local and CDC vaccination rates, The 74 queried a random sample of 10 U.S. counties, a small sliver of the over 2,600 in the full dataset and separate from the analysis of the counties with the highest reported rates. Seven returned data for comparison against federal numbers, some using slightly different age boundaries for youth vaccination than The 74’s 12- to 17-year-old range.

Out of those seven counties, three had rates that diverged from CDC numbers by more than 5 percentage points. Hood River County, Oregon, reported that 72 percent of youth ages 12 to 17 had received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine while the CDC reported an 80 percent figure. Sullivan County, Pennsylvania, reported a 23 percent rate for youth ages 12 to 19 compared to a 30 percent 12- to 17-year-old rate from the CDC. And Schoolcraft County, Michigan, reported that 32 percent of youth ages 12 to 15 and 47 percent of youth ages 16 to 19 had received at least one dose, compared to a 13 percent CDC rate for youth ages 12 to 17. Both Sullivan and Schoolcraft counties have populations under 10,000, meaning small inaccuracies could have an outsized impact on their vaccination percentages.


The inconsistencies don’t surprise Michael Kurilla, director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the National Institutes of Health. The U.S. has a decentralized health care system, he pointed out, meaning that providers can’t easily share data. For example, someone sick with COVID who leaves the hospital too early and re-admits to another facility could easily be counted as two cases, said Kurilla.

Further, the reporting systems themselves are often antiquated, the NIH expert explained.

“Some places are still paper based, some are using fax to transmit information,” he said, adding — only half joking — that it wouldn’t surprise him if some local health agencies still used floppy disks.

On top of technological woes, the many different settings offering COVID-19 shots can compound reporting challenges, explained Phil Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health. It’s easy to document doses at state-run vaccination clinics, he said, but vaccinations delivered at doctor’s offices or pharmacies can be harder to track.

“It’s a lot of moving parts,” he said. “The devil’s really in the details.”

Vaccination sites can use this form when they lack internet. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

When those details are mishandled, inaccuracies in the data arise. In mid-September, the CDC adjusted their report of the share of people 12 and older in West Virginia who had received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine from 74 percent to 67 percent, after discovering that they had double-counted certain data streams for over three months.

On the flip side, increased data transparency may well translate into increased accuracy. In Maine — the only U.S. state to publicly report student and staff COVID vaccination data for school districts, according to the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education — youth vaccination data reported by the state for each of its 16 counties align closely with federal numbers.

“We need to be transparent, you need to show exactly what you do,” said Mokdad, the UW epidemiologist who spent two decades at the CDC.

He wishes his former employer would be more forthcoming about its raw numbers and any possible shortcomings in its data pipeline. In his own COVID research, Mokdad said, he relies on infection counts from the Johns Hopkins tracker, because he finds it more reliable than the federal numbers.

“There is a big problem at CDC right now,” said the epidemiologist. Mokdad himself was involved in a high-profile incident in 2004 where he co-authored a CDC paper that overestimated the number of annual deaths caused by obesity. The health expert said he left the centers in 2008 for unrelated reasons and on good terms with all his co-workers.

“I criticize CDC because I love CDC,” he said.


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Study: AI uncovers skin-tone gap in most-beloved children’s books https://www.laschoolreport.com/study-ai-uncovers-skin-tone-gap-in-most-beloved-childrens-books/ Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:01:26 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=60218

The most popular, award-winning children’s books tend to shade their Black, Asian and Hispanic characters with lighter skin tones than stories recognized for identity-based awards, new research harnessing artificial intelligence reveals. (Craig F. Walker/Getty Images)

The most popular, award-winning children’s books tend to shade their Black, Asian and Hispanic characters with lighter skin tones than stories recognized for identity-based awards, new research finds.

The discovery comes on the heels of a half decade of advocacy to diversify the historically white and male-centric kids’ literature genre, leading to modest gains in racial representation. But now, a working paper recently published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute raises questions about what, exactly, that representation looks like.

“There may be more characters that are classified as, for example, being Black, but they’re being depicted with lighter skin,” explained ​​co-author Anjali Adukia, assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

Anjali Adukia (University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy)

Adukia and her team used artificial intelligence to analyze patterns in the images and text of 1,130 children’s books totaling more than 160,000 pages — far more data than manual methods could possibly crunch. Their code identified characters’ faces, assigned race, age and gender classifications, and calculated a weighted average for their skin tone.

The researchers found that, among books that won the Newbery or Caldecott awards, which comprise the lion’s share of purchases and library check-outs, the average shade for characters belonging to each racial category was lighter than those characters in books that won identity-based awards for race, gender, sexuality or ability representation such as the Coretta Scott King Award for African-American kids’ literature or the Stonewall Award for LGBTQ books.

The most popular, award-winning children’s books tend to shade their Black, Asian and Hispanic characters with lighter skin tones than stories recognized for identity-based awards. (Adukia, Eble, Harrison, Runesha and Szasz via Brown University’s Annenberg Institute)

The color analysis also revealed that, across all collections, children were persistently depicted with lighter skin than their adult counterparts. The messages sent by those portrayals worry Adukia.

“There’s … this notion of equating youth or childhood with innocence,” she told The 74. “But if innocence is equated with lightness or whiteness, what’s that implicit bias that gets baked into people’s minds?”

