As diagnoses of COVID-19 skyrocket to new highs, schools are being impacted to greater levels than ever before. Each day, news trickles out of another school district implementing virtual learning protocols, some for a few days, some for two weeks, others for even longer.
And that’s problematic beyond the obvious. Not only are children, teachers and their families becoming ill or being exposed to those with this contagious illness, not only does the learning suffer, but the larger community cannot be sure about the extent of the spread and exposure within and emanating from the schools in our region.
Indeed, not only is there a lack of consistency from district to district, county to county, in how schools are dealing with the virus spread, there’s no consistency for the dissemination of information. That is unacceptable and fixable.
Pennsylvania has taken the position that it will allow the state’s individual districts to determine how to cope with their particular rates of coronavirus spread. The thinking is that there are too many variables to issue a one-size-fits-all mandate about face-to-face instruction, remote instruction or a hybrid model.
That may be true. But the fact remains that COVID-19 doesn’t respect school district and municipal boundaries. Students from varying districts interact with each other in a multitude of ways, from sporting events to other extracurricular activities. The same cross-boundary interaction is true for adults from one district to another.
There is compelling interest in knowing what is going on within a constituent’s own school district, as well as the school districts next door — and beyond.
The public should not have to piece together the bits of information that are being released via letters, emails and website postings from School District A and School District Z.
Pennsylvania health and/or education officials must begin a system for divulging what is going on within our school buildings without requiring interested parties to do the math themselves based on a hodgepodge of data.
Just across the state line into New Jersey, officials host a public dashboard that announces school outbreaks. A similar effort should be undertaken in Pennsylvania. This could feed into a national effort that asks schools to voluntarily and anonymously report their coronavirus cases. The COVID-19 School Response Dashboard hopes ultimately to track the situations of America’s 56 million K-12 students. It’s an effort begun in the fall and led by Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University. She has told news outlets she got involved in the independent data collection because “other people weren’t doing it.” Time will tell what worthwhile conclusions can be gleaned from such data analysis.
In the meantime, Pennsylvania must step up. The commonwealth already is providing dashboard data on case numbers and deaths, gender, age and counties of residence. It should not be beyond reach to provide data on school outbreaks.
Knowing the numbers — of positive diagnoses, of students and staff in quarantine — will allow the deeply invested community to weigh in on the far-reaching decisions being made by school directors and administrators.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (TNS)
