COLOMBIA – A map of the “operational status” of school districts in South Carolina shows an impressive and, for many, frightening picture of how the pandemic will almost certainly exacerbate the already wide-spread educational disparities in this state.
The districts in yellow, meaning that all students are learning at home, are largely along Interstate 95, on the so-called Corridor of Shame, labeled by a 2005 documentary on the situation of poor rural schools in South Carolina.
“Many of these children are the ones who need to be in school most,” State Superintendent Molly Spearman told a Senate panel on Wednesday. “They are in poverty. Some of them we haven’t seen since March. It’s scary.
“I need your support to pressure these local school councils to go back to school,” she told senators, a week after making a similar request to a House panel.
Options include legislation requiring this – a debate that lawmakers have promised will happen – and giving teachers priority to the state’s limited supplies of COVID-19 vaccine, a request that has so far been rejected. Teachers are currently part of the next phase of eligibility, which may still take months.
There are about 59,000 public elementary and high school teachers. Vaccination of all other school district employees, including classroom assistants, bus drivers and cafeteria workers, would add about 64,000 more to the request, according to the state Department of Education.
Getting shot in the arms of teachers “will alleviate the fear factor,” Spearman told senators.
Last week, 12 districts were operating entirely virtual, 24 districts were offering an entire week of learning within a classroom and the other 43 were offering a weekly combination of face-to-face and online education. It is an improvement over the previous week, when 19 districts were completely remote, Spearman said.
But the goal must be for each district to offer five days in the classroom – as quickly as possible, she said.
Sound familiar? Last July, Governor Henry McMaster asked all districts to give parents the option of sending their children to school daily and asked Spearman, a Republican colleague, to support him in law enforcement.
The state Department of Education updates on this map how students are learning in each district, with yellow meaning students are totally remote. This is a screenshot of Thursday, January 29, 2021.
The state Department of Education updates on this map how students are learning in each district, with yellow meaning students are totally remote. This is a screenshot of Wednesday, January 13, 2021.
But autonomous school councils elected locally across the state readily ignored him, citing a summer peak in the COVID-19 cases, and Spearman approved plans to reopen without the option.
Six months later, amid much higher cash counts, the two are singing the same hymnbook, with only a slight difference in melody. Although McMaster’s reasoning has always been about education and economics – getting students into school so that parents can work – Spearman’s appeal focuses only on children. But your conclusion is the same.
‘The school is safe’
For months, the mantras against reopening have been to remain “virtual until safe” with decisions that “follow science”.
Teachers against returning to classrooms noted that McMaster forced schools to close in March, when there were less than a few dozen people diagnosed with COVID-19 across the state, and no South Carolinians had died of the disease yet. Going back to school with thousands of newly diagnosed cases daily made no sense, they said.
But what has changed is what science revealed about the virus last year and what has been learned about how to mitigate the spread. Keeping track of the data is what convinced Spearman that “the school is safe,” she told lawmakers.
“Fear exists,” she said, but fear is not science.
“We need to manage for the data, and the data says it is safe,” she said. “You better be at school than going to church or the supermarket.”
This does not mean that schools are free with COVID-19.
More than 8,800 students and teachers have tested positive while regularly participating in face-to-face activities since the state public health agency began reporting cases of COVID-19 in schools in early September. They represent 3 percent of all South Carolinians diagnosed with the virus at that time.
A growing body of research, including a study in public schools in Charleston, shows that most school-related cases are contracted elsewhere, and when the virus is transmitted in schools, it is not the students who spread it.
Allison Eckard, an infectious disease pediatrician who worked in the Charleston district, found that only a handful of her 500 students and staff diagnosed with COVID-19 last semester “may have been transmitted” within schools.
“There have been cases, no doubt, but most of them were acquired outside the classroom. The ones that happened inside the classroom most often involved a teacher giving to a teacher or a teacher giving to a student, “said Eckard, a child health doctor at South Carolina Medical University, working with a team of nurses tracking each case.
“And I don’t have examples of students giving to teachers – what everyone was so concerned about,” she said in an internal MUSC publication on January 19 about her study.
Duke University researchers working with 11 school districts in North Carolina came to similar conclusions. The contact tracking determined that among 90,000 students and staff attended personally, 32 of the 805 diagnosed in a nine-week period contracted the virus at school, and none of them were transferred from child to adult, according to the study published on 8 January in Pediatrics.
Eckard said she was shocked by her own research.
“I was not really in favor of that initially,” she said. “And now I am a believer. Children need to be in school and it is safe.”
‘A ton of money’
Part of what makes the school safe is security protocols, Spearman said. Unlike the general community, wearing a mask – something really discouraged by doctors when McMaster ordered it closed last March – is easier to apply inside a school building, and tens of millions of dollars have been spent across the state in security efforts, such as plastic partitions and regular cleaning.
The ability to be safe exists if adults who make decisions about children’s learning make the effort to do so, legislators argue. McMaster summed it up as “where there is a will, there is a way”.
“In the past nine months, we have learned enough to do this safely, but we need to have children in the classroom,” said Senate majority leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield. “This is an area of education where they can’t say they don’t have enough money. There has been a ton of money injected into COVID’s security and cleanliness.”
Available expenditures included $ 84 million in federal aid that lawmakers approved last September to send to school districts for security measures, school nurses, tutoring and technology. This is in addition to the $ 10 million in security resources that the state Department of Education provided to any district that requested help last summer.
And that’s in addition to the $ 195 million allocated directly to South Carolina’s districts last spring in the first round of the COVID-19 aid congress, which gave them two years to spend them. Districts spend their share of this on reimbursements after sending the paperwork to the state. Until this month, only 39 percent of it had been requested, according to Spearman’s agency.
How much districts used this spring distribution, from Lexington-Richland 5 which covers Irmo and Chapin, which spent almost all of its $ 1.6 million stake in a few months, to Richland Two in the northeastern suburb of Columbia, which requested none of its $ 4 million, according to the state agency.
Harry Miley, chief financial officer of Richland Two, said on Thursday that the district spent about $ 1 million, mostly on personal protective equipment and plastic partitions, but did not send the paperwork for a refund. About $ 500,000 in tutoring services will also be paid out of this money, but the district has not yet been charged for that, he said.
Even greater luck is coming.
The aid package approved by Congress last month provides at least $ 846 million directly to school districts in South Carolina, with an estimated range of $ 1 million for tiny Clarendon 3 in Turbeville at $ 72.6 million for Charleston County.
Spearman is demanding that districts submit plans on how they will use this money to accompany students, including private tuition, longer school days and summer camps.
Remote learning is possible with another federal aid, which is paying for more than 90,000 access points to provide Internet access for students who had none; 19,000 devices are still on hold.
But in reality, with a device or not, it is only “half” working. The technology does not make up for the fact that students are in a classroom with a teacher, she said.
“Even in the best situation, if you have a parent who understands technology sitting there, it is still difficult for students. Students do better when they are in the classroom. The younger they are, the more they need to be there.”
Your own granddaughter is a good example.
Four-year-old Molly started the school year at the virtual preschool. A photo taken during class showed the 4 year old boy sitting under the table, without even looking at the screen.
“Imagine this with two college-educated parents and a child who really knows how to operate the screen, and it wasn’t working,” said Spearman.