The Singing Man, left, was honored by the Coretta Scott King Award in 1995 and The Village of Round and Square Houses, right, was honored by the Caldecott Medal in 1987. (Emileigh Harrison)

In many cases, said the professor, that pattern extends to adult characters that authors want to depict as moral or upstanding. Some books, for example, dilute Martin Luther King Jr.’s chocolate complexion to a light brown or beige, she said.

Whether by conscious choice or implicit bias, some children’s books lighten the skin tones of characters meant to be seen as moral or upstanding, such as Martin Luther King Jr. (Amazon Bookstore)

“We live in … a world that still sends the message that to be closer to white is to somehow be at an advantage,” Sharon G. Flake, author of the award-winning book The Skin I’m In, told The 74. “The whole notion that you are seen as … more valuable, more beautiful if you are lighter.”

The stories children read, said Flake, shape how kids come to understand the world and their place within it. Giving birth to an African-American daughter with a darker complexion inspired her to write a book featuring a dark-skinned Black girl as the protagonist to remind her child that she’s brilliant and beautiful.

“If you’re always left out of the story, then you start to think that you’re not important,” said Flake. But the power of books to reframe those societal messages, she added, is “huge.”

“When you’re able to read a book that actually does represent you, … you feel seen,” Edith Campbell, librarian at Indiana State University, told The 74. “You connect with it in a different way.”

Sharon G. Flake was inspired to write a children’s book with a dark-skinned girl protagonist after giving birth to her own daughter. (Sharon G. Flake)

But despite trend-setting titles, authored by Flake and many others, the children’s literature genre still has “a really wide gap in [racial, color and gender] representation,” said Adukia.

The dataset her team analyzed includes every children’s book published in the past century that won one of 19 different awards. Even from 2010 to 2019, their figures show, Caldecott and Newbery winners saw upticks in the share of characters whose skin color fell into the lightest tone group. They also saw a modest increase in the proportion of characters in the darkest skin tone — though the share remains less than in books winning identity-based awards — and a reduction in the percentage of medium shades.

In 2018, half of children’s books depicted white main characters, while Black, Asian, Hispanic and Indigenous people led 10 percent, 7 percent, 5 percent and 1 percent of titles, respectively, according to numbers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center.

“There are more books written with animal characters than there are with children of color,” said Campbell, remarking on the 27 percent share of stories with non-human protagonists in 2018.

The librarian, who launched the We Are Kids Lit Collective to boost diverse summer reading options, said she would give the recent progress to increase racial, gender and ability representation in the genre a D+/C-.

“There’s so much work to do,” she said, pointing to a string of new rules in red states and districts across the country ostensibly meant to limit critical race theory that disproportionately restrict the teaching of books written by Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and Asian authors.

In addition to racial and skin-tone patterns, the UChicago and Columbia Teachers College research team also identified concerning trends in the portrayal of female characters in kids books. Girls and women, their data showed, were more likely to be represented in images than text. Out of all the award categories, those dedicated to representing female voices were the only group to have more words gendered as female than male, the researchers found, and that proportion amounted to only a slight majority.

“There may be symbolic inclusion in pictures without substantive inclusion in the actual story,” said Adukia. “It is really striking, this illustration that women should be ‘seen but not heard.’”

“I don’t think that [the imbalance between female representation in images versus text] is something that people necessarily are doing on purpose,” added co-author Emileigh Harrison, a Ph.D student at the University of Chicago. “But making this finding more visible might help those who are writing future books or publishers … think about it more carefully.”

If those in the industry can turn the worrisome patterns in racial, skin color and gender representation around, the potential impact can be enormous, Flake believes.

“Books work a lot of magic and they do a lot of healing,” she said.


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‘We left those students behind’: 1.9 million low-income youth boxed out of afterschool programs, despite surging parent interest in STEM offerings https://www.laschoolreport.com/we-left-those-students-behind-1-9-million-low-income-youth-boxed-out-of-afterschool-programs-despite-surging-parent-interest-in-stem-offerings/ Thu, 23 Sep 2021 14:01:06 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=60160

Seventy-nine percent of afterschool attrition came from low-income families despite these students making up only 38 percent of all program participants in 2020. (Derek Davis/Getty Images)

Every year, millions of students nationwide participate in afterschool and summer programs that help them gain skills in science, technology, engineering and math — also known as STEM. But even as student interest surges and the programs continue to expand, financial and transportation barriers have boxed many young people out of these pivotal learning opportunities, particularly students from low-income families, a new report reveals.

From 2014 to early 2020, just before the pandemic, the U.S. saw a 1.3 million-student drop in afterschool STEM participation, falling from 7 million learners to 5.7 million, according to the paper, which was published by the nonprofit organization Afterschool Alliance.

Those drops were starkest among poorer students, who were already underrepresented in STEM fields. In that timespan, the number of young people from low-income households participating in afterschool programs, STEM or otherwise, fell from 4.6 million to 2.7 million — meaning 79 percent of afterschool attrition came from less wealthy families despite such students making up only 38 percent of all participants in 2020.

“We left those students behind,” said Nikole Collins-Puri, CEO of the California-based nonprofit Techbridge Girls.

Simultaneously, however, the share of afterschool programs offering STEM opportunities grew. Nearly 3 in 4 young people learning outside of school hours have science and technology programming available to them. That’s up four percentage points from 69 percent in 2014.

“The inequities are troubling and must not continue,” said Jodi Grant, Afterschool Alliance’s executive director, in a press release. “We need to increase access to afterschool overall, because even though parents report a greater percentage of programs are providing STEM, fewer children are in afterschool programs today than in years past.”

