As a new school year approaches, COVID-19 infections are again on the rise, fueled by highly transmissible variants, filling families with dread.
the spread of the highly contagious omicron variantAmong them is Baltimore County schools, where the number of days that individual schools in the district couldn’t offer in-person learning added together totaled 159 in January, according to data from the private research firm Burbio, which tracks over 5,000 school districts nationwide. District officials said they did not see a need to change protocols.
“That is the greater concern – that they will have the necessary staff to man all the classrooms, to man all the programs – which will only be made worse if there is an outbreak of COVID,” he said. The district has switched to a new staffing agency and aims to fill 90% of substitute requests this year, said Orbanek. They also now have over 100 supplemental teachers, substitutes who show up at the same school every day in case of last-minute absences.
Schools cannot afford more disruptions that distract them from the critical work of helping kids catch up, said Thomas Kane, an education policy researcher at Harvard. Students at lower-income schools that were doing remote learning for more than half a year lost the equivalent of 22 weeks of learning, he said, while higher-income schools lost 13 weeks.between Blacks and whites, between Latinx students and whites, between high- and low-poverty schools,” he said.
“We firmly believe that with the protocols we have in place that we’re going to be able to keep in-person learning going as the virus ebbs and flows and as new variants come — pending an unforeseen variant that really changes the game,” said Cleo Hirsch, director of the district’s COVID-19 response.
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