UPDATE (8/14): During school board meetings this week, both Mifflinburg Area School District and Lewisburg Area School District voted in favor of delaying their start dates until after Labor Day. The hope is this will provide time for the recent increase in cases to subside and offer conditions suitable for opening for face-to-face instruction.
UPDATE (8/17): The Department of Education just announced that, based on the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics, they would be bringing their mask guidelines in line with the Department of Health requirements. This is being spun as a confusing change in policy, when in fact it was actually just an inexplicable and persistent inconsistency between the existing DOH guidelines and the PDE. The DOH did not change their guidelines, PDE had previously just proposed to have schools ignore them and people had banked on that. It was a classic case of wishful thinking. Anyone actually familiar with the DOH guidance was instead frustrated with PDE for giving people a mistaken and misguided impression that being distanced while indoors is a suitable circumstance for mask removal. In fact the PDE FAQ about masks acknowledges that the mask order from DOH has been in effect since July 1. Now districts are upset that they went to the trouble to create distancing indoors since masks will be required "anyway," but that betrays further lack of understanding that all of these mitigation measures are imperfect and should be employed in combination. Especially for students and teachers who will be in each others' presence for many hours at a time indoors, sharing the same air, masks AND distancing AND hygiene are key.
UPDATE (9/10): Lewisburg Area and Mifflinburg Area Schools opened in person this week. Substantial numbers of families have opted to do eSchool (25%+ in LASD). Other school districts in the region opened for classes in preceding weeks. There have been a number of reported COVID-19 cases in different schools and a mix of different results: staying open but with extra cleaning, a day off from in-person, sending a class home, switching to hybrid, cancelling a football game, closing a school for a couple weeks... This page from the PA Department of Education gives some insight into the thinking behind the different decisions, which are a function both of the incidence rate in the community overall and the number of cases and their exposure in a given school or district.
That page also references some of the consequences for individuals and households who may have had close contact with a confirmed case. "Public health staff will work with school administrators to determine whether entire classrooms or other cohort groups need to be quarantined. Based on these discussions, public health staff will direct close contacts to quarantine for 14 days from the last exposure to the case; this includes household contacts (like siblings and parents/guardians/caregivers) who attend or work in other schools."
The regimen for isolation and quarantine has not changed, but the fact that kids are spending many hours a day with lots of other people has and so it is to be expected that this will be kicking in more frequently. We all want this to work and we just need to be prepared to be flexible moving forward. A decision to start the school year in person is no guarantee that it will remain in person, but if we want it to, we know what we need to be doing: masks, distancing, and hygiene!
Schools around the country are grappling with whether and how to reopen for the fall. We can look to other countries and fairly quickly realize that we may not have access to the conditions under which they undertook to reopen their schools -- generally low levels of transmission, implementation of mitigation measures like masking and small, stable class groupings, and access to accurate, ongoing, rapid testing for students and teachers. The bad news is that almost no one in the nation meets those criteria. Some suggest we scale back our hopes and just aim for low transmission levels, good policies and implementation, both at the community level and on a personal level, and then consider your own household's risk profile and the cost-benefit analysis for having your particular children back in school.
In light of those basic community parameters, Lewisburg had seemed to be in ok shape. We have, until very recently, had quite low case numbers and even now we aren't definitively certain about whether the new growth in cases has translated into sustained community spread. And, after some unpromising initial talk of not requiring masks in schools (unfortunately in line with some waffling on this point in guidance from the PA Department of Education), the LASD policies seem to be heading in a good direction.
As a sign of the district's ability to be flexible and adaptable, it should be noted that the LASD Marching Band went through a really excellent planning process to come up with a COVID-Safe plan for this year's Band Camp. It looked a lot different than past years, but it happened and it incorporated the mitigation criteria recommended: it was outdoors, masked when not playing, and distanced. We hope that if there were any infected people attending, the precautions taken helped to keep them from spreading it to others. Generally speaking, bravo!
The LASD is also be commended for reaching out to local public health officials and both getting their input and making that input available online. They posted a video of the discussion between Superintendent Polinchock and two local health and safety experts, one each from Evangelical Community Hospital, Michael Exley, and Geisinger Health System, Jen Hess, answering questions about the return to school. The topics ranged from health system capacity to the likelihood of an outbreak locally to the proposal for mask breaks.