Even as the share of afterschool programs offering STEM learning increased, overall participation has fallen precipitously since 2014. (Afterschool Alliance)

Data for the report come from a randomly selected, nationally representative sample of U.S. families, including a total of more than 31,000 phone interviews, making the report the most comprehensive look at out-of-school learning to date.

The interviews revealed that, even amid drops in afterschool program participation, more parents than ever before would like to see their children get involved in such opportunities. For every child in an out-of-school learning program, another three are waiting to get in, according to the study. The parents of some 24.6 million students said they would enroll their child in afterschool programming if the offerings were readily available to them.

Cost and transportation appear to pose key barriers. Fifty-seven percent of parents said afterschool opportunities were too expensive and 53 percent said they weren’t sure how their kids would get to and from activities. STEM programs may be particularly pricey, with a $107 mean weekly reported price, compared to $74 per week for other offerings.

Cost and transportation are key barriers to afterschool program participation, parents report. (Afterschool Alliance)

Despite barriers, however, science and math opportunities are an increasing priority for parents. Some 72 percent of families, up from 53 percent in 2014, told researchers that STEM and computer science learning were important factors in their selection of afterschool and summer programs. Rates were especially high among Black, Hispanic and Asian families.

STEM-related occupations tend to be more lucrative than non-STEM fields, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the former will grow by 8 percent in the next decade, while the latter will only grow 3.4 percent. STEM fields, however, tend to employ a more white and more male workforce than the general population.

Collins-Puri’s organization, Techbridge Girls, works to counter that trend by providing STEM learning opportunities to low-income girls of color and gender-expansive individuals.

Widening access to STEM programs, she said in a briefing held on the Afterschool Alliance report, means eliminating potential barriers to participation for underrepresented groups. For example, young women more so than young men tend to shoulder caregiving responsibilities, the CEO pointed out — which for many families only increased during the pandemic.

“When girls have the responsibility to take care of their younger sibling, to take care of their elderly family members, or even take on some of the economic responsibilities to support the household, that is a direct impact to their participation in afterschool programming,” said Collins-Puri.

“You have to make your afterschool programming flexible,” she continued. Adults should encourage students to come to activities, regardless of their home responsibilities, by telling them, “Make sure you bring your younger sibling so they can be part of the learning experience,” the Oakland afterschool leader advised.

CLICK TO WATCH: Experts, including Nikole Collins-Puri (above), comment on Afterschool Alliance report findings. (Afterschool Alliance via YouTube)

Programs may soon have additional resources at their disposal, Grant, of the Afterschool Alliance, pointed out thanks to funds from the American Rescue Plan, which could allow some organizations to subsidize program costs, bolster transportation options or make other adjustments to meet families’ needs.

Even amid persistent disparities in access to afterschool programming, gaps have never been due to any deficiencies among individuals who belong to underrepresented groups, Collins-Puri reminded viewers.

“Our girls lack nothing. Our girls are capable. They’re ready and they’re willing to be in the STEM revolution.”


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Ask the doctor: Did we miscalculate the risk of COVID for kids? https://www.laschoolreport.com/ask-the-doctor-did-we-miscalculate-the-risk-of-covid-for-kids/ Thu, 16 Sep 2021 14:01:50 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=60133

Rebecca Wurtz, Ishminder Kaur, Amruta Padhye, Janet Englund, Benjamin Linas, Kristina Deeter

Not so long ago, it seemed the data on COVID-19 held a degree of comfort when it came to children: not too many of them got infected, fewer still got sick and almost none were hospitalized. As for schools, they were not believed to be super spreaders of the virus, for either adults or students.

And then came the Delta variant.

Pediatric coronavirus cases have now surged above 250,000 for the first time since the start of the pandemic, according to recently released data from the American Academy of Pediatrics. Hospitalizations of children stricken by the highly transmissible strain are reaching alarming levels and some tens of thousands of students across the country last week were quarantining away from schools that had just barely begun. With a swiftness that surprised even health experts, the virus has forced at least 1,400 closures of long-awaited in-person school across some 278 districts in 35 states, according to the website Burbio, a data service that tracks school calendars.

As for the adults in schools, at least 13 Miami-Dade staffers have died of the virus since mid-August and a Central Texas district shut down all its schools earlier this month after two teachers perished in the same week.

The Delta drumbeat of distress is one of the main reasons that President Joe Biden came out Thursday with a new plan of attack, including mandatory vaccinations for some 300,000 school staff members working for federal programs, such as Head Start or schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Education, and grants for districts confronting loss of funding for implementing mask mandates.

It will take some time to tell if Biden’s new strategy will be successful in beating back this latest surge. Right now, many parents and school officials are in a state of anxiety about how to keep their K-12 communities safe and perhaps questioning whether they miscalculated the strength of the COVID-19 enemy.

Complicating the matter further, decisions to implement basic virus mitigation measures in school have in some cases exploded into ridicule or even all-out brawls.

Amid the uncertainty and high tensions, and with misinformation about the virus still rampant, The 74 spoke directly to health experts for clarity on how to understand the virus in this critical stage and tips on how to safely navigate the back-to-school season.

Here’s what they had to say:

1. We’ve seen a surge in pediatric coronavirus cases. Should we abandon the prior wisdom that kids rarely catch COVID, and when they do, it’s not too serious?

