As coronavirus cases reach record levels in South Carolina, conversations about how schools should operate during the pandemic have gained renewed momentum from lawmakers, educators, parents and students.
The subject has become one of the most polarizing themes in the state, generating heated debates during school board meetings and on social networks.
As virus activity increases, several leading teacher advocacy groups are pleading with districts to reevaluate their pandemic learning plans and pivot to virtual models, if necessary.
“We expect districts to assess their own ability to provide instruction safely and not just assume that because a model worked in September, it will work in an environment where case count across the state is four times higher per day and the rate of positivity is more than double what it was, “said Patrick Kelly, director of government affairs for the Palmetto State Teachers Association.
SC for Ed, the grassroots movement that organized a 10,000-teacher march on the steps of the Statehouse last year, has repeatedly emphasized its desire for districts to implement “virtual until safe” COVID-19 reentry plans.
The group’s leaders doubled the message this week, asking teachers to change their profile pictures on social media as a way to demonstrate their support for virtual learning across the state.
Other advocacy organizations, including the South Carolina Education Association, have stopped pushing for universal virtual learning in all 80 public school districts. Instead, they asked local educational leaders to conduct an assessment of virus activity in their area and adjust learning plans to compensate for the post-Thanksgiving spike.
Meanwhile, the teachers themselves have approached their districts to carry out similar plans since the beginning of the summer, with limited success.
But amid protests from teachers and warnings of another holiday peak in cases after Christmas and New Year, some districts have modified their plans.
In Berkeley County, one of 20 districts that offer face-to-face classes five days a week, school officials faced teachers’ reaction earlier this year for their model of reopening.
On Tuesday, district council members shocked the public with the decision to move all traditional classroom lessons to online learning for a week starting January 4 to allow students to be quarantined before returning to school. classroom after the winter holidays.
Several other districts across the state have changed their approaches.
On December 6, the Orangeburg Consolidated School District, more than 12,000 students, announced that it was abandoning hybrid models and becoming fully virtual at least until the beginning of next year.
Jasper County students who learn on the district’s hybrid model will spend the two weeks of classes after the winter holiday learning entirely online.
And over a 24-hour period in one of the capital’s largest school systems, the team’s absences nearly doubled – a coordinated work stoppage that closed three Lexington-Richland high schools 5 and sent a message to administrators that measures more aggressive measures are needed to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
In response, the trustees voted on December 1 to reduce classroom time from four days a week to two for students in grades 7 through 12 until January 4, when students return from winter holidays.
“I think as the numbers go up, you will see these types of instances go up and I say ‘angry’. I am happy to see teachers putting their lives and health and the lives and health of their families above political rhetoric about the importance of education, “said State Representative Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg.
Teachers at a breaking point
Even though some districts decided to reduce face-to-face learning, others continued to press for five days a week of face-to-face instruction.
Horry County schools are joining hybrid education, despite the increasing incidence of COVID-19 in the county. The same is true in Greenville County, where the district’s hybrid strategy has gradually increased face-to-face instruction days since October. In January, all elementary and high school students will be in class five days a week, leaving only high schools with hybrid teaching.
“Despite the handful of teachers I heard about who expressed serious concerns, many teachers, they are soldiers,” said Tim Waller, a spokesman for Greenville County Schools. “They are in it to win. They are dedicated and come to school every day.”
Several teachers in Horry County have reported that they believe that teaching should be exclusively remote until the threat of contracting the virus is minimized.
Several teachers in Horry County agreed to be questioned by the Post and Courier on the condition of anonymity, as each feared retaliation from the school district, with many claiming throughout the year that they were instructed not to speak out.
A high school teacher pointed out the additional obligations, the lack of annual increases and the fear of the impacts the environment has on his own health as factors that lower morale across the district.
Another longtime professor agreed. “We are stuck in a system that fears traffickers to keep our mouths shut, and yet that same system does not seem to take into account the thoughts, concerns and well-being of teachers,” said the educator. “Some teachers are resentful.”
Teachers across the state are reaching their limit, either from exhaustion or from controlling the virus in their district, said Saani Perry, professor of Rock Hill and diversity and inclusion officer at SC for Ed.
Your district is facing pressure from parents to reopen with face-to-face learning five days a week.
“I feel disrespected. I don’t feel concerned about anything, and I really feel that not only my worth, but the value of my students is simply non-existent for the leadership,” said Perry.
Perry knows several teachers who are actively looking for other jobs. Sometimes, it seems that every day he learns of the resignation of a new teacher on social media.
He even thought about giving up himself.
“In my entire career, this is probably the worst I’ve seen teacher morale,” he said. “Honestly, I think a lot of teachers are at the point where they don’t want to protest, they just want to give up.”
News of the death of a Lexington elementary school teacher shook the state’s educational community this week, said Sherry East, president of the SC Education Association. Staci Blakely was the third educator in the state of Palmetto to die of complications from COVID-19 this year. A school guardian in Orangeburg County also died.
“This is a deadly thing,” said East. “Educators are now having that very serious conversation with themselves about ‘is this worth my life?'”
Monitoring community dissemination
While teachers and district officials are calling for safer work environments, growing national and international research on COVID-19 shows that young children who are infected do not tend to transmit it, for reasons still unknown.
“We don’t see significant evidence of transmission in schools,” said epidemiologist Linda Bell recently. Instead, public health officials are more concerned with what is going on in homes or elsewhere in the community when it comes to the spread of the coronavirus.
In the past two weeks in Richland County, for example, more than 1,860 residents have tested positive for a cumulative total of 22,200 – one of the highest rates in South Carolina. But in the same period, no county public schools recorded more than five cases, according to state data.
“Fortunately, we didn’t have many positives,” especially compared to the high COVID-19 count in Richland County, said Dawn MacAdams, health coordinator for Richland Two and former president of the state School Nurses Association.
Several districts that have resisted calls to abandon any form of face-to-face learning echo Waller’s response, but expect at least one to implement rapid test kits offered by the state in the coming weeks.
“A substantial amount of infrastructure and logistics needs to be in place for this to happen,” said Superintendent Baron Davis of Richland Two. This includes exemptions for building clinical laboratories, developing infectious disease control plans, creating data tracking and additional training for nurses.
Richland Two’s third-grade teacher, Demi Bannister, died in early September at the age of 28.
Across the state, 3,367 students and 1,446 K-12 public school employees tested positive for COVID-19 last month, DHEC reports. Bell pointed out that these represent cases associated with schools, not necessarily hired there.
Waller of Greenville said that cases of COVID-19 among his staff and students remained low, despite increases in the wider community, and most of the cases discovered did not come from classrooms. Greenville County’s seven-day continuous average exceeded 400 on Sunday, the highest ever. Last week, the infection rate in schools was about half that in the community, but the student count pulls the average down.
“Even with the huge increase in cases at national, state and local levels, when we look at the cases we have and contact the tracking data … we come to the conclusion that we believe that children are much safer eight hours a day in our classroom than it was, “he said just before Thanksgiving. “Most of the time, our school security protocols are working,” he added, while recognizing that nothing is 100% guaranteed.
This lack of certainty is what concerns Rep. Wendell Gilliard, D-Charleston. Gilliard wrote nearly a dozen letters to state leaders, including Governor Henry McMaster, State Superintendent Molly Spearman and Charleston County Superintendent Gerrita Postlewait.
All students must learn online until a vaccine is widely available, he said.
Since November, Gilliard says he receives phone calls and emails every day from concerned educators who fear for his safety.
“My heart is with the teachers,” he said. “When they speak to us, we must listen.”
Seanna Adcox, Nick Masuda and Anna B. Mitchell contributed to this report.