Highlights include both experts pointing out that "we're all in this together." This is a transcript of part of the discussion: "it's important for people to recognize we're really in this together as a community, and while there's a lot of things that need to occur at the school district level, because we know that the students are coming back and there are a lot of steps to take to mitigate that risk, it really is a community effort; and while schools can take a lot of really good and strong precautions, but what we do outside of that school day and how our children interact and what happens is just as important... in order for our students to successfully be able to return... the more we can do try and mitigate that risk, the more successful that return will be; but if we start getting more lax in some of these areas or outside of school some of these things are becoming more lax, it will certainly influence and impact." (@22:42)
In addition, when asked about the idea of mask breaks (the school had previously proposed that students could remove masks while sitting at desks indoors so long as they were distanced), they said "it's important that if those breaks are going to occur that they are very structured and supervised... obviously outdoors... definitely would have to be outside of that 6 feet area and really make sure if that is occurring that there are additional steps are in place, so again insuring the handwashing and other pieces as part of that activity." (@11:42) Again, for emphasis, "obviously outdoors."
District administrators, elected officials, and teachers around the country are struggling with how to make locally appropriate decisions right now. LASD had decided based on the County's green status to go with face to face instruction with early dismissal on Wednesdays for deep cleaning, with the option of eSchool available for any who chose it. They have also outlined a fully remote option and a hybrid option in which only students in k-5 would be in person and spread out throughout all of the district facilities (so with access to lots more space for distancing) and older students would be remote.
The decision to go with the face to face option, albeit with mask requirements, layout changes, cleaning, and equipment to facilitate separation was based on the relatively low levels of infection in the area that had been the case until recently. Even prior to the beginning of August, though, even without any local uptick in cases, there have been some changes in the offing in the community that seemed to argue in favor of either a delayed start or going with hybrid to begin with. The primary issue is the return of Bucknell students from all over the country. They represent as much as 8% of the county population, so presumably we have been light on people over the past 5 months. Just bumping the population density up a notch will increase the potential avenues for transmission, but we are also looking at a group that can be expected, even if given a clean bill of health upon arrival, to be quite vulnerable to transmission of any contagion already present in the county. To both welcome those students back and send another 8% of the district population into close quarters to mingle daily at the public schools at the very same time seems like a significant increase in risk, in fact two compounding increases.
And now, here we are in mid-August, with the Bucknell students just starting to return this week, public school supposed to start in another 10 days AND a significant rise in local cases independent of either school cohort.
People are quick to point out that many of the new cases locally are associated with the Lewisburg Penitentiary. And when the first announcements were made, it was clearly a time to wait and see. But in the ensuing 10 days the number of cases in the county has doubled, with only half of that doubling being accounted for by the prison. There is no other single event or site that the rest of the cases are tied to. That makes them both easier to discount and more alarming. What that really means is that we appear to have transmission in the community. What's more, the beginning of the rise in cases outside the prison predates the arrival of the students, the resumption of school, and even the prison outbreak. As we know an uptick in cases is indicative of things that were happening up to two weeks previously. So it's not at all clear that the prison cases are directly related to the cases in the general public in any way.
The rise in cases is so striking that Union County had the ignominious distinction of being the sole hotspot in the state for a time and when the PA Department of Health finally issued their more detailed criteria for school reopening, Union County was the only one called out as not being a good candidate for in-person education at this time.
The DOH suggests that for in-person education a district be able to show fewer than 10 new cases per 100k people in the preceding 7 days and a test positivity rate of below 5%. At between 10 and 100 cases per 100k over 7 days or positivity rate between 5 and 10%, hybrid would be recommended. And above 100 cases per 100k over 7 days or positivity rate over 10%, remote would be recommended. They also recommend that districts make decisions based on the cumulative metrics over two consecutive weeks.
So our numbers now are rising and that is before both the Bucknell students and the public schools start mixing it up. We are seeing a rise resulting from behavior from a week or two ago. Where we will be in a couple more weeks is hard to say.
Clearly this is not all on the school district's shoulders. They are in charge of their planning and policies and ideally, per the CDC, they should be helping with messaging about mitigation measures and how critical they are to reopening and then keeping open the schools. Because everything is riding on community behavior right now.
Our numbers are going up; things don't look good, but the state DOH is quick to point out that you shouldn't make policy based on a single number, so we're waiting and watching to see what develops and hopefully, if we can all get on the same page, we're all working together to do what we can to actively bring those numbers down. They are a testament to our activities and behaviors. We have the power to turn them around. We're just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz: we've had the solution all along, masks, distancing, and hygiene.
In fact, if anything the pushback in the community at large is going the wrong direction. There are people both arguing for reopening the schools in person AND for not wearing masks... And we'll have to wait a week or two to find out whether the West End Fair running essentially maskless all week will have any effect on local counts.
Look for a separate (long) post compiling questions and answers from social media about all of this, as well as another Radio Free Lewisburg on the topic.