Not exactly.

“[The Delta variant] is more infectious, but it’s not a whole new game,” explained Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University.

The variant’s high transmissibility has pushed up case counts, including among children, he told The 74. But serious illness among young people remains “vanishingly rare,” he said — citing a case fatality rate of .00003 for those under 20.

“This underlying reality that kids are at far less risk of severe COVID-19 than adults remains true, even with Delta.”

Young people do represent a larger share of infections nationwide now than they did at the outset of the pandemic. But that’s likely because far fewer minors than adults are vaccinated, and many remain ineligible for shots, said Kristina Deeter, professor of pediatric medicine at University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine.

In most cases, “[kids] are not as sick as the adults,” she agreed.

Still, Rebecca Wurtz, professor of health policy at the University of Minnesota, cautions that the risk of infection remains high, particularly for the unvaccinated. The idea that young people couldn’t catch or spread COVID was always silly, she told The 74, and the Delta variant means that transmission is now easier than ever before.

“Delta will find you if you are not thoughtfully masking and social distancing,” she said.

2. Does the Delta variant make kids sicker than previous strains?

There is no conclusive evidence that it does, according to the experts.

“The jury’s still out,” said Deeter.

Studies from Canada and Scotland have found that patients infected with the Delta variant were more likely to be hospitalized than those infected with previous mutations of the virus.

And while those papers don’t examine virulence specifically among young people, Wurtz believes it could still be “reasonable to extrapolate that to kids.”

Evidence from the U.S., however, seems to contradict the idea that Delta causes more severe infections among youth. Even as pediatric COVID cases have surged, the proportion of children and adolescents hospitalized with severe disease has remained constant, points out Amruta Padhye, pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Missouri.

The hospitalization rate among unvaccinated adolescents was 10 times higher compared to those who were fully vaccinated, recent CDC data reveal.

3. After the Pfizer vaccine’s full approval from the FDA, parents may now theoretically seek “off-label” vaccines for children under 12. Should they do so?

In short, no.

Although the FDA’s full approval of the Pfizer vaccine for those 16 and up means that doctors now have the power to prescribe the shot “off label” to any individual regardless of age, it would be irresponsible to do so, said Deeter.

The biggest unknown, she explained, is dosage. She prescribes drugs off label every day as a pediatrician, but explained that the COVID vaccine is different because it’s still so new.

“I don’t feel safe even deciding on what dose I might want to prescribe for a child. I have no idea what’s going to work,” she said, explaining that too much vaccine could elevate risks such as myocarditis, already more prevalent in young vaccine recipients than adults, and too little vaccine might not provide adequate protection against the coronavirus.

“There’s a reason that we have the approval process, even in the middle of a crisis,” added Linas. “I don’t recommend going out to get your child vaccinated before the vaccine has actually been approved or emergency authorized for kids.”

Youngsters aged 5 to 11 are expected to become eligible for coronavirus shots as soon as the end of October, experts say. The process has stretched out over months in part due to federal health regulators efforts to bolster confidence in the shots by demanding increased enrollment in clinical trials.

Once shots are approved for that age group, they will be the most effective way to keep children healthy, said Linas.

“With the vaccine, you’re very well protected from the bad outcomes.”

4. Should schools implement vaccine mandates for staff?

Immunization requirements for school staff have multiplied since the FDA issued full approval for the Pfizer vaccine. ​WashingtonConnecticutOregon and multiple other states have enacted rules requiring educators to receive the COVID shot or be regularly tested for the virus.

In his Thursday address, which unveiled new vaccination rules covering two-thirds of all U.S. workers, President Biden called on state leaders to help move the needle on teacher immunization from its reported 90 percent level up to 100 percent.

“Vaccination requirements in schools are nothing new,” said the president.

Expecting teachers to be immunized against COVID represents a sound public health policy, says Linas.

“It’s reasonable for school districts … to say to their educators and staff… ‘We have an expectation that if you’re going to come into our buildings where we have our unvaccinated children, we expect you to be vaccinated. And if you won’t do that, then I’m sorry, you can’t teach.’”

That strategy also minimizes learning disruptions, pointed out Janet Englund, professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

“When a teacher gets sick, he or she is unable to perform his or her job,” she told The 74.

5. What about vaccine mandates for students?

Very few school districts have extended vaccine mandates to students, as 12- to 15-year-olds remain eligible for shots only on an emergency authorization basis, and those under 12 are still ineligible.

On Thursday, however, Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves 600,000 students, became the first major U.S. school district to require that eligible students attending school in person be fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. Students 12 and older in the nation’s second-largest school system will have to receive their second dose of the shot by Dec. 19, officials announced.

Culver City, California and Hoboken, New Jersey also instituted similar requirements for students in late August. Experts told The 74 that they expect the vaccination rules to face legal challenges.

Although Englund said she is a believer in many student vaccine mandates — they helped control diseases such as measles and polio, she pointed out — requiring a vaccine that is approved only on an emergency use authorization may be premature.

“It’s not quite time,” she said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, however, expressed his support for student vaccine mandates while speaking on CNN in late August, and the University of Minnesota’s Wurtz told The 74 that she is “absolutely in favor of mandatory vaccinations for students,” due to the high safety and efficacy of COVID shots.

6. How effective are masks and other safety mitigation measures at slowing the spread of COVID in school?

Experts agree that safety measures to slow the spread of COVID are more effective when implemented in tandem with multiple others than on their own.

