Teachers unions and some politicians and health officials will use any excuse available to close schools. If they can’t achieve that, they will at least try to limit classroom instruction to two or four days per week. Right now, the excuse closest to hand is the delta variant of the coronavirus.
Maui’s mayor already canceled the opening of in-person school. The American Federation of Teachers is making noise about delta, sparking fear that they will push to bar the schoolhouse doors again.
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But this is an error. The science is clear that school is and can be safe, even amid growing COVID prevalence. Moreover, the evidence shows that it is not any safer to push students back into remote schooling.
In general, research has found that “in-school transmission was generally low when schools took basic precautions,” as a recent New York Times report put it.
“When you have masks and even three-foot distancing, you are not going to see major outbreaks in schools,” according to Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chairwoman of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases.
“It’s actually safer for the kids in school than it is for them to be home,” another pediatric specialist told the New York Times.
That was our experience where I live, in the D.C. suburbs. As the county government was closing all public schools, it tried and failed to close all non-public schools. Many Catholic, Jewish, and private schools opened in person. What we got was a six-month experiment in government mandated inequality: About 160,000 students in the county were forced to learn remotely from September through March, and at the same time, about 8,000 students were allowed to go to school in those months. The result, from my own analysis of the numbers: remote learners were three times as likely to be infected by COVID as were the in-person students.
This is a key point that the school-closers miss. When you close schools, you don’t make the students disappear and stop spreading the virus — they just find other things to do that are evidently more likely to spread COVID than attendance at school.
At my neighborhood basketball courts, the middle-school-aged children were out in force all fall, winter, and early spring. Many of them, I’m sure, gathered post-game at a friend’s house for rehydration, video games, television, and so on. Since this was often going on during the school day, there were certainly no adults to enforce distancing or limit capacity.
Meanwhile, when cases were at their highest, from Thanksgiving through mid-February, we found it easy to nix our children’s plans for crowded indoor gatherings: “You got to see your friends all week at school. You don’t need to see them this weekend or this break.”
That is, in-person students spent more of the high-spread days supervised by adults who were very concerned about spread. Remote-only students did not.
As a place for children to go during the year, school is both important and safer than the alternatives. If the number of cases keeps climbing, mayors, county executives, and health officials must resist the temptation to close schools or force children to stay home.