“[Masking] has to be a part of a layered protection strategy,” UCLA professor of pediatrics Ishminder Kaur told The 74.

That means that classrooms should employ all strategies available to them, she said: universal masking, ventilation, distancing, outdoor activities and rigorous testing to keep infected students out of the classroom.

Doing so can result in schools effectively containing the virus and keeping case rates below those of surrounding communities, academic studies show.

Although quarantining students exposed to the virus can disrupt academics, experts said it is a necessary step to contain transmission. They pointed out that with widespread access to testing, a negative result after five days may allow students to return to the classroom more quickly. On Thursday, Biden announced that the White House will move to make 280 million rapid and at-home tests available using the Defense Production Act and lower the cost of over-the-counter tests from Walmart, Kroger and Amazon.

Some districts’ quarantine protocols are more stringent than those recommended by the CDC, according to a recent survey of 100 districts from the University of Washington’s Center for Reinventing Public Education.

Some observers have recently made the case that the benefits of mask-wearing in the classroom remain uncertain, but Kaur points out that a recent study from Bangladesh with a randomized design — considered the “gold standard” in causal research — finds that simple surgical masks slow spread of COVID significantly, though it cautions that cloth masks may be less effective.

And while masking controversy has turned many school board meetings ugly, including in Broward County, Florida where the board chair said “all hell broke loose” when they required face coverings in defiance of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s order, kids don’t actually seem to mind wearing masks, said Kaur.

“They’re not fidgeting, they’re not touching it,” she said of the youngsters who come into her clinic. “It’s the new normal for them.”

Deeter, who works in a sedation clinic and has to ask kids to remove their masks, has observed the same.

“They get so upset when I try to take it off of them. It’s their buddy,” she said.

7. Outside of school, what’s the best way to navigate playdates and other social activities?

The number one tip, experts say, is to stay outside as much as possible.

“Outdoor activities were not the ones that were spreading these infections, which remains true even for Delta,” said Kaur, although she recommended avoiding overcrowded locations even outside. For example, coaches calling players into a huddle might ask everyone to momentarily mask up.

Even when the weather gets cold, Wurtz recommends limiting indoor hangouts. She suggests some compromises: building a snowman outside then coming indoors for hot chocolate at the end, perhaps.

8. What’s the COVID end-game for schools?

Once all students have had the opportunity to receive COVID vaccinations, it could be time to consider rolling back virus mitigation protocols, Linas said, and beginning the conversation about how to live with a virus that experts expect to remain endemic within the global population. But that’s still a long way out.

“We’re not there yet,” he said.


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‘Buried’ CDC guidance emphasizes universal masking in schools, says properly protected ‘close contacts’ needn’t quarantine https://www.laschoolreport.com/buried-cdc-guidance-emphasizes-universal-masking-in-schools-says-properly-protected-close-contacts-neednt-quarantine/ Wed, 25 Aug 2021 14:01:05 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=60043

An update to CDC quarantine guidelines exempts students from self-isolation if both they and the infected student were properly masked. The change is pushing some districts to require face coverings. (Chandan Khanna / Getty Images)

Some key absences complicated the return to school in Wayne Township, Indiana: 461 to be exact.

After just eight days in classrooms, 37 positive coronavirus cases in the 16,000-student district outside Indianapolis had triggered hundreds of student quarantines, forcing young people to miss out on classes and extracurriculars.

Superintendent Jeff Butts knew he had to act fast. The district had begun the year mask optional in late July. But in early August, he stumbled on a solution, hidden in plain sight: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had just updated its guidance, exempting students from self-isolation if they and the infected student were properly masked and spaced at least 3 feet apart.

“That was my biggest tipping point, quite frankly, when the CDC came out and made that change,” Butts told The 74. “I realized that if we had all of our children in masks … I can quarantine fewer children.”

But not everyone got the message. It doesn’t appear that the guidance trickled down to many other school systems, where most policies remain stricter than the CDC demands, according to a recent survey of 100 districts from the University of Washington’s Center for Reinventing Public Education. One reason for the disconnect is that CDC made little attempt to billboard the policy shift, which only appears in an appendix on case investigation and tracing updated Aug. 5.

“It’s buried in some appendix to the close contact definition,” Emily Oster, Brown University economist who has tracked schooling through the pandemic, told The 74. Under many school systems’ quarantine protocols, spending 15 minutes within a six foot radius of an infected individual — sitting next to them in class, for example — can force students to stay home for up to two weeks. The new exemption allows schools to bypass that rule in cases where both individuals mask up.

Across the country, as school leaders struggle with quarantine totals that are stretching into the thousands just weeks after schools opened their doors, the new masking exemption to self-isolation guidelines, could help districts sidestep chaotic reopenings amid divisive politics surrounding the use of masks.

(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

In the past week across the country, New Orleans School District quarantined over 3,000 students and staff after 299 recorded COVID cases. Mississippi has 20,000 students staying home for isolation statewide, an official announced. And a district in Texas shut down due to outbreaks among school staff. Meanwhile, Texas — among other states like Florida, Arkansas and Arizona — maintains a ban on mask mandates, though school systems like those in Dallas and Miami are requiring face coverings in defiance of the ban.

The CDC did not respond to The 74’s request for an explanation of why the update wasn’t publicized more widely. But Oster, the Brown economist, said it’s possible that when the CDC updated the definition of close contact for quarantining, “they didn’t realize how important it would be for school guidance,” and thus didn’t heavily broadcast the change.

At the very least, it’s clear the hidden clause gives districts a “huge incentive to have everybody mask,” Oster said.

As of Aug. 11, all students and faculty in Wayne Township are now required to wear face coverings. Site leaders have told Butts that the district is already seeing fewer quarantines, though the superintendent said he doesn’t yet have this week’s numbers.

Wayne Township is not the only locale to pull the trigger on face coverings in response to skyrocketing COVID absences. Elsewhere in Indiana, Greater Clark County Schools adopted a universal masking rule on Aug. 7 after some 70 COVID cases spurred over 1,100 student quarantines. In Arkansas, the Marion schools superintendent mourned that the state-level ban on mask mandates had caused a nearly twenty-fold increase in students missing class due to COVID exposures in his district. And in Ohio, in an effort to avoid the fate of mass quarantines, Lakota Local Schools outside Cincinnati announced a last minute policy change on Monday to require masks, just two days before students returned to classrooms.

“Because we want to keep our kids in school all year long, just like we did last year, we made a decision this weekend to move to masks,” Superintendent Matt Miller told The 74.

Where school systems have the latitude to set their own face covering rules, “all these school districts are probably going to go to masks because there’s too much COVID right now,” said Dennis Roche, co-founder of the website Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic.

Utah school quarantine rules, like CDC guidance, exempt students from self-isolation if both they and the infected student were properly masked. (coronavirus.utah.gov)

While exposure to infected individuals often keeps large numbers of students home from school, very few students in isolation actually turn out to contract the virus themselves, Oster noted. Having a rule that allows healthy students to avoid missing class is crucial, she said.

“The quarantine itself is tremendously disruptive. And so I think that having an off ramp or a way to make it possible for people not to have to quarantine after an exposure is just huge for generating a functioning school system.”

As Delta variant COVID cases continue to surge, allowing students to come to school without masks and spread the virus is inexcusable, said Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association.

“If you have to now quarantine a student because they’ve been exposed to somebody because nobody was wearing a mask, that’s a problem,” he told The 74. “From a logistical point of view, the easiest thing to do is to say everybody needs to wear a mask.”

Despite the potentially large implications for schools’ daily operations, there was “not much emphasis” on the CDC’s policy change, said Domenech — meaning many districts may still be struggling to catch up.

From a public health perspective, the move aligns with what Phil Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health, says are the best practices to prevent the spread of COVID.

“Where we are with our case transmission rates across the country… I think [masking] makes all the sense in the world,” he told The 74. It’s “the bare minimum we should be doing at this time.”

Still, in his home state, face covering policies in school are “all over the map,” he said, which he fears could spell unnecessary COVID spread and lost learning.

Last week in Georgia, for example, four school districts — some of which had mask-optional policies — switched to virtual instruction days after the school year began due to COVID outbreaks.

As summer ends and students return Wednesday to Lakota Local Schools, that’s precisely the situation that Superintendent Miller hopes to avoid.

“I think the social emotional pitfall of masking is bad enough, but I think the social emotional pitfall of being at home and learning again from home is probably worse.”


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‘A rising tide that lifts all boats’: Having more immigrant peers can boost scores for U.S.-born students, new study finds https://www.laschoolreport.com/a-rising-tide-that-lifts-all-boats-having-more-immigrant-peers-can-boost-scores-for-u-s-born-students-new-study-finds/ Tue, 03 Aug 2021 14:01:03 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=59936

March marked an all-time monthly high in solo youth crossings at the U.S. southern border. Those children and teenagers could be an unexpected boon for native-born students should they reach American classrooms, a timely new study suggests.

The research, which analyzes a decade’s worth of data from over 1.3 million Florida students, links the presence of immigrant classmates with gains in academic performance for students born in the U.S., especially for Black and low-income youth.

“Instead of seeing evidence of immigrants harming native-born students, we actually find evidence that immigrants at minimum do not harm and [often] help native-born students academically,” co-author David Figlio, professor of education and economics at Northwestern University, told The 74.

In the past, research on the topic had been complicated by the fact that immigrant youth tend to enroll at schools educating higher shares of underserved students. At the same time, whiter and more affluent kids may decide to change schools when immigrant students move to their district, a well-documented trend known as white flight.

Those factors together can create a statistical mirage in which immigrants appear to cause lower academic performance for native-born students, as a 2011 study of schools in Denmark concluded. Similarly, others have argued that immigrant students might consume additional resources that limit funds for others.

But Figlio and his co-authors took a novel approach — and uncovered an opposite effect.

David Figlio (Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy)

Their study, published as a working paper in March by the National Bureau of Economic Research, compared sets of siblings who theoretically had all factors in common (family characteristics, race, socioeconomic status) — except one: exposure to immigrant peers.

Due to fluctuations from year to year, many U.S.-born students have different shares of immigrant classmates than even their own family members. Looking at those cases, the researchers found a significant boost to native-born students from having immigrant peers.

Holding factors like race and poverty constant, students who had 13 percent immigrant classmates achieved higher reading and math test scores on average than those who had only 1 percent exposure — a difference equivalent to nearly 10 percent of the gap in scores between students whose mothers had completed high school and those whose mothers hadn’t. Black and low-income students saw benefits that were twice as large.

The NBER working paper, which analyzed a decade’s worth of data on over 1.3 million Florida youth, found that U.S.-born students’ academic performance increased with their exposure to immigrant peers. (National Bureau of Economic Research)

The ‘true believers’ in the American dream

Students’ drive may be a key reason for the effect, according to Figlio.

“Immigrant students in the United States tend to come from families that are very highly motivated,” he said. “They’re driven for success,” which can have a “spillover effect” in the classroom.

The findings offer a new datapoint on the potential impacts of immigration, at a moment where debate on the topic has reached a fever pitch. Currently, over 20,000 migrant youth are in government care at border facilities, according to recent reporting.

The positive effects found in the working paper don’t surprise Patricia Gandara, a specialist in immigrant students who works as a professor of education at UCLA. English language learners, who sometimes but not always overlap with those who are foreign born, often outperform English-only students once they reclassify as fluent speakers, research shows.

Patricia Gandara (UCLA Latino Politics & Policy Initiative)

“There’s a real spark in these kids,” Gandara told The 74. “They know their families have made tremendous sacrifices.”

In turn, immigrant kids often see school as their ticket to success in this country, and set their sights on higher education. “They’re the true believers in the American dream,” said Gandara. “They really apply themselves.”

Especially for students of color or low-income students who might feel left behind by an education system that disproportionately discourages and disciplines kids of their background, having classmates with a college-going mindset can have a big impact, she says.

“Having these peers who have higher aspirations, who’re talking about graduating high school, going to college, it rubs off.”

A ‘win-win’

But despite migrant students’ success and positive impact on peers, Figlio and his co-authors also found that white and affluent students often abandon schools with high proportions of immigrant youth. White students in the dataset on average had only a 6 percent exposure level to immigrant students, while native-born Black and Hispanic students had 8 and 12 percent levels, respectively.

Those numbers frustrate Rosario Quiroz Villareal, an education policy entrepreneur at Next100 who herself grew up as an undocumented student.

“The quicker we can wrap our minds around [the positive effects of diversity] and embrace that, the quicker that our school systems can move toward ensuring that they are also creating environments where students are learning from each other, embracing each other,” she said.

Rosario Quiroz Villareal (Next100)

It’s a “win-win” to have racially and socioeconomically diverse schools, added Conor Williams, a fellow at The Century Foundation and regular contributor to The 74. Integrated classrooms give a boost to all kids, but especially lower-income students and students of color, he told The 74.

White students in the dataset on average were less exposed to immigrant peers. (National Bureau of Economic Research)

But though the school integration numbers may be rock-solid, Figlio, the Northwestern University researcher, says that there are many factors in the analysis on immigrant students that still need to be clarified. His team’s dataset comes from Florida, but whether students in other states would yield the same results remains to be seen.

Additionally, as Gandara points out, the study adopts a narrow definition of migrant students, including only those who themselves were born in another country (or in Puerto Rico). She wonders, how would the results change if the more than 11 million students born in the U.S. to immigrant parents were taken into account?

“This is a small slice of what we generally think of when we think of children in immigrant families,” said Gandara. “It’s hard to know how this might generalize out.”

Figlio hopes future research will address those questions. “This is not the last word. This is the next word,” he said.

But for the meantime, according to Figlio’s study, the results from this group of students, in this setting are clear.

“Immigrants can basically create a rising tide that lifts all boats,” said the Northwestern professor.


This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

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When parents disagree over doses for kids: How mothers’ caretaking instinct may be slowing youth COVID vaccination https://www.laschoolreport.com/when-parents-disagree-over-doses-for-kids-how-mothers-caretaking-instinct-may-be-slowing-youth-covid-vaccination/ Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:01:07 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=59872
A woman stands in a grassy area with two female children. One of the children is in a wheelchair and holds a sign that says "No mandate! Let my mom decide for me!"

A mother and her children advocate for vaccine choice in Boston, Massachusetts. (Joseph Prezioso/Getty Images)

Fatou and Modou have two healthy children. A 5-year-old boy who likes to build Lego towers. A 7-year-old girl who’s into anime. With each parenting decision the couple has faced over the years — picking a religious Sunday school for their kids, setting bedtime — they have mostly been on the same page.

But now, the Pawtucket, Rhode Island family is split over one of the most fundamental questions of the pandemic: whether or not to vaccinate their kids against the coronavirus.

Modou, the children’s father, who asked to be identified by his middle name because of the sensitivity of discussing a family health issue, is undecided on whether he would choose to get the kids vaccinated once they become eligible — he’d need to research it more first, he says — but he’s largely open to COVID-19 immunization. The 36-year-old works as a nursing assistant at a state hospital and rolled up his sleeve in December of last year, as soon as the shot became available to him as a health care worker.

“It’s necessary for everyone to get the vaccine so the country can keep moving,” he said.

But Fatou, who also asked to be referred to by her middle name, strongly opposes vaccinating the children.

She knows the shot offers protections and she knows young people can become seriously ill from the virus — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hundreds of minors have died from COVID-19 — but the risks are greatly reduced for kids compared to adults, she points out, and the 32-year-old mother worries that the shot may have unforeseen side effects.

“Your kid could … be the kid that has the negative reaction to the vaccine,” she said.

“I can’t call myself an anti-vaxxer,” Fatou maintains, because both of her kids have received all the immunizations necessary for school. But she herself has also chosen to skip the COVID-19 shot. She understands the public health imperative, but something about the vaccine doesn’t sit right with her.

“It’s a gut thing,” said Fatou. “I don’t want to be the guinea pig.”

The Pawtucket mother possesses a disarming self-awareness about her stance. She doesn’t speak much about the vaccine in public because she knows it’s important for as many people to get vaccinated as possible.

“For the general health of everybody, it’s better for people like me to keep our opinions to ourselves,” said Fatou.

But even if Fatou and other like-minded moms are not outspoken on the topic, it appears that the Rhode Island family’s predicament may well encapsulate a growing split among parents over the vaccine.

While women have received coronavirus shots at higher rates nationally than men throughout the pandemic, polling indicates that higher shares of mothers than fathers are resistant to vaccinating their kids — especially among parents under 36.

A May study, based on a survey of over 21,000 people across all 50 states published in collaboration between universities such as Northeastern, Harvard and Rutgers, found a widening gap between mothers’ and fathers’ stances on inoculating their children. Since February, the percentage of fathers who said they were “extremely unlikely” to vaccinate their kids fell from 14 percent to 11 percent, while the share of mothers who said the same held constant at 27 percent. Among moms under 36 years old, nearly a third said they were resistant to vaccinating their kids.

“The big gap persists,” Matthew Simonson, lead author of the study, said. “Fathers are becoming less resistant and mothers aren’t.”

Since February, the percentage of fathers who said they were “extremely unlikely” to vaccinate their kids fell from 14 percent to 11 percent, while the share of mothers who said the same held constant at 27 percent. Resistance was strongest among young mothers 18-35. (The COVID States Project)

As the U.S. struggles to sustain its pace of vaccination and with President Joe Biden acknowledging Tuesday the administration would not meet its goal of giving at least one shot to 70 percent of adults by July 4 now, the parent polling numbers present a problem for America’s vaccination campaign, says Simonson, a Ph.D. candidate at Northeastern University. In cases where moms are against immunizing their kids, youth vaccinations rarely happen, he said.

“Mothers are the primary decision makers about whether the children get vaccinated or not,” says Simonson. “Even if the fathers may be more willing, the mothers are the ones who are more involved in scheduling appointments and making health care decisions about their children.”

Such is the case for Fatou and Modou. Though the parents’ stances on the issue diverge, Fatou says that the ball is “more in [her] court” for any final decisions.

She is not ignorant to the stakes of the pandemic. In October of last year, COVID-19 claimed the life of her dearest friend’s father, who she described as one of her “parent role models.” He had coached her basketball team growing up, and Fatou and Modou, who are Muslim, would attend Christmas parties at his house every year.

The pandemic “definitely has hit closer to home,” Fatou said.

Still, the personal experience has not made Fatou any less skeptical about the vaccine. She tried reading academic journals on the topic, but had a tough time decoding the findings.

“[Studies] can tell me that five plus seven is two, and I will be like, ‘Oh, OK, that makes sense in your world,’” she said. “It’s all a trust game for me because I just don’t feel like I can understand all of the pieces at play.”

So Fatou, who works as an advisor for Upward Bound at Rhode Island College, is left trying to make sense of what she hears from others. That’s true of many mothers, says Simonson.

“The way that we make these decisions is not in isolation, it’s socially,” said the Northeastern researcher.

He says the social factor may represent a major part of the vaccine hesitancy equation, especially for moms. Simonson hypothesizes that among young mothers who socialize with other young mothers, there could be an “echo chamber effect” that stigmatizes COVID-19 shots for children.

In a portion of his study where respondents typed into a text box to explain their personal reasons for not getting vaccinated, many individuals expressed concerns over the authorization process, worrying that it was still an experimental vaccine, Simonson explained. Extrapolating to children, it would be reasonable to conclude that the caretaking instinct is a key component of some mothers’ resistance, he thinks.

“It’s coming from a place of really wanting what’s best for their children and thinking, mistakenly, that they’re playing it safe by being vaccine hesitant. Whereas actually, playing safe is to get your kid vaccinated,” said Simonson.

In fact, over 300 young people have experienced heart inflammation after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, a higher-than-expected number which may be stoking parental fears. A CDC safety group said Wednesday there’s a likely association between the condition and the vaccine, mostly in adolescent and young adult males after receiving their second shot. The CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices was meeting Wednesday to assess the situation. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has stressed that heart inflammation cases in young people are still exceedingly rare and are, in most instances, mild. The benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks, she has said. Others, however, are not so sure, including Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, who is recommending kids not get the second dose of the vaccine until the heart complication is “properly reviewed.”

As the more infectious Delta COVID-19 variant takes hold in the U.S., health experts have voiced concern that unvaccinated young people could become a focal point for viral spread this summer and fall. Philip Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health, knows that kids can fall seriously ill when they contract the virus and encourages parents of vaccine-eligible children to get their kids immunized.

“The vaccines are highly effective against the Delta variant,” he said. “We have to vaccinate everyone in order to get through this.”

Highlighting a silver lining from his study, Simonson points out that parents of older children report being marginally less vaccine resistant than parents of younger kids. That happens to align well with the chronology of the FDA’s expansion of emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. The Northeastern University researcher hopes that, over time, there will be a “trickle down” effect, by which younger parents become more open to immunizing their own kids after watching as slightly older children safely receive COVID-19 doses.

Modou, who knows his wife needs to make an independent decision on the issue, hopes that a similar evolution may occur in his household.

“I’m not really that forceful,” he said. “I tend to just lay back … and maybe she would come around.”


This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

